Immigration Bill

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

First, I am a huge admirer of the work of the Red Cross and pay tribute to all that it does in this area. The noble Baroness referred to my charitable endeavours over the recess. Last year, I raised £90,000 for projects for the International Red Cross in China. My response to the point about the Red Cross study is that we are engaging with it. Home Office officials are in contact with the Red Cross and we are working through its recommendations, which I have read. There is some question—which we need to understand better—about the cohort. I think that the Red Cross looked at some 60 case studies. The majority—all but five or six, I think—were failed asylum seekers, but there was not really sufficient explanation of why they had failed. Suffice to say that we take this very seriously. We want to engage with organisations such as the Red Cross so that we move forward sensitively.

I have said that I will write on the point about the Azure card and perhaps I could include the exceptions. With that, I hope that noble Lords will accept my explanation and withdraw their opposition to the clause standing part.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I could ask one question. A number of noble Lords have said that when this sort of scheme was tried before, where, basically, failed asylum seekers were forced into destitution, not only were there fewer returns than in the control group but more people absconded and disappeared than in the control group. I understand the Minister’s arguments about saving government money for more deserving cases and that if somebody has exhausted the asylum appeals process you cannot keep giving them resources, but surely the most important thing is to ensure that the people who should not be in this country are no longer in this country. When this was tried before, the evidence was that starving failed asylum seekers into leaving the country is counter- productive. The Minister has not answered that question.

[Lord Bates]

That is one of the reasons why, in the preceding group, we talked about the policy of deport first, appeal later. If people are appealing from outside the country, there is less of a risk that they will abscond. We should also note, when comparing this with the 2002 Act, the different way in which we now engage families in this situation—through caseworkers, through Migrant Help and by working with them to manage their return to the United Kingdom. There is also a very generous grant available to them—up to £2,000 per person in addition to travel costs—when they agree to do so. So judged in the round, within the wider package of things that we are trying to do in the Immigration Bill, we can actually see that that figure will improve. But I am sure that the noble Lord will hold us to account when those figures are published each year to see how we are doing.