Asylum Support (Children and Young People)

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is a great delight to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies.

I congratulate my three hon. Friends who spoke in today’s debate and all hon. Members who took part in putting the report together. I also congratulate, as my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) has just done, the various charities and organisations that work with refugees—including those whose primary work is not with refugees, such as the Red Cross—on the diligence that they have brought to the work, to try to make Parliament and the wider public understand the situation faced by many refugees in this country. Of course, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) for the work she has done in bringing the issues together, for getting the report published and for how she presented her case today.

Different parts of the country will make different responses to the issue of asylum, because some parts have more refugees and a longer history of refugee communities than others. I used to be a curate in High Wycombe. Many refugees had come from Poland to High Wycombe in the 1940s, and it was an accepted part of Buckinghamshire society that there was a strong support for asylum and for refugees individually.

A respect for asylum and a desire to protect refugees are essential parts of our British decency. They are things we feel proud of because of our response not only in the 1930s and 1940s, but after that. People in the United Kingdom looked at oppressive dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, Greece and parts of eastern Europe and were proud when we were able to provide others greater freedom and liberty than they were able to have in their own countries.

The hon. Member for Brent Central was absolutely right in saying—though this is not often the version portrayed in the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent or just about any national newspaper—that there is little evidence to suggest that asylum seekers choose a country because of its benefits system or whether they would be able to work. That, incidentally, is also true of other forms of migration.

It is important that we keep asylum and immigration separate and that Government rules do so, too. If someone has suddenly to leave their country, it is far more common for them to go to a country where they already know someone; that stands to reason. If this country suddenly had a dictatorial Government and people suddenly had to leave, they would probably go somewhere where they had family or friends, whose house they might be able to stay in. Alternatively, people might go to a country whose operation of the rule of law they truly respected. Our historical respect for the rule of law is another reason why Britain has sometimes been a place where people seek refuge.

The hon. Lady was also right in saying that being a refugee is tough.

[Mr Virendra Sharma]

I arrived in this country many years ago, but in different circumstances. Does my hon. Friend agree that, when people leave their country, they go to a country where there is a history and tradition of tolerance and where they feel they will get a sense of justice? That is also part of why they move—not the benefits.

[Chris Bryant]

I absolutely agree. That does not mean that we should throw out all the rules on benefits in this country. It is a simple point to make—the vectors of asylum are oppression and dictatorial regimes, not the attraction of some kind of benefits system in this country. That is not to say that we should build palaces for every single person who comes to this country—no refugee expects that—but it is important to realise why people come.

It is also important to realise that no one wants to be a refugee; everyone prefers to live in their own country. The whole Old Testament is about people who are refugees because they had to leave their own country and the oppression that they lived under. The Israelites went off into the desert because of the oppression they were suffering under the Egyptians. That is a fundamental—theological, if one likes—understanding of the role of the refugee.

We need to do a great deal more, where we can, to ensure that our aid budget is deployed to try to ensure that fewer people around the world have to seek refuge. The number of people seeking asylum in this country and in many other parts of the world rose dramatically in the 1990s for the simple reason that there were many more dangerous places from which people had to flee.

We were hideously ill-prepared—in 1994, 1995 and 1996 there were only 50 people to deal with asylum seekers’ applications in this country—and it took a considerable period to put the situation in order. There were something like 170,000 applications a year; we are now talking about something in the region of 19,000, 20,000 or 21,000.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman says that the number of asylum seekers increased because more places around the world were dangerous. Is it not also the case—this is not a harsh point, just one for balance—that many people who came here claiming that they were asylum seekers came for other reasons? In fact, the attraction of easier travel and better media meant that, in addition to the rising numbers, understanding whether the basis for asylum was valid or invalid become more important in the 1990s and the last decade.

[Chris Bryant]

That may be true, but part of my critique is that we have been very ill-prepared to make such decisions over the past 20 years. If a long time is taken to decide on someone’s asylum application—that happened under Labour, but also in the early 1990s—the danger is that we end up with people who have become stateless and without any real existence.

Among people coming to my surgery recently, one young gentleman—he is not young any more; he came here some 25 years ago—has never had an asylum decision and has simply being living here. He has not been living off the state. He lives with his wife, and he is the house husband. Sorry—not his wife, but his partner: he has decided to come clean because he wants to marry, and he cannot marry without regularising his position.

It is vital that we make swift decisions, and it is important that the Government do whatever they can to reach the target of all asylum decisions being made within six months. In some cases, we have to be very careful. In particular, I hope that the Minister will look at the new evidence about Sri Lanka. When we return people to Sri Lanka, where they face oppression and persecution, we need to be careful in our relations with the Sri Lankan Government, let alone with others. There can be no greater instance of the trauma involved in someone’s having to leave their country as a refugee than the case of the 92 Burmese refugees who died after being at sea for 25 days off the coast of Thailand.

I am absolutely certain that the vast majority of the British people would be scandalised, upset and shocked by many of the stories told and much of the evidence presented to the group, especially about those for whom no decision has yet been made. The warmth of feeling of the British people, however, is somewhat diminished for those on section 4 support, when it has already been decided that people should go home.

I also think, as I know from an e-mail I had from a constituent yesterday—about a story in the Daily Mail, which makes me slightly hesitant—that there is less support for those in this country who decide to take on further family responsibilities after it has been determined that their asylum claim will not be accepted. I merely note that five of the people we have talked about are women who became pregnant after their appeal had been rejected.

[Sarah Teather]

The hon. Gentleman will recall that his hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe said that, under section 4, people cannot buy condoms.

[The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)]

Yes they can.

[Chris Bryant]

That is perhaps a point for the Minister. I want to say to some religious organisations that it is time they understood the reality of the modern world and abandoned their views about procreation.

[Sarah Teather]

That is not relevant to the point I just made.

[Chris Bryant]

I hear what the hon. Lady says. I do not know whether what she has reported is true or not, which is why I hope that the Minister can reply. He said from a sedentary position that it was not true.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to refer to the hideous conditions in which many people live. We need to do far more in this country to crack down on unscrupulous and poor landlords, who put people into housing that, frankly, is not fit for living. It has been a disgrace that successive Governments have not concentrated enough on that. Multiple removals are a waste of time, money and energy for the organisations involved, leaving aside the effect on families, and particularly on children who have to change school. I have already referred to slow decision making, and to how important it is that decisions are made swiftly so that people can organise their lives accordingly.

I want to ask the Minister what impact the bedroom tax will have—

[Richard Fuller]

It is not a tax.

[Chris Bryant]

I have heard the Prime Minister say that the bedroom tax is not a tax, which rather seems to give the game away.

[Richard Fuller]

Stop misleading people. It is not a tax.

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Chris Bryant]

The point is that neither will that measure redistribute scarce resources from the over-supplied to the under-supplied. I assure the hon. Member for Bedford that it is not a form of socialism. Child asylum seekers, if they come here under the age of 18, are normally fostered. As I understand it, the Government have admitted today that foster carers’ additional rooms will be counted as additional to their requirements. I fear that that will again crack down on families who want to provide legitimate support for people. What assessment has the Minister made of that?

I hear everything that my hon. Friends have said about the Azure card and section 4 support. I will not declare a new Labour party policy, I am afraid. Of course, the Government have to keep the concept of the card under review, because if it is genuinely more expensive to provide than the savings it brings, that is obviously to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face. I will not make a new financial commitment today. The Government must, of course, review the amounts, and it is time that they got on with that this year.

I want to make a point about paperless children. A significant number of children who come to this country as asylum seekers say that they are 15, but the system says, “No, you aren’t 15; you are 18 or 19. You are an adult and should go through the adult process.” One difficulty is that many people destroy their papers the moment they get on an aeroplane. I wonder whether there is any means of ensuring that airlines scan the documents required to be shown before people can get on an aeroplane, so that if the documents are destroyed on the aeroplane, they are not entirely lost to the system, and people cannot thereafter claim that they are completely and utterly paperless and therefore stateless.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Brent Central on advancing this issue. Having seen, when Labour was in government, several ex-Ministers find conviction about policies that they did not necessarily exhibit when they were in office, I hope that she will retain her commitment when she returns to office, which I am sure the Prime Minister will want to enable very swiftly.