Refugee Integration

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I agree broadly with much of what the noble Lord, Lord German, said, but it is no surprise that I will take a slightly different approach because I also agree with quite a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, said.

There is a prior phase before we get into how we handle refugees, and that is the main point of this debate. We need much more confidence among the public that applicants for refugee status are genuine and, if they are not, that they will be refused and removed. The second part of that is, frankly, very weak at the moment. We have to convince the public that the number is satisfactorily under control. I suspect that there is growing public concern on both counts. The public are aware that roughly 75% of applicants are relatively young men who have nearly all destroyed their documents and who have nearly all—certainly those who cross the channel—come from a safe country. We cannot focus on the treatment of genuine asylum seekers unless we take account of this public feeling, which is strong and well based.

By way of illustration, I shall address one group of applicants on which the Government seem to be making a serious mistake. I refer to the so-called streamlining of applications from six Middle East countries announced on 23 February 2023, namely Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. I know most of those countries and have served in three of them. In the past five years, about 23,500 applicants and dependants from these countries have been granted asylum, but thousands of these applicants are now having their applications processed on paper and the “vast majority” are given the green light to stay in the UK without an interview. It is extraordinary. What is the reason? It is that their grant rate in recent years was 95% or higher. The system cannot be working effectively if it gives 95% approval to any group of people. What message does that send to their compatriots at home and how much does this matter?

A glance at the United Nations population statistics will show that the number of males aged between 20 and 39—the likely age group—from these six countries comes to a total of 23 million. Obviously, they are not all coming, but the word will spread rapidly, especially as all these countries are in chaos and many people in them live in poverty. It is surely only a matter of time before the numbers start to rise sharply.

This is just one example of the Government’s frankly limp and short-sighted policies in this field. The costs are enormous. Robert Jenrick, until recently Minister responsible for all this, has just said that it costs £500,000 to integrate and support one migrant. I put to the Minister that, if the Government are serious about pathways to integration—I hope that they are and I suspect that everyone here is—they will first need to get a grip of the process and to constrain the numbers.