Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540
- 559)
TUESDAY 17 JUNE 2003
THE RT
HON OLIVER
LETWIN MP
Q540 Miss Widdecombe: I do not want
to pursue that line too much. Are you convinced that it would
be lawful if somebody who was applying under the criteria set
by the Convention of 1951 left the centre, for some reason best
known to them, and then re-presented? Are you sure it would be
lawful?
Mr Letwin: No, I am not yet sure,
and that is why that is one of the questions that I have asked
the group of lawyers under Martin Howe, who are advising me, to
investigate, and once they have done so, if the Committee wished,
I would of course make available their deliberations.
Q541 Miss Widdecombe: Thank you.
Can we just pursue this business of UNHCR and IOM actually operating
these centres, if you like, on our behalf? You actually envisage—and
one can see the attraction of it—other countries operating
similar systems. Is your proposal dependent on other countries
adopting similar measures?
Mr Letwin: No, and here lies a
very significant difference—perhaps the most significant
difference—between what are otherwise rather similar approaches
between the Home Secretary and myself. It is odd for me to be
lecturing the Committee, many Members of which are Members of
the Home Secretary's party and who have access to the Home Secretary
independently more than I, but my impression as an observer (a
rather interested observer) of the Home Secretary is that his
idea is to create a system not wholly dissimilar from the one
that I have been describing, but entirely collaboratively under
the EU aegis. I take it that is one of the reasons why he opted
into the Dublin II Directives and has deprived himself of the
ability to determine UK asylum policy independently—a little
noticed feature of the scene in the last three months. He has
put forward, as the Committee very well knows, proposals to the
EU. He hopes, presumably, that the EU will come to a collective
view, and I assume that he takes the view that that will mean
that the proposals are iron-clad and that they will work better
because they are shared. I agree with him that they will work
better if they are shared and it is probably also true that if
they were shared they would be more robust against hostile criticism.
But—and this seems to me to be quite a big but—sitting
here today, at least, I do not have any very great confidence
that he is going to succeed in persuading the EU as a whole to
adopt proposals of the kind that he finds appealing. I have very
specifically argued that if the EU does not adopt such proposals
then we should do so, so to speak, unilaterally. I think one of
the effects of our doing so unilaterally would be that a lot of
other people would begin to follow.
Q542 Miss Widdecombe: Let us suppose
that we do follow, or let us suppose that the Home Secretary is
successful in persuading them to be in on it from the start. Presumably
you have to allow them to set their own criteria; we would want
to retain the right to set our own criteria, we would not accept
a common set of criteria. That must suppose that other countries
will do similarly. Is it actually realistic or indeed practical
to expect UNHCR to actually apply several different sets of criteria
, possibly within the same processing centre?
Mr Letwin: The processing centre,
no, I am sorry. Let me pick you up on that. I think there lies
a confusion between two things. Persons who come to Britain, or
any other European country that was operating such a system, seeking
asylum would be removed to an offshore processing centre. No criteria
are necessary other than the 1951 Convention criteria because
all such people who have applied for asylum and who qualify under
the 1951 Convention as refugees would be eventually admitted once
they have gone through processing and been found to have a well-founded
claim. The criteria that I am talking about are criteria, so to
speak, for the top-up; they are criteria for the people who are
part of the quota who are not part of the offshore processing
because they have not been to this country and they are, in many
cases, much too persecuted and much too poor to come to this country.
It is they that I would like to be able to admit on top. I suppose
it would be quite a challenge for the UNHCR to be told that France
wished to have people from Francophone Africa rather than from
Anglophone and we wish to have people who are English speakers
from Anglophone Africa—or whatever it might be—but
I do not think it is a challenge that need necessarily be beyond
them in helping us to select the appropriate place to focus humanitarian
effort for refugees that year.
Q543 Miss Widdecombe: It is a part
of your vision that when we were topping up, under the quota,
the people who came under that top-up system might not have presented
to Britain in the first place and, not only that, might have no
preference for Britain as a place for refuge?
Mr Letwin: It would certainly
be the case in 100% of the cases involved that they would not
have presented to Britain because as soon as they had done that
they would be in the other side of the system. They might not
have expressed a preference. If it were the case that several
other countries joined our schemes, so to speak, or set up parallel
schemes of a similar scheme, I think it would make abundant sense
to try to agree between us that if we had established criteria
X and criteria Y and they had established criteria Z and P, and
if there were individuals who, notwithstanding those criteria,
were to be absorbed within the quota for a particular country
but expressed a preference for another, there could be, so to
speak, some quota-swapping. That is a refinement which I think
one could well imagine in order to answer to particular desires
of particular individuals. Of course, that would depend on other
countries having adopted a quota system alongside our own.
Miss Widdecombe: I think there are going
to be questions later about which other countries. Good.
Q544 David Winnick: Mr Letwin, UNHCR
were reluctant to give a view about the role that you would allocate
to them, for reasons stated, more or less, in broad terms that
they did not want to enter into a controversy which is engaging
domestic politics in the United Kingdom. However, if UNHCR decided
(and it may well be far from the position and you were deciding
policy in practice) that they did not want to take on this role,
your proposals would all collapse, and there is no other organisation
that could do the job on the international scene.
Mr Letwin: No, no, the proposal
would not collapse. It would be a pity because I think there would
be a huge advantage to be derived from working with them, who
are the experts, but if necessary, obviously, the Foreign Office
and the Home Office between them have the capacity to examine
the various sets of refugees that might best benefit from our
humanitarian effort, and British decision-makers have the capacity
to make decisions, which they are doing at the moment, and we
could operate a system perfectly well—I think sub-optimally
but perfectly well—on the basis of our own resources. My
purpose in seeking, so to speak, to move in the direction of the
UNHCR is to try to achieve some bonuses and benefits but it is
not a crucial feature of the proposal.
Q545 David Winnick: You mentioned
Australia as having that system, but they have since modified
it, have they not? You are going to Australia, you have already
told us.
Mr Letwin: I am.
Q546 David Winnick: We understand
there has been some modification because of controversy and opposition
in Australia to the system they adopted originally.
Mr Letwin: I think there have
been many modifications. Incidentally, one of the two Australian
Ministers responsible is visiting this country in the near future
and, indeed, I am having discussions with him, and it may very
well be that he would be happy to address the Committee. For me
to address the Committee about the modulations of the Australian
experience would certainly be absurd as I have only a second-hand
acquaintance with it. I have the very strong impression from my
discussions with the Australian Government about these matters
that the fundamentals of their system they find robust. I also
have the impression that there are enormous numbers of changes
that have happened over time, as one might imagine, and are continuing
to occur. What the details of those are I have read conflicting
reports of, and that is one of my purposes in discussing it with
the Minister when he comes.
Q547 David Winnick: The basic decision
about who would and who would not be allowed in as an asylum seeker
would be, under your proposals, taken completely away from Home
Office officials. It would be a UNHCR decision in vetting—
Mr Letwin: Ideally so.
Q548 David Winnick: Therefore you
would have a situation, would you not, where they would be making
the decision who should actually come into the United Kingdom?
Do you think that would be acceptable? It would not be Home Office
officials acting under the Government's auspices, it would be,
in fact, UNHCR deciding who should actually come into our country.
Mr Letwin: I think we need to
distinguish levels of the process and the two sides of the process.
If we deal first with the question of those who continued to come
to this country and make an asylum application here and are removed
to offshore processing, the first level of decision in my image
would be under the auspices of the UNHCR rather than British officials.
It is a straightforward, factual matter who is and who is not,
under the 1951 Convention, a refugee. A very difficult matter
to decide in many cases, but it is a matter of fact; it is not
a matter of judgment about desirable outcomes, it is a matter
of establishing the facts. I do not see any reason why it would
be inappropriate for the facts to be best established by experts—with
the best experts we could find. I do not think they have to be
British, though, as I say, British officials could do it faute
de mieux. The adjudicators would continue to be British, the
judges, if there were a judicial review, would continue to be
British. So final decisions of a kind that had to be made where
there were tricky issues of judgment of fact would remain British
because I do not believe there is another juridical system around
that would enable us to replace it. When we come to the question
of the top-up, so to speak—the people who are admitted under
the quota who have never come to this country and never sought
asylum but whom we are trying to help from refugee camps or whatever
in other parts of the world—the criteria under which we
would be selecting one set of people rather than another would
be established by the British state and would be under the control
of Parliament, ultimately. The question of who best fits those
criteria we would be sub-contracting. I happen to think that it
is preferable to apply criteria once they have been established
on the basis of the greatest possible expertise and not on the
basis of judgmental factors that could be influenced by domestic
political considerations. That is one of the reasons why I prefer
the UNHCR route, but I do not regard this as absolutely fundamental.
If the feeling were strongly in this country that even once we
had established criteria the very people that were to fulfil the
quota beyond those who had applied in-country and been processed
offshore, who had not ever come to this country and were going
to be brought to this country and accepted here as refugees, should
be decided upon at every stage by British officials, I do not
regard that as a critical component. I think it would be a pity
because I think we would be losing some expertise that exists
in the world and replacing it with an inferior expertise. I think
our officials are hardworking and make tremendous efforts but
they are not living in an atmosphere where the greatest possible
level of expertise exists about who does and who does not fit
various criteria about refugees in the world today, which is a
very, very fine-grained exercise. If I may just give you an example,
I think it is generally agreed that the level of the assessment
of various countries that is provided by the Home Office and the
Foreign Office as the basis for decision-making has been a major
source of problems over the years. That suggests, does it not,
that our level of domestic expertise about the precise conditions
in particular countries can often be less good than it could be,
and that is one of the reasons why I think the UNHCR could play
so valuable a role.
Q549 David Winnick: As Mr Cameron
asked you earlier, of course, if there was indeed an arrangement
and a tragedy occurred—be it European, in former Yugoslavia
or before Kosovo was liberated, or be it in Africa, Zimbabwe or
the rest—the United Kingdom would be under tremendous pressure,
regardless of any quota, to accept people who were genuinely fleeing
from terror and persecution. Would that not be the situation?
If you had your 20,000 quota and then suddenly there was, as we
have seen in recent years, unhappily so frequently, the sort of
tragedy which emerges then when people were fleeing and managed
to get here there, would be great pressure, would there not, to
accept them?
Mr Letwin: Yes, but can we distinguish
two kinds of case? There is the case where a new and terrible
persecution arises in the world that did not exist a little while
before, which is a genuine persecution in terms of the 1951 Convention.
A really egregious example would be some regime that started a
programme of ethnic cleansing in one part of the world or another—
Q550 David Winnick: Like Kosovo?
Mr Letwin: Yes, trying to murder
a large number of people. There would be, I think, a lot of pressure
to do something. I think it is essential that the world should
respond to those sorts of circumstance. There are two kinds of
response and they need to march together in an appropriate way:
one is a response to try to prevent the outrage from happening,
which of course has been done over the past few years and, rightly,
in alliance, and there is a response to try to deal with the effects
for those who have been affected by it if it has not been stopped
in time, which again I think needs to be done, in such circumstances,
in alliance. I do not see the system that I am here describing
as being capable of handling those sorts of things. If there is
an appalling ethnic cleansing going on somewhere and if, even
in an alliance, we are unable to stop it, then we must find ways
of clubbing together with other countries to find a solution for
those people which is at least in place for as long as that persecution
occurs. That is a refugee problem but it is a very specialised,
localised and immediate refugee problem. I do not believe we can
design a home grown system for dealing with such occurrences.
We need to find better mechanics internationally for agreeing
how we deal with them. Of course, it might be the corollary of
such an arrangement that as part of an alliance solution to such
a thing the quota for that year would be significantly expanded
in order to allow our part of that task to be fulfilled. That
is a perfectly imaginable route. Separately, however, and much
more difficult for my thesis, there is the case where there is
a terrible occurrence somewhere in the world but it is not a persecution,
and the people involved are not 1951 Convention refugees. However,
you or I, were we in their circumstances, would certainly not
want to be living where they are living—there is a civil
war somewhere, people are shooting at one another and it is pretty
unpleasant to be stuck in the middle of that. You and I, and everyone
else in Britain, would feel that it was a terrible thing if we
did not have some means of dealing with people who had just been
in the middle of being shot at and tried to get out.
Q551 David Winnick: There would be
great pressure, from the very opposite people who are now concerned
about asylum, from liberal (small "l") voices, shouting
"What are we doing about this?"
Mr Letwin: And wider. The paradox
is, I believe, that very many of the people who are very concerned
about asylum actually, when presented with that kind of case,
feel sympathy for the people involved. Therefore, as I was saying
to Mr Cameron earlier, I believe it is essential that alongside
these proposals which relate exclusively—and it is important
they should relate exclusively—to asylum, to refugees and
the 1951 Convention status, we certainly will need some set of
mechanics which I have not yet worked out at all for replacing
the current system of exceptional leave to remain, which is not
working terribly well but is an attempt to answer that particular
issue. I recognise that as a major additional problem.
David Winnick: We live in a very unsettled
world. Mr Singh has a few questions on the resettlement package.
Q552 Mr Singh: I would like to explore
a little further with you, Mr Letwin, this "goodie"
bag of yours. What would it consist of and what would this goodie
bag cost?
Mr Letwin: I do not know and I
do not know, but I can give you some initial hints. It is essential,
if I am to achieve the aims which I have set out to achieve, that
all those—in stark contrast to the present position—who
are admitted here as refugees should see themselves and be seen
by the rest of the population as welcome. That is critical. One
of the things which will contribute to that is them being, from
the first days, gainfully employed if at all possible or, at the
very least, put on a route to gainful employment through appropriate
training and education. It cannot be our aim that refugees should
arrive in this country and end up unemployed, dispossessed and
floating around. One of the critical components of what you call
the "goodie bag" is that there should be training and
assistance with finding jobs. Of course, going with that should
be the automatic award, so to speak, of a work permit—which
requires a change because at present the employer has to apply
for a work permit and if there is not an employer there is no
job. Clearly none of that is going to succeed unless the people
we are talking about who are refugees are given basic skills which
will enable them to be employed successfully in the UK and, indeed,
to prosper in our society—above all, of course, English.
The Home Secretary, I think, has done good things in that kind
of direction and they need to be expanded. It is also, I think,
important that the people involved should see Britain as their
long-term home; if we are going to admit a particular number of
refugees each year as part of the international humanitarian effort,
it is important that the people who come end up becoming British.
So I think it is important that we do some of the things that
the Home Secretary has rightly suggested should be done for people
who are taking up long-term residence here—some kind of
acquaintanceship with our institutions and what I think are sometimes
called Citizenship classes. I do not quite like the term, but
you see what I mean. Clearly, it is of great importance that such
people should be coming to some definite place, so we need to
help with housing. Those are the basic components. How much will
they cost? All of these things are being done in one way or another
somewhere or other for some set of people or other at the moment.
I am not quite sure whether they are, in the famous phrase, joined
up exactly right. I do not think we are talking about vast additional
expenditures. I think we are talking about tailoring the various
programmes that exist and focusing them on a group of people that
we would now be absolutely sure we wanted to welcome to this country.
That is the mood shift that I would like to achieve.
Q553 Mr Singh: I can see where you
are coming from and I can see some of your commendable motivation.
I think the dilemma is this: that you are coming in with a legal
system when many of our citizens will say "Hang on a minute,
I do not have a house, I do not have a job, I have been unemployed
for a year and I cannot get my children into the local school
because when I applied it was over-subscribed". Do you not
see you are actually falling into exactly the same trap that you
are trying to avoid, through this system?
Mr Letwin: I think you are absolutely
at the nub of the issue. Let me describe to you why I do not think
that, and you will have to take a view about whether the system
and I have got this wrong. I think what enrages very many people
is the idea that there is a group of people who are arriving in
Britain who are no different from them (this is assuming that
they have not demonised them); they too would like jobs, they
too would like operations, they too would like houses. They cannot
see why "they" should get preference. That is entirely
an understandable phenomenon. It can degenerate into an appalling
kind of xenophobia but the basic motivation is, as you imply,
entirely understandable. Under the arrangements that I am talking
about, the people that I am describing do not fall into that category,
and I hope that they would not be seen as falling into that category,
and I think we could achieve a position where they would not.
When somebody has been systematically tortured they are not just
like me. I have not been. I do not think that even people in quite
hard-pressed circumstances think that they are in the same position
as somebody who has been systematically tortured. Their objection
is that there are people who are perfectly ordinary people, like
them, who seem to be getting an advantage. If it is a case of
a restricted, defined number of people who really have been appallingly
persecuted because they really do fall under the 1951 Convention
definition of a refugee, I do not think British people will feel
that, I think British people will think pretty kindly about that.
You will have your own constituency cases and, maybe, your experience
differs, but my experience is that sometimes the same people who
say to me at some meeting that they are terribly exercised by
asylum seekers will then come to me in a little delegation about
somebody whose sister's husband has been appallingly persecuted
somewhere and ask "why are we not admitting them?"
David Winnick: That is quite familiar
to all of us as Members of Parliament.
Q554 Mr Singh: I do not want to get
into border controls because there are questions on that, but
I do contend that we are very poor at that and we should be dealing
with that better. We already have a problem of asylum applications
from people entering the illegal economy as illegal migrants,
so you would still have problems there. Let me put it to you this
way: we still have that problem yet you are proposing, over ten
years 200,000 extra refugees in this country with goodie bags.
How is that going to play with the population?
Mr Letwin: It will not play unless
we could persuade people, because we had made it a reality, that
as part of doing this we really had tightened up the borders and
we really did remove people who were here illegally because they
were not under the immigration system with work permits and entry
clearance and so on, and they were not part of my asylum group
and indeed were not part of the group dealing with civil war participants,
if we find a different solution for them. I agree with you that
it simply will not wash unless the corollary is that we actually
run our borders tightly and we really do remove clandestines.
I cannot over-stress this; the fact of making the asylum system
work seems to me to give us, if we can achieve it, a platform
on which to build genuine control of our borders.
Q555 Mr Singh: If you were the Home
Secretary today, your policy would be for the next ten years to
allow in 200,000 extra refugees.
Mr Letwin: It is not 200,000 extra,
no. No, that is not my policy. Rather, I do not think it is an
accurate description of the policy because at the moment—the
last count, last year—there were some 110,000 people who
came here claiming asylum. My view is that a properly worked out
version of the kind of proposal I am putting forward, or indeed
of the one the Home Secretary is putting forward, could get us
to the position where a very large proportion of that group of
people did not come to this country in the first place or, if
they did come here, were removed very speedily. I think that the
effect of the position that I am outlining here would be that
a very large number of people currently coming to this country
because they think, rightly, that they can claim asylum, because
they think that when they have obtained asylum they will get work,
would cease to come if they knew that this system were operating
effectively and that there were concomitantly a serious set of
border controls. I do not think—if I can respond to what
I think is underlying your remark—that net immigration would
be increased by my proposals, I think its first effect would be
to reduce net immigration significantly. Whether we then decided
on an orderly, rational basis to increase net immigration or reduce
it would be, as I said several times, a matter for orderly and
rational national debate, but the immediate effect would be, so
to speak, to strip out the group of people who are currently coming
here on one side of the immigration system and using the asylum
system as a means of remaining here.
Mr Singh: I think we can agree that this
is a very complex area.
David Winnick: Mr Prosser has one or
two questions before we go on to treaty obligations.
Q556 Mr Prosser: Mr Letwin, in your
answer to Mr Singh you give us the impression that the cost of
this resettlement package would be not significant because these
things are being done by other agencies in other ways already,
but can you give us a feel of the costs of providing some sort
of holding centres? You have said that you envisage asylum seekers
coming into the United Kingdom and, within 24 hours, being shipped
or flown out to the overseas' centres. Can you give us some idea
of the cost and the difficulties of organising the holding centres
for this? Will they be secure or not?
Mr Letwin: The offshore processing
centres?
Mr Prosser: No, the costs of actually
receiving them. From our own experience in places like Dover a
huge amount of resource and energy goes into the logistics of
receiving people, processing them and keeping them safe and secure.
In this case, of course, you will be shipping them out. So what
are the costs of that, the cost of actually flying them out to
their new overseas locations, the actual cost of setting up locations
in areas where, perhaps, the receiving host country will not think
it is the best idea in the world—these will be open centres
so that people can come and go as they wish and we know from our
own experience that that is not very attractive in some areas—and
the cost of then returning those who have been successful back
to the United Kingdom (we have already mentioned the resettlement
cost) and the cost of returning the remainder who are not satisfying
our criteria to their homelands?
Q557 David Winnick: Those would all
be British costs?
Mr Letwin: Yes, entirely. Let
me preface my remarks by explaining the logic. The picture which
I think you may have in your mind, which certainly many people
have in their minds, is of broadly the orders of magnitude of
applications currently entertained in the UK but with all of those
people then being, so to speak, very, very briefly (24 hour) remanded,
or whatever (less than 24 hours) and then shipped out in a very
large number of conveyances and then brought to very large processing
centres and then very large numbers of those failing the test
and having to be removed and only a small number succeeding in
coming to this country. That is one model that people have in
their minds. If that were the case, the costs of this enterprise
would be enormous and the system, as a whole, would fail. The
speculation that I am inviting the Committee to engage in is whether
I am right to suppose that that would not be the case at all.
It is all a question of how one understands motivations and incentives.
Of course, if we set up a system we would eventually know what
the truth of this was. However, here is my speculation: my speculation
is that if people knew, and people-traffickers knew, that on arrival
in the UK the effect of saying "I claim asylum" would
be immediate removal to a processing centre abroad in a place
where there is no economic attraction to reside and under circumstances
where there would be rigorous and entirely effective one-stop-shop
assessment, I submit the effect of all of that would be a vast
and immediate reduction in the number of people actually coming
to this country and claiming asylum. I speculate further that
it would reduce almost exactly to the level of those who were
genuine refugees. I cannot see—and you may not share my
speculation but I cannot see—why someone would want to go
to the bother of getting to Britain in the knowledge of being
put on a plane to go to another place, to have a claim-processing
system that would work, only to be told that thereafter they would
be shipped back home. I think what is currently generating the
very large number of applications is the conception on the part
of very many people, rather justified in practice, that by claiming
asylum none of these things will happen but, rather, that they
will be able to remain one way or another in the UK for a very,
very long time—perhaps forever. If my speculation is right
then the costs are as I have identified, roughly; that is to say,
based on the Australian model and based on the numbers that we
used to have applying for asylum in this country, and based on
almost any method of calculation, it is very difficult to get
the cost to be above about £400 million a year of operating
the system, and we are currently costing about £1.8 billion.
If my speculation is correct, there is a very, very large saving
here. I accept entirely that it depends on whether the Committee
agrees that the fact of knowing that that is how things would
happen would initially and immediately deter a very large number
of people who are not refugees from applying in the first place.
That is, as Miss Widdecombe pointed out, an absolutely critical
component of my scheme. I do not see how we would finally find
out the answer to whether that was the case until one tried, but
I submit that if we do not try we will not find out and no other
system has been proposed which offers even the prospect of a serious
reduction of the £1.8 billion a year, now that the Home Secretary
has already made the changes to social security that have been
made.
Q558 Mr Prosser: The £1.1 billion
is the total cost of running the IND system as a whole now.
Mr Letwin: It is £1.8 billion.
Q559 Mr Prosser: That is the total
cost of running the system as it is now. That is all the immigration
officers at Dover, at Heathrow and all the other airports and
all the infrastructure of immigration control. You would not be
dismantling that, would you, when you bring your system in?
Mr Letwin: The same entire system,
including asylum and the rest of immigration, nationality and
so on, was costing this country, in today's money, around £400
million a year seven or eight years ago. I am suggesting that
the gap of £1.4 billion (and this is, I think, incontrovertible)
is accounted for by what has happened since. I do not lay the
blame for that exactly on anybody; the fact is we all know that
these are complicated things which have complicated origins, but
that is what has happened. What I am suggesting is if we could
get back to a world in which the asylum system is a relatively
small part rather than a relatively large part of our total immigration
system we would get back to a world where we were spending the
sorts of sums we used to be spending. That is all I am saying.
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