| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
The Lord Bishop of Leicester: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, for bringing these matters to our attention. It was just over 30 years ago that the Leicester Mercury carried a notorious front page headline, "No room here". It was sending a signal to Ugandan Asians seeking a new home after Idi Amin's expulsions. For three decades the city has repented of that headline even as the process of immigration from east Africa, south Asia and other parts of the world has continued. It has repented because these decades of immigration have brought prosperity, civil renewal and cultural diversity to a city whose key industries in hosiery and textiles were in terminal decline.
The great majority of those who have arrived have been people whose primary identity has been their faith rather than their nationality. They puzzle over the reasons why some government policy, elaborately developed to enable effective working with faith communities, can at the same time include immigration and asylum proposals which have the effect of increasing their insecurity and slowing down the process of their identification with the cultural values of the host country.
In the brief time available to me, I want to build on what the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, said about the tone of the debate. In Leicester, for 30 years two key principles have shaped and undergirded the commercial, political and religious leadership of the city. Neither are adequately discussed by the major parties' proposals. Indeed, both are undermined by much of what is contained in them and in the public debate on these matters.
23 Feb 2005 : Column 1227
The first principle is that of trust—the systematic, often laborious, unglamorous and repetitive work of building up understanding and, therefore, trust between different communities about our traditions, languages, festivals, foods, cultures, and so on. The second principle is the management of anxiety. In my experience, this is best done by making speedy, sensitive and appropriate collective responses to world events, whether in Kashmir, Israel/Palestine, or the effects of the tsunami disaster. Those are the two key fundamentals in the building of social cohesion which I believe we all want to see. I have to tell noble Lords that the effect of some of the public debate on this matter is not to undergird or enhance these principles but to undermine them.
But the fact is that much of the language currently in use heightens anxiety and undermines trust in both the immigrant and host communities. We are in danger of making immigration a lose-lose issue.
Of course, the Government's promise in their current proposals to speed up asylum claims, to give proper attention to the root causes of immigration, proposals to enable protection for refugees in countries of origin, and linking development with the prevention of involuntary migration, and so on, are to be welcomed. But I want to draw attention to some major concerns, particularly in relation to the Government's proposals relating to asylum seekers.
First, they make the status of the refugee increasingly precarious. I refer in particular to the proposal to grant refugees temporary leave to remain for only five years in the first instance. Those who work with these people know how much their lives become fixated on the outcomes of their hearings. Their lives are on hold; they cannot plan for the long term; they are psychologically absorbed in the process. Are we to inflict this condition on them and their families every five years or so? This is a recipe for making insecurity and anxiety a permanent condition of life.
Secondly, it is already becoming clear that it is virtually impossible in practice in some cities for asylum seekers to get any legal support due to changes in the legal aid system and the requirement of a new examination for all solicitors who wish to engage in work with asylum seekers. This has led to almost all the firms in my home city dropping that work from their portfolios.
Thirdly, there is not enough in the Government's proposals about the Home Office's assessment of safe countries or the routes through which people are enabled to leave their home countries. The suggestion that the UK Government should co-operate more closely with countries from which unsuccessful applicants have come would have required HM Government in the past to seek to enter rational negotiations, for example, with Iraq and Zimbabwe. Is that a realistic proposal?
Further, the Government's proposals in the document, Controlling our borders, seek to address the difficult issue of returning unaccompanied
23 Feb 2005 : Column 1228
asylum-seeking children. It is vital that the Government ensure that policy-making in this area is guided by domestic and international standards on children's welfare and is removed from the current highly political debate on immigration and asylum.
The Churches and faith communities are well placed to speak for the most vulnerable in our towns and cities whose lives, freedoms and rights are most likely to be subtly undermined by the tone of our immigration debates. We want to express concern for a relatively small number of people within our society who are involuntary exiles from their own country, many of whom are daily denied what they need to realise their full potential. In many cases these people have come to Britain to find themselves disbelieved, denied the possibility of working, kept waiting for months and, finally, refused. They have often been detained behind barbed wire and threatened with deportation back to their own country and the security forces from which they fled. One of the most corrosive and undermining experiences for people who have escaped persecution, especially for those who have suffered rape, imprisonment and torture, is to be told by officialdom that their story, their personal, human narrative, lacks credibility—in other words, that they are lying.
Jeremy Harding, in his book The Uninvited, put the issues this way:
"The more freely capital and goods move around the rich world, the harder it becomes to inhibit the movement of people, with the hostility of . . . voters to foreign influx growing in proportion as the ability to restrict it dwindles. The power of government to reverse this process is no greater than it was in the past, but its capacity to signal an intention and project that signal is far stronger".
It is for the reasons that I have sought to outline that I hope that we shall exercise extreme caution in the signal that the House sends from the debate today.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: My Lords, on entering the debate, I cannot help reflecting on that Russian proverb which says that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive. Can we have a measured debate on immigration in the somewhat febrile atmosphere of a pre-election period?
As I said in my maiden speech, as the child of second-generation Jewish immigrants, I have reason to be grateful for a sympathetic immigration policy. I live in multi-cultural, multi-racial Southall, and my children benefit from attending schools that reflect the multi-ethnic nature of our community, as do the local hospitals, the local authority, the building sites and the restaurants, all of which employ a significant number of former immigrants. I have no doubts about the benefits that they bring to our society, but the need to separate fact from fiction and to deal with prejudice arising from misperception and the racists who use the issue to promote their misguided views makes immigration an issue that we should treat with care.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, for introducing the debate. I warmed to the initial points that he made about the benefits of immigration, but I
23 Feb 2005 : Column 1229
despaired as we were given a litany of problems. The noble Lord seemed to be painting a picture which did not recognise that we have the lowest unemployment for 20 years or more. The problem is not unemployment; the problem nowadays is finding workers to fill the vacancies. We benefit hugely from immigration in that regard.
It is a changing landscape; nobody could argue against that. We need only consider the inner-city communities to recognise that fact. There are problems, but it is manifestly wrong to say that the Government have not attempted to deal with them. The noble Lord instanced the disaster in Morecambe Bay, which was a terrible tragedy. He forgot to mention that legislation to license the people who exploit illegal immigrants resulted from that terrible tragedy.
The Independent—indeed, all today's newspapers—quotes the dramatic fall in the number of asylum seekers since 2002. Whether you rejoice in those figures may well depend on your standpoint, but at least they serve to separate fact from fiction. Last year, 40,200 people, including dependants, claimed refuge, which is down from a peak of more than 110,000 two years earlier. Home Office statistics show that asylum seekers are arriving at a rate of just over 2,800 a month, compared with 7,600 at the peak in 2002. Iranians are now by far the largest national group claiming refuge in Britain, a fact of which, I must admit, I was unaware.
I too have examined the Government's policy. I may part company here with the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, and the right reverend Prelate, but it seems to me that there must be a policy on immigration. Nobody denies that. I read the statement made by the Secretary of State. He said:
"Each year there are millions of visitors to our shores. We have global communications, global economies and global movement of people. We have to adapt to these developments, not by putting up the shutters, but by managing, controlling and selecting".
If I had a worry, I would add the words "in a humane and fair way" to the end of that statement. That is, perhaps, the difficulty.
We cannot pretend that we do not live in a changing world. We must deal with the situation. Is the Government's policy absolutely right? I am sure that, like all policies, it will change and develop and will be capable of improvement in the light of a calm assessment. It builds on significant progress. Asylum applications are down by 67 per cent, back to 1997 levels. Four out of five new claims are now decided in two months, rather than the 20 months that it took in 1997. That is important. It benefits people who are left in a terrible state of limbo. They might not always like the outcome of their application—I am trying to help an individual at the moment who does not like that outcome—but it is far better that those claims should be processed in a reasonable time.
The number of claims outstanding is at a 10-year low, and the number receiving NASS support continues to fall. Border controls have been tightened, with the introduction of detection technology and the presence of UK immigration officers in mainland
23 Feb 2005 : Column 1230
Europe. Enforcement action against illegal working has been stepped up. That is important because there is a large amount of criminal activity associated with it that benefits nobody, other than the criminals who seek to exploit the appalling tragedy of workers who have done nothing but try to get themselves out of a terrible situation in their own country and go somewhere which, they hope, will be better.
Key measures in the strategy include a transparent points system for those coming in to work or study. I would have thought that the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, would welcome that. There are financial bonds for specific categories in which there has been evidence of abuse to guarantee that migrants return home. There will be an end to chain migration and an end to appeals when applying from abroad to work or study. Only skilled workers will be allowed to settle long-term in the UK, and there will be English language tests for everyone who wants to stay permanently.
I must admit that I agreed with the point made by my noble friend Lord Desai about not focusing only on skilled workers but recognising that there is also a need for unskilled workers. After all, people are capable of changing from unskilled to skilled. We should recognise that.
"This country needs migration—tourists, students and migrant workers make a vital contribution to the UK economy. But we need to ensure that we let in migrants with the skills and talents to benefit Britain, while stopping those trying to abuse our hospitality and place a burden on our society".
I worry about some of those words, for the reasons that others have given. Nevertheless, we must recognise that they address a public concern. That concern may be misplaced, and it may be a misperception, but we should concern ourselves with how we handle that.
The Government's policy is broadly right for dealing with a situation that is difficult to get absolutely right. If I look at what the other main party offers, I become very concerned. The Tories' proposals on immigration and asylum policy do not give much detail. They say that there will be an annual quota for immigration and asylum, but they refuse to give the size of the quota. They even imply that more, not fewer, refugees could be accepted. They say that no one will be allowed to apply for asylum in this country and that they will process applications in centres near the country of origin, but they have no idea where those will be, how they will fund them or how they will get the agreement of other countries and of the UNHCR. That does not make me believe that there is a serious attempt to deal with an exceedingly difficult policy in any way other than to encourage a debate, not in the best way, during a pre-election period.
I hope that we recognise that there is a challenge. We live in a society that is more mobile than it used to be and a truly global world. There will be real pressures, but, in the final analysis, immigrants have brought enormous benefit to this country and will continue to do so.
23 Feb 2005 : Column 1231
I do not think that we should be ashamed of our record. While I understand the concern expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, about people being called asylum seekers, I can reflect only on the atmosphere in my local primary school where I am a governor, and where many different languages are heard—there are 29 examples where English is the second language at home. There is a tiny amount of racial incidence in that school.
We should look at the good that is taking place in multi-racial, multi-cultural Britain, and should not embrace a policy of despair. We should honestly recognise that it is not an easy problem. Have we got it right? I doubt it, which is why the debate is worth having. Nevertheless, I believe that the Government's policies take us in the right direction.
| Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |