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On Question, amendment agreed to.
Clause 26, as amended, agreed to.
Clause 27 [Conditions of residence]:
[Amendment No. 122 not moved.]
Lord Bassam of Brighton moved Amendment No. 123:
The noble Lord said: In moving this amendment, I shall speak also to Amendment No. 124, both of which are minor, technical amendments. Amendment No. 123 corrects an oversight by inserting a reference to paragraph 2(5) of Schedule 3 to the Immigration Act 1971 into Clause 27(7). It ensures consistency with Clause 21 and makes clear that any accommodation centre residence conditions imposed under Clause 27 of this Bill are additional to any residence restrictions imposed under paragraph 21 of Schedule 2 and paragraph 2(5) of Schedule 3 to the 1971 Act.
Amendment No. 124 deletes what is now an unnecessary subsection. The purpose of subsection (8) of Clause 27 is already provided for by Clause 23(3), which was introduced at Committee stage in the other place. I beg to move.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Lord Bassam of Brighton moved Amendment No. 124:
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Clause 27, as amended, agreed to.
Clause 28 [Financial contribution by resident]:
Earl Russell moved Amendment No. 125:
The noble Lord said: This amendment seeks to delete subsection (3) of Clause 28. The clause authorises the Secretary of State to draw on the assets of the asylum seeker to meet any charges that may be incurred in the centre. Subsection (3) authorises the Secretary of State to draw on assets outside the United Kingdom. Since the asylum seeker is in this country presumably because he cannot remain in his native country in safety, and since his assets are presumed to be in his native country, does not this require an impossibility? I beg to move.
Lord Bassam of Brighton: We are grateful to the noble Earl for moving this amendment, if only because it will enable us to consider a minor drafting error that can be corrected in the next print of the Bill. Subsection (3) of Clause 28 should—and, of course, will—refer to "assets" in subsection (2), not subsection (3). We will ensure that that error is rectified.
Leaving aside the error, we believe that subsection (3) is necessary. We cannot accept its wholesale deletion. When correctly drafted, it will make clear that the reference to "assets" in subsection (2) in the clause includes assets outside the United Kingdom. Subsection (2) will allow the Secretary of State to make regulations enabling him to recover some, or all, of the value of support that has been paid to an accommodation centre resident if that resident has asked for support and at the time of asking for support he had assets that were not realisable and if those assets have subsequently become realisable.
We believe that the approach is entirely fair and that it is completely reasonable to include it in our definition of "assets"; that is, assets outside the United Kingdom. The point to bear in mind—and this goes to the heart of the noble Earl's point—is that we would only take account of assets outside the United Kingdom if those assets have become realisable. We believe that it is quite proper that an asylum seeker with, say, property in his home country that he cannot sell at the time that he applies for asylum support but which he subsequently sells or is able to sell should make a contribution to his support in the United Kingdom.
There is no question of us taking account of assets abroad if the money could not be said to be reasonably available to the accommodation centre resident. In our view, the provisions for accommodation centres are entirely consistent with those for people currently supported by NASS under Part VI of the 1999 Act. The equivalent provision is set out in Regulation 17 of the Asylum Support Regulations 2000.
There is, I believe, a point here that the noble Earl has missed; namely, that an asylum seeker resident in an accommodation centre could have assets not perhaps in his country of origin but in another county. It may not necessarily be the case that assets in the home country are inaccessible to him. Subsection (3)
Lord Avebury: Perhaps I may suggest to the Minister that the principal asset that an asylum seeker may have left behind in his country of origin may be the house in which he was living. Although it would be theoretically possible in many cases for him to instruct agents to sell the house, the normal course of action would be to allow other members of the family to live in it so that he would have a home to return to should the situation subsequently change; in other words, he would at least have somewhere to go.
The Minister is proposing that such an asylum seeker should be forced to sell that accommodation. Therefore, if the dictatorship, or whatever, in his home country is overthrown and he is able to return after, say, 10 or 15 years, he would have nowhere to live. Does the noble Lord think that it is wise to impose such a solution on asylum seekers?
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: Before the Minister responds, perhaps I may put a question to him that arises from the language that he used in his response. I do not believe that the Minister was suggesting that the word "realisable" and the phrase "reasonably available" are equivalent to each other, but I wonder whether the phrase "reasonably available" includes references to exchange control. One can conceive of circumstances under these provisions where the person would be required to sell his house and then, having sold it and transformed it into cash, would not actually be able to remove the money from the country of origin.
Therefore, in addition to the correction to the drafting of subsection (3) at the next printing of the Bill, it seems that a certain amount of tidying up of this particular provision will be needed before the Bill becomes law.
Lord Bassam of Brighton: Noble Lords have made fair and reasonable points. However, I return to the point that the assets must be realisable. Moreover, they will be considered on a case by case basis. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, makes a very reasonable point. If the assets are not realisable, they cannot be taken into account. I think that there will be a test of reasonableness in all of this. While the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, is right that property may well be an asylum seeker's major asset, there may well be other assets such as—I do not know—insurance policies, national savings certificates, pension schemes, premium bonds, stocks, shares and so on. Any of those may be assets that are accessible and available. As I said, it will be done very much on a case by case basis.
As it is, NASS currently takes account of cash, savings, investments and certain types of property which belong to an applicant or may have belonged to an asylum seeker or his or her dependants. So all of that is already provided for in the current regulations. They have not caused great difficulty in their application, or at least we are not aware of them causing great difficulty. So this is continuing an existing provision.
Lord Greaves: The Minister clearly said that this provision is similar to that which applies to people currently obtaining NASS support. In the past two years, since NASS started operating, in how many cases has this provision been used? Of the 44,000 people that NASS has dispersed and the others that it has supported, how many have paid over money?
Lord Kingsland: As I understand it, the effect of the clause is to make the exercise by the Secretary of State an ex post one. In other words, someone will enter the accommodation centre, receive the support that everyone else receives, but, at a later stage, as a result of research into their finances, the Secretary of State will seek to claw back that money. That will be the subject matter of the proposed regulations.
Before the Minister embarks on that course, he might like to ask the Home Office to reflect on the cost-benefit of the exercise. If the Government want to extract these sums from individuals owning property abroad, there will have to be, first, a fair amount of research abroad; and, secondly, perhaps a heavy investment in the actual recovery process. I can see the force of injecting into the Bill a disincentive system in relation to someone wrongfully claiming support. Conversely, I think that cost is an appropriate issue for the Home Office to address.
Lord Berkeley: We have to remember that many of those claiming asylum and using the Sangatte centre are alleged to have paid between £5,000 and £10,000 to get there. I do not know how they got that money or whether they paid it to the mafia or someone else, but it is possible that some of them have other assets. I think that this type of situation will be rare, and that it will be even rarer that, as other noble Lords have said, those assets will be realisable from the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, if someone has raised £10,000 to come to the United Kingdom as an economic migrant and is claiming asylum, and if it can be demonstrated that he has realisable assets, I do not know why he should not be made to pay for his accommodation while his application is being processed.
Earl Russell: My Lords, I respond first to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I know one person personally who happens to have come not from Sangatte but ultimately from Kosovo via an expensive lorry journey across Europe beginning in the Valley of Death in Blace. That person had absolutely nothing left after that. That is, I think, a rather commoner case than the one that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, envisages.
As for the Minister's reply, not for the first time I remind the Home Office that it is not a Foreign Office. In assessing the realisability of assets in another country the Home Office is literally outside its element. This is the office which believed in 1996 that opposition groups were allowed to flourish freely in Zaire and that in Turkey efforts were being made to encourage the better expression of the Kurdish cultural identity. I do not think that the Home Office's opinion that an asset is realisable is necessarily sound. The point that my noble friend Lord Avebury made about the house being very likely to be occupied by relatives is a serious one. The risk to the relatives is also serious in that case. In fact, it might be the first effect of putting such a provision into effect to bring another asylum seeker to our shores in great haste. I doubt whether that is what the Home Secretary intends.
The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, about exchange controls is also one of considerable force. The sort of countries that produce large numbers of asylum seekers tend not to be the sort of countries that have particularly sound currencies. So once the asset is realised, it is likely to produce when it is brought over here a sum a great deal less than the Home Office intended, in which case the point of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, about the cost of realising the asset is of considerable force.
The case of the asylum seeker with large numbers of assets in another country is not likely to be a sufficiently common one to justify this provision on its own. When people such as Saddam Hussein and General Mobutu seek asylum in the United Kingdom I shall take that point seriously. At present I do not feel the need to.
The only asset that most asylum seekers will have is probably a small amount of family jewellery and ornament about their person. Those will often be family heirlooms and a precious reminder of a sense of identity which has been deeply challenged. I am reminded of the story of a couple in desperate poverty. They were equally desperately in love. Her one great asset was a wonderfully beautiful head of hair. His one asset was an inherited gold watch for which he had no watch chain. Come Christmas morning they discovered that she had cut off her hair and sold it to a wigmaker to buy a chain for his watch and that he had sold his watch in order to buy a gold chain to put round her hair. That really is the course of true love but I do not want it to be the course of British law. I shall not take the matter further tonight; we may hear more of it later. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 29 agreed to.
"( ) The Secretary of State may arrange for the provision of facilities in an accommodation centre for the use of a person in providing legal advice to a resident of the centre."
Page 14, line 13, at end insert "or under paragraph 2(5) of Schedule 3 to that Act (control pending deportation)."
Page 14, line 14, leave out subsection (8).
Page 14, line 34, leave out subsection (3).
9.30 p.m.
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