Asylum Seekers

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the noble Baroness to the government Front Bench and look forward to the many exchanges that I suspect we will have.

On this issue, I side very much with the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, rather than with the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. In doing so, I declare an interest as a member of an independent asylum commission which studied this whole issue for three years and reported to the previous Government in 2009. Right at the heart of what we said was that we were very concerned that within the Home Office there was what we called a culture of disbelief. This amounted to a general disbelief of anyone coming to this country. This included people who had been victims of torture, whose stories were also disbelieved. We felt that that was unattractive, not least because it influenced too many decisions that had to be made objectively and were conditioned by something else. During that experience I also saw something that I never thought I would see on the streets of this country—namely, the distribution of Red Cross food parcels to destitute asylum seekers in Manchester. The Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, who was leading the delegation, asked whether he could take one of them away and try to live on it for a week. His report on that, which was included in our report, makes salutary reading.

I suspect that the inadequate reasons that the Government put forward for resisting the suggestion that the period might be reduced to six months, which were questioned by the High Court in the 9 April judgment to which the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, referred, hides a deeper malaise in the Home Office, to which I last drew attention during the passage of the Immigration Bill through this House. At present, there is a monstrous backlog of 500,000 unresolved applications to come to this country. That millstone has not just arrived; it has built up over years. I cannot believe that any system can work properly if it has a millstone of that proportion hanging round its neck. During the passage of the Bill, I made the suggestion that it would only be good sense for the Government to make special arrangements to have that backlog cleared as quickly as possible by drafting in extra people to do the work, which, admittedly, would involve expense. However, having cleared the backlog, the system would be able to function properly, processing day-to-day applications as they arrived.

When a former Home Secretary, John Reid, described the immigration system as being not fit for purpose, I entirely agreed with him because it included many aspects like this. At the time, I was privileged to be working with it as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, with responsibility for inspecting immigration detention centres, so I was close to the coal-face.

There is no evidence at all that the proposals for the punitive 12 months mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, would succeed in deterring what are called economic migrants. Indeed, I think that the economic migrant scare is just that. Of course, there are people who come for the wrong reasons, but the vast majority do not. It is entirely unworthy of this country, with its traditional record of offering sanctuary and as a place where human rights are observed, to persist in the myth that everyone coming here is an economic migrant, a vandal and a vagrant who should not be here. We need to remove that suggestion from any reasoning of why processing cannot happen more quickly. If people got down to it and the designed procedures were operated properly, it would be perfectly easy for all applications to be completed within six months, as happens in other European countries, as the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, has stated. If they can do it, so can we. It requires will and determination but it can be done. I agree that it is ludicrous to go on with the reasons that, allegedly, we cannot do it and cannot afford it. I do not believe that.

The noble Lord, Lord Roberts, is right to talk about raising the level of support given. The suggestion has been made that it should be 70% of the income support rate—which seems nearer to the £53 that the noble Lord mentions than the £36, which I defy anyone to live on. I absolutely agree with him that the abolition ruling on 25 July 2002 was a mistake that ought to be rectified as soon as possible. Having cleared the backlog, there is absolutely no reason why we should not proceed in a civilised way with the aim of having a six-month ceiling for all decision-making.