Covid-19: Support and Accommodation for Asylum Seekers

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, the health service generally, whether in Scotland or here, has had to find new ways of working through the pandemic, so assessments probably happen remotely, as they do for the general population. He is right to ask whether they take into account the specific needs of people who perhaps have fled war-torn countries to seek asylum and refuge here. This pandemic has seen the very best of our NHS. I am fully confident that when assessments happen, NHS doctors and nurses are well trained to take into account the vulnerabilities and traumas that these people may have faced.

[Lord Marlesford (Con) [V]]

My Lords, in her reply last week to my Written Question on the asylum process, the Minister said:

“Individual applications are referred to Ministers where they are identified as potentially sensitive”.


Unfortunately, she was unable to give me any information on how often this happens. Does she agree that in determining an asylum application, the authorities must always consider potential risks to national security, which may require balancing the risk to the asylum seeker with that to the UK, and may mean that asylum seekers must be detained in custody? Of the 10 serious terrorist attacks since March 2017, some have been associated with an asylum seeker. Is she prepared to review the cases where asylum and permanent UK residence have been granted, and where the seeker has been convicted of terrorist offences in other jurisdictions?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My noble friend makes some valid points. He is absolutely right that we need to balance the claim of the asylum seeker with any danger that they might pose and also the genuine nature of the claim. My honourable friend Chris Philp, a Minister in the House of Commons, said yesterday there how important it was to weed out the genuine from the—shall we say?—non-genuine asylum seeker. I am sure that the services do analysis like that all the time, examining the type of behaviour experienced after someone is granted asylum, their vulnerability and the things that might cause it.