Delays in the Asylum System

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, Mr Mundell—thank you for calling me. I thank the hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) for securing the debate. He and I have been in many debates together over the last two days, and I am sure there will be many more where we will be on the same side.

The way we treat asylum seekers is something that I have spoken about on numerous times in this House and the message remains the same. I am not changing my stance; I cannot give encouragement to the Government. I believe in the immigration system, I understand that an open-door policy cannot work in terms of security and in distribution of resources, but I also believe that we have a duty of care to help those who do not have the capacity to help themselves. While they are in the process of determining their status, we must do better by them.

The hon. Member for Stockport referred to the Baptist church in his town and I want to refer to all the faith groups in my constituency who are enormously active in trying to help in every way. I give credit to the Government and the Minister in particular for the Syrian resettlement scheme, which was an excellent scheme in my constituency. Six Syrian families needed help at a time when they were under pressure. The churches came together collectively and ecumenically in a great way, Government bodies came together, and the people came together. It was a superb scheme. Is there any intention of doing something similar in a wider sense in the future?

I was contacted by the British Red Cross regarding the asylum process. It highlighted the need we are facing and the steps that it believes must be taken. I am happy to give it voice this afternoon. Since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, we have supported more than 30,000 people at all stages of the refugee and asylum process across 58 UK cities and towns, including people who are being accommodated in hotels and military barracks. That shows the scale of the issue faced by the asylum system at present.

I am quite fond of the British Red Cross, which does excellent work. We should give it credit. It asks for the expansion of safe routes for people to reach the UK; improvements in asylum decision making to ensure decisions are made quickly and are right the first time, which is important to retaining confidence; and the provision of the right support to people, at the right time, so that they can engage with the asylum system and integrate successfully.

I totally agree with all those requests. Last week, or perhaps this week, the Home Secretary referred to the family who were trafficked from across the water and who were forced on to a dinghy at gunpoint. The two wee girls were left on the shore. They have not seen them since. That is an example that makes your heart ache. We are all touched by the images of children in dinghies trying to make their way here, but I agree that they should not have gotten this far. However, given that they are here, should we not treat them with the same care and respect with which we would want our own children to be treated? Should we not ensure that they are living free from fear? Above all, should we not extend our compassion? We should and we must.

I recently read an article highlighting that the queue for asylum decisions is nine times longer than it was 10 years ago, rising from 3,588 in 2010 to 33,016 in 2020. The number of children waiting more than a year for an initial decision has risen twelvefold from 563 to 6,887, and 55 applicants who applied as children have been waiting five years, as referred to by some hon. Members here. I have great respect for the Minister and believe that he has an interest in this subject and wants to help, so what is being done to shorten those waiting times?

In conclusion, there are simple and straightforward changes that can and must be made. They will not allow more people in; they will simply help us to treat those who are here better. They seek to cut the waiting times for decisions and improve the mechanisms for living while waiting, which is right and proper. I look forward to working with the Minister and charitable bodies, such as Red Cross and Mears, which has the contract in Northern Ireland to supply accommodation for asylum seekers, to see how we can collectively do this in a better way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

The German scheme was not a resettlement scheme. What Angela Merkel did briefly in 2015 was simply declare that their borders were open. About 1 million people irregularly just crossed into Germany, many of whom were not from Syria or Afghanistan. That was not a resettlement scheme; that was essentially mass illegal migration. With our resettlement scheme, which we do properly in partnership with the UNHCR, we go directly to dangerous places around Syria, although we plan to expand that in future. We identify people in need of protection and bring them to the UK from dangerous places such as Syria, or near Syria, rather than have them make dangerous, illegal journeys across Europe first. That is the right way to do it. We are committing to safe and legal routes and to being fair to people in genuine need via the Bill, but at the same time it is important that we are firm where people abuse the system.

There are problems with our legal system, to which the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) referred. The legal system often gets protracted in the most extraordinary way when people make repeated claims often over a period of years, many of which turn out to be without merit, and yet they can do that repeatedly, which does not serve anybody’s interest. Partly as a result of that, there are now for the first time ever more than 10,000 foreign national offenders circulating in the community, which is an unacceptable situation that we intend to act on.

It is worth saying a word about illegal migration. When people come here from France—I am thinking about the small boats—that journey is unnecessary, because somebody coming from France is not directly fleeing a war zone. Calais, and France more generally, is not a dangerous place. They do not need to leave France to claim protection or asylum because France has a well-functioning asylum system, and so does Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Italy and the other European countries that people have passed through. No one needs to cross the English channel in a rubber dinghy to claim asylum. They should claim it ideally in the first safe place that they arrive in, which would include France.

Such journeys are dangerous. People have died. A family of five, including an 18-month-old boy, died trying to cross the channel last October. There have been incidents where ruthless people smugglers who take money to facilitate illegal routes have threatened people with guns, including a family that was separated because the people smuggler they had paid to smuggle them into the country turned on them. We should all seek to shut down those routes. It is not humanitarian to have people smugglers paid to smuggle people across the channel. It is dangerous and unnecessary, and we should stop it. Routes into the country should be safe and legal, not dangerous and illegal, and that is the objective of the Nationality and Borders Bill, which I am sure we will debate at length in a few weeks’ time.

Specifically on delays in the asylum system, it is true to say that the delays are considerably higher now than they were a year ago. A great deal of that is due to the disruption caused to the asylum decision-making system by covid, which has obviously affected many areas of our life. It has affected us here in Parliament. We are still sitting here wearing masks and having remote proceedings. It has affected the NHS, our call system, all of our national life, and the asylum system has been affected in the same way.

For some months last year, asylum interviews stopped entirely because it was considered unsafe to have a face-to-face asylum interview. People who worked in asylum decision-making offices, including in my own borough of Croydon and elsewhere in Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds and other places, were not able to go into the office in the normal way to take asylum decisions and conduct interviews, and that has been enormously disruptive over, roughly speaking, the past year and three months, which means that the number of decisions taken in the past year has been dramatically lower, and we have not yet fully recovered.

We are still sitting here wearing masks, and the asylum decision-making process has not fully recovered either, which means the backlog and delays have built up. I agree with the points made by hon. Members that the delays are not what we want to see at all. For those whose claims will be granted, clearly we do not want to see them kept in limbo for protracted periods of time. If they are going to have their asylum claim granted, it is much better that it is done quickly so that they can move on with their lives. Equally, if the asylum claim is rejected, we should then look to move them to the country of origin quickly, because if someone’s claim is not genuine, it is only right and fair that they are removed. Whether it is accepted or rejected, we need faster decision making. That is a completely fair point.

[Jim Shannon]

Will the Minister and the Government set targets for the reduction in numbers? If targets were set, we could see goals being achieved.

[Chris Philp]

That is an interesting point. We had a six-month operational guideline previously, but that was moved away from in order to try to focus resources on the cases that most need attention. For example, priority is given to cases involving children. Hon. Members have mentioned that some cases have been waiting a long time. We are now putting a particular focus on trying to resolve those long-standing cases, so a slightly more holistic view has been taken, but I will take away the hon. Gentleman’s point and mention the idea, which I know was offered in a constructive spirit, to my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay.

Actions are being taken to address the issue that we have been discussing. First, we have been introducing remote interviewing by video link, like we are using now. We did not really have that at all about a year ago. It has now been introduced and its usage is more widespread. Indeed, for reasons of convenience for applicants and others, it is something that we may well continue with, even after the pandemic, I hope, subsides in the near future. That investment in remote interviewing technology has been made and is being rolled out.

Secondly, we are interviewing on sites outside the Home Office. We are trialling interviews in places such as the Napier barracks in Folkestone, as well as in the hotels where some people are accommodated, to try to speed things up a bit. We have also opened up additional registration centres where people can register their asylum claim, so there are now offices in Glasgow, Belfast, Liverpool, Leeds, Solihull and Cardiff, in addition to Croydon—it used to be that Lunar House in my borough was principally the place where people went before. Those places are now available, too, which was intended as a covid measure, but continues to this day.

We are also investing in better IT systems. We are trying to make the work rate of the caseworkers more efficient by, for example, shortening the letter to someone who is granted asylum. When someone is granted asylum, they are not going to argue with it, clearly, so rather than writing a great long letter, it has been shortened to make the whole process a little faster. There is some effort to prioritise cases in which we think a quick decision can be made. If particular indicators suggest that the case is likely to receive a positive response, we would like to do that. We are also introducing specialist caseworkers, such as specialists in a particular nationality. If people feel familiar with a particular country and its circumstances, that will facilitate quicker decision making.

My hon. Friend for Torbay intends to increase staffing levels, to which hon. Members have referred. About 550 people are currently engaged in making those casework decisions—550 full-time equivalents—and the objective is, over time, to get that up to 1,000, which is almost double. That investment in people should clearly have a dramatic effect on speeding things up. As someone said earlier in the debate, wherever someone sits on the immigration issue—we believe in proper border control, as well as fairness—it should not be difficult or contentious to say that it serves everybody’s interests to get those decisions made quickly, whether they end up being positive or negative.

I have outlined the steps that my hon. Friend is taking, and I am sure that all hon. Members present will hope and expect that the measures I have outlined will have the desired effect and that waiting times will come down. We are of course somewhat in the hands of the intake. We have had an extremely high intake in the last few weeks because of the dangerous, unnecessary, illegal English channel crossings, and if they continue in large numbers, that will add to the backlog. The intake is somewhat unpredictable—I mention that caveat for completeness. In the interests of giving the hon. Member for Stockport an opportunity to reply, I will conclude my remarks.