| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: I cannot improve on the arguments advanced by my noble friend Lady Anelay and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and I shall not try.
The noble Lord, Lord Corbett, made reasonable points in his intervention. But to be fair to my noble friend and to the noble Earl, they did adduce case histories in support of the figures for which they were arguing. The late Professor Parkinson, in his term,
once did valuable work on the ideal size of human groups, and the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, made an allusion to that in terms of the size of military units. The noble Lord's point about putting nationalities together argues for smaller centres rather than larger ones in order to confer the maximum flexibility.My main point is that, if the Minister is minded to resist the amendment, he owes it to the Committee to produce quantitative justification, not just in terms of economics but in terms of social return, for the figures that are the Government's preferred numbers.
Finally, as a rural resident, after a quarter of a century, like the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, as an inner-city MP, I wholly support the views of my noble friend Lady Carnegy about avoiding a scale in the centres which dominates local communities.
The Countess of Mar: I remind the Committee of my membership of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal. I support the noble Baroness's amendment wholeheartedly. I come from not very far from Throckmorton, in Worcestershire, and I know the locality very well. I am hugely concerned that there will simply not be the infrastructure there to support accommodation for 750 asylum seekers. We already know that the local residents are extremely upset about the idea. They were upset enough when the foot and mouth funeral pyres were put there. This seems to be another punishment for them.
That aside, a great number of studies have indicated that crowding people together under stressful conditions creates problems. From my own experience of working with asylum seekers, I can confirm that they are under a huge amount of stress. They are in a strange country. They do not know what will happen to them or what the procedures are. They have not been informed in advance of what they should do or what they should expect. Each nationality has different dietary needs, and that is true even within nationalities.
Putting people together in smaller groups rather than in larger numbers would work much better. It would probably be better if they were also accommodated on the edge of urban conurbations where they would find people of their own ethnic origins who have already settled in this country and who could be brought in to help and advise them and to show them the way. Putting them in the middle of Worcestershire, for example, where we have a very small ethnic population, would not work. As my noble friend has said, the hospital facilities in Worcestershire are already over-stretched. I know that from my own personal experience. I assume that that would be the case in other rural communities.
We must look at the whole package. If we are going to put people of different nationalities and different ethnic origins together, we must make sure that they will not strike sparks off each other and create greater problems than they may possibly have encountered in their own countries. I support the amendment.
Lord Greaves: Like other Members of the Committee, I congratulate the noble Baroness,
Lady Anelay of St Johns, on putting forward the amendment. It allows us to have an important and basic debate—the first of several on the nature of the proposed accommodation centres.The various amendments that we shall discuss deal with issues of size, location and function. It is difficult to separate them neatly into those categories. It might have been better had they been grouped together so that we could discuss all these issues at once.
Size and location are closely linked. As I understand it, the reason why the proposed sites are in rural areas relates simply to their proposed size. Sites for accommodation centres of about 750 are much easier to find in the countryside—disused airfields, for example—than they are to find in the middle of Manchester or Leeds. That is a simple fact of life. So the two matters are closely and intimately related.
The noble Lord, Lord Corbett, made a cogent case in favour of the concept of reception or accommodation centres. There is indeed a very good case to be made out for such centres for some people who apply for asylum, for the reasons put forward by the noble Lord; namely, that they offer an opportunity to provide the kind of services and support to asylum seekers which are all too often lacking in the present system of dispersal into the community. Whether it is possible to provide those services on a dispersed basis is a matter of argument. I believe that it would be possible if it were done better. Nevertheless, the basic argument for accommodation centres must be that it will be possible to concentrate services, resources and support for people who are often under great stress and do not know what is going to happen to them. They have reached a traumatic stage in their lives which many of us would find it difficult to understand.
My noble friend Lord Russell talked about a sense of community. I shall focus on the ethos of the centre, how it works, how the people there relate to the centre and how they live there. The noble Lord, Lord Corbett, is wrong. He suggested that we had no evidence and no reason to choose between 200 and 750, or any other figures. That is not a sustainable argument. There is a great deal of research about the nature and management of institutions of different sizes and of all kinds. Apart from that, we all know from experience that institutions of around 200 people are different in kind from institutions of 700 people, which in turn are different in kind from institutions of 5,000 or 10,000 people. That is a fact of life. We know what the size of different institutions means and we can make competent and legitimate decisions about them on that basis. That does not mean that there should not be further research into the subject.
The noble Lord said that it was not a matter of size, but a matter of the way in which the centres were managed. That is true up to a point. But we are looking for institutions that are humane, that treat people decently, that are pleasant places to live in and that provide the supportive environment that such people need. It is easier to manage an institution of 200 people than an institution of 750. It may be possible to manage an institution of 750 or even 5,000 in such a
humane and practically sensible way, but it is more difficult. Better managers and better systems are needed. Many of us are not confident that the Home Office and the people it employs are always as competent and humane in managing things as we would all like. I am not saying that in some cases they do not.As a member of Sub-Committee F, I have recently had the privilege, along with other noble Lords, of visiting two contrasting institutions. The Red Cross centre at Sangatte, near Calais is an open institution where people can walk in and out. It is a refuge, not a detention centre. The centre at Harmondsworth is a detention centre that holds people pending their removal from this country. If I were to spend a week in either, I would prefer to spend it in Harmondsworth, for all the fences, barbed wire and goodness knows what other security around it, than at Sangatte, which is a dreadful place. To some extent that supports the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, in his view about management.
There is no doubt that institutions differ. Institutions such as detention centres, which on the face of it are undesirable places in the sense that in an ideal world we would not have them, can be run humanely if the resources and the right management are put in. Our view was that a good job was being done at Harmondsworth in very difficult circumstances. Nevertheless, we are not legislating for the best; we are legislating for ordinary people in the real world and for what would be most sensible.
The Minister says that these are trials. We know the likely sites of three of the accommodation centres. We understand that the Government are still looking for a fourth. They will all house around 750 people. If these are genuine trials, why are we trialling four examples of one model instead of four different models? That is fundamental to the case against what the Government are doing. If they were planning one type of trial in an urban locality, a different sort of unit in a rural locality, one big unit and perhaps something else, many of us would still be unhappy about some of the proposals to be trialled but at least we would accept that there was some sense in trialling a range of options.
The Minister says that it is open to the Government to have smaller units once the first four are under way. It is the first time I have heard that from the Government. Perhaps the Minister is prepared to explain what he means and tell us what progress is being made with the idea of trialling a centre of 200 in an urban area.
It is an interesting question why we are having accommodation centres for some asylum seekers and a system of dispersal for the other 90 per cent, or whatever it will be, in the next few years—people who will be in the community, supported by NASS in the present way. Some of the ideas being explored by Nick Hardwick should be followed up. In an urban area that already has a community of asylum seekers, an accommodation centre could also act as a centre for services for asylum seekers living out in the
community. That is the core and cluster model that various social services and health authorities use for mental health patients. Some people live in the centre because it is more appropriate to them while others living out in the community can use the centre to access legal advice, adjudication and other services specifically designed for the needs of asylum seekers, such as health services, which are difficult for them outside. Has anyone here tried to find a dentist recently? Have you tried to find an NHS dentist recently? Have you tried to find an NHS dentist if you are an asylum seeker recently? It is not easy.I hope that the Government will take seriously the idea of providing services for asylum seekers generally within a centre in which some of them might live, on the core and cluster basis. If the Government are genuine about trialling different options, the might like to consider that.
My final point is not directly related to size, except in the sense that bigger institutions may cause a problem in the community. Some accommodation centres will cause great difficulty locally simply because they are, in the best sense of the word, alien institutions in the area. I do not use the word "alien" in any pejorative sense. A demand will arise to stop people from the centre going into local pubs, wandering across local fields or hanging around in villages. The same might happen in urban areas if the centre is too big. There will be demands for stricter curfews than are proposed, not just night-time curfews. There will be demands for people to be kept inside the centre—where they belong, as some will see it—and not allowed to wander around the countryside in a way that local people worry about, even without making a nuisance of themselves.
As with people dispersed in the community, there will also be a tendency for people living in asylum seeker accommodation centres to find a way of disappearing towards the end of their presence there if they believe that their application is likely to be turned down in order to avoid being picked up the morning after their final appeal is refused. It is clear that some people will do that, because that is what some people do at the moment. They move out of their NASS accommodation at the appropriate time so that they cannot be found when the removal squads employed by the Home Office turn up to find them. Subsequently they live in the community as illegal immigrants, with the unknown number—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of other illegal immigrants. That will happen, and it will increase the pressure for greater security.
What guarantee does the Bill give that the accommodation centres will not be turned effectively into detention centres that do not allow people to leave? Where is that guarantee? The Government can say that that is not their intention, but where in the legislation is a guarantee that accommodation centres will not eventually or overnight become detention centres?
Next Section
Back to Table of Contents
Lords Hansard Home Page