Immigration Bill (Fourth sitting)

Chloe Smith Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Champion]

I am sorry. We are not trying to trip you up.

[Chloe Smith (Norwich North) (Con)]

Q 257 Does the Committee have any reason not to accept the figures in the Home Office’s August consultation document? I am referring to the public consultation on reforming support for failed asylum seekers and other illegal migrants. I am looking at the figures given for the scale of the situation: an estimated 15,000 refused asylum seekers with an estimated cost of £73 million. Do you accept those figures or have any concerns about them?

Paul Greenhalgh: We broadly accept those figures, yes.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 258 That is very helpful. Thank you. I will preface my next question with a sentence from the UNHCR website:

“If the asylum system is both fast and fair, then people who know they are not refugees have little incentive to make a claim in the first place, thereby benefitting both the host country and the refugees for whom the system is intended.”

If we are looking at 15,000 refused asylum seekers, with an associated cost that we might all agree on, does the panel think that we ought to do everything we can to reduce that number and those costs, to be able to fulfil the obligations to refugees that we all want to fulfil—the Prime Minister has set out that we want to—towards refugees coming in from other parts of the world at present, who of course have recourse to public funds, because they are under the temporary relocation scheme?

Councillor Simmonds: Yes, entirely. If we look at the Syrian programme, which is under way at the moment, people coming with humanitarian status will have rights, and the expectation is that they will be able to access fully UK public services but also will be expected to work.

Picking up on the point about the numbers, there is a survey that is probably the most up-to-date one, because I do not think we have any national data on the number of people who are here irregularly as migrants under one status or another. The Greater London Authority commissioned a study. It is from 2007 and it gives the most recent national figure. It estimated that the number of irregular migrants—this is people with a number of different statuses—was between 417,000 and 863,000.

In terms of the numbers at present, we know the organisations that participate in Henry’s body. There was a survey recently, in January this year, and it put the number at around 2,154 households, supported by the 34 authorities that provided detailed information, at a cost of £613,872 per week. Clearly, that is a significant cost to UK taxpayers for people who will fall into a number of different groups; not just failed asylum seekers but visa overstayers and various other categories.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 259 Would you just kindly repeat that number and say what the unit is?

Councillor Simmonds: Yes. So, we were talking there about 34 authorities that are supporting 2,154 households who are irregular migrants, and the cost—the quite detailed costing of that—is £613,872 per week.

Paul Greenhalgh: Which aggregates to £32 million for those 34 authorities.

Henry St Clair Miller: And includes 3,825 dependants.

[The Chair]

I do not know whether any of the witnesses has those figures in a table, because it is very difficult to take them all down. If you could write to us, I would like to circulate them to the Committee.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 260 Would the rest of the panel like to make any comment on this notion of having to reduce our undesired costs to be able to do more for those who most need it?

Paul Greenhalgh: Absolutely, and we would want to do that to ensure that the relevant safeguards are in place, particularly for children in families.

Henry St Clair Miller: I agree with that, yes.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Q 261 I would just like to follow up a little on some of the witnesses’ answers to the Minister’s questions about the interaction that you have had with the Home Office. Mr Greenhalgh, you said in relation to the 2005 pilot by the then Labour Government that it not only failed but was counter- productive, in that it drove many people underground and made compliance more difficult. From the discussions that you have had with the Home Office, do you know what different measures the Home Office is putting in place that will mean this time it is different, and are you confident that that is the case?

Paul Greenhalgh: I spoke about the complexity of the current assessment system when families need to come to local authorities for support. So, as the Bill is currently drafted, we believe that the number of families that would inevitably come to local authorities for support would increase significantly.

One of the questions that we are exploring with the Home Office is whether it is appropriate to leave the legislation around the Children Act as it currently stands, which we then have to apply to those families, or whether we take migrant families without status out of the Children Act and provide support for them through schedule 3 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. There are some advantages to that, in terms of the potential for establishing a new simplified assessment system, for providing support in a way that takes more account of the family’s immigration status and for being more explicit about the fact that it would result in a clear new burden on the local authority, which would need to be funded. That is one mechanism that we are in discussion about.