Delays in the Asylum System

Navendu Mishra Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered delays in the asylum system.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. I thank the many Members attending the debate for their ongoing efforts to push the Government to address the delays in the asylum system. It is shocking that not a single Conservative Member thought it necessary to take part in a debate on such an important issue.

I pay tribute to the many organisations and charities that campaign tirelessly to raise awareness of the issue, as well as those—including the Refugee Council, Detention Action, the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, and Lift the Ban, to name just a few—that provide vital support to some of the most vulnerable people on our planet. So many people are worthy of recognition for their incredible work, such as Councillor Wilson Nkurunziza, Councillor Irfan Syed and Stockport’s own Mrs Sandy Broadhurst. There are also those who do so much at national level to keep the issue at the forefront of everyone’s minds, such as Lord Alf Dubs.

In my region, Refugee Action Manchester and the Refugee Council provide life-saving and life-changing support to asylum seekers, while Stockport Baptist church in my constituency has done so much over the years to help to raise funds to provide accommodation, food, pocket money and transport to those in need. I am grateful to the volunteers from the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, who support the incredibly vulnerable people who are subject to immigration control. Significantly, they have worked with local authorities across Greater Manchester, and seven of the 10 councils have signed up to remote asylum interviewing for looked-after children: Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford and Wigan.

Our country has a proud history of standing up for and protecting refugees, who are among the most vulnerable people on earth, having undertaken perilous journeys to reach our shores to seek sanctuary from the very worst of humanity. We are the fifth richest country in the world and that is absolutely the right thing to do. It is also right that our country provides shelter to people—not excluding them, but enabling them to earn a living to support themselves and their family.

I am proud that my part of the world, the north-west, is the largest asylum dispersal conurbation in the UK, housing 25% of our country’s applicants, with 70% of those living in Greater Manchester. Data provided by the House of Commons Library reveals that 138 asylum seekers are based in Stockport and more than 6,000 in Greater Manchester as a whole, which is two thirds of the total in the north-west region. It is heart-warming to see how my community has embraced those people and helped them to integrate into our community. I have long been an admirer of the work of Stockport Baptist church, whose congregation and supporters have raised funds to support refugees with food, pocket money, accommodation and transport costs.

It cannot be right, however, that so many are simply stuck in the system for long periods, unsure of what their fate will be. Detention Action revealed that more than half of the almost 40,000 people in detention centres have been waiting for a decision for more than a year. A similar number have been waiting for up to five years, with almost 25,000 people indefinitely detained last year.

Greater Manchester Immigration Aid provides urgent assistance to more than 50 young people who have been waiting the best part of a year for an asylum decision, despite half already having had a remote interview. Even when the asylum system is functioning marginally more efficiently, the average wait for those handled by my local unit is 51 days, with the longest wait being 82 days—almost three months. That is completely unacceptable, and it involves the livelihoods of some of the poorest people in our society, including young people.

It is vital that the Government look again at how those in the system are treated. One issue that must be addressed is the Aspen card handover debacle. I focus on that issue because it reflects many of the problems in the system. Aspen is a debit payment card given to UK asylum seekers by the Home Office to provide basic subsistence support via a chip-and-pin system. However, purchases made using the card are closely monitored by the Home Office, making it an insidious surveillance tool. Recently, the Home Office switched providers, which proved nothing short of disastrous owing to the 48-hour period between the old card being deactivated and the new one going live, forcing people to live off what little means they had.

That is just one of myriad problems, from claimants not receiving their cards to their receiving cards carrying the wrong name, cards without money on them or cards that do not work, or people being unable to activate their cards. When cards were not working, asylum seekers could apply for emergency cash payments from accommodation providers, but those have been inconsistently applied and people could not access any more payments. There are stories from the Refugee Council of such people having to survive for days without food.

That is an absolute disgrace, and it can never be allowed to happen again. Why was it even allowed to happen in the first place? Perhaps the Minister will answer that question today. However, well before the card changeover took place, multiple organisations forewarned the Home Office that there could be problems, and it is clear they were simply not listened to. When the matter was raised in Parliament, the Government attempted to give the impression that it was a minor issue, rather than one that had gone on for weeks. Their claims could not be further from the truth, with many asylum experts describing the Government’s handling of the issue as the worst failure they have seen in the system. That is why the likes of Asylum Matters are continuing to raise awareness of it—they want the Home Office not only to acknowledge its failings, but to learn from them so that we never again put the neediest people in society in this desperate situation.

There are also well documented and widespread concerns about the way women are dealt with in the asylum process, particularly whether that process is sensitive to specific issues faced by women. The expectation that a woman has been the victim of domestic abuse or rape, and will be able to disclose that during her interview with a UK visa and immigration caseworker, has been pointed to as a serious problem.

There cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach. We must acknowledge that these are incredibly vulnerable people in the most desperate of circumstances and act accordingly. That means shining a light on the failings of the system, rather than demonising those within it. Just last month, asylum seekers held at the Home Office’s widely criticised Napier military barracks claimed they would be blacklisted if they spoke out following the High Court ruling that to use the site was unlawful. That included them being told that their asylum application would be at risk if they talked to the media about conditions at the camp. Instead of attacking those in the barracks who are in conditions described as “squalid” during the successful legal challenge, the Government should have acted immediately to close the camp.

The failures in our system cause untold distress and are a considerable factor in the high levels of mental health problems among asylum seekers. Refugees are five times more likely to have mental health needs than people in the general UK population, while 61% report that they have suffered serious mental distress as a result of their ordeal, including higher rates of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders.

The way the Government treat asylum seekers in this country—the fifth richest in the world—is truly shameful. That lack of humanity was exposed during the 2015 migrant crisis when our European counterparts, such as Germany, showed benevolence, true compassion and leadership by giving asylum to more than 1 million people fleeing war in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. In stark contrast, the UK allowed a paltry 25,000 the safety and sanctuary of our shores.

I am sure Members on both sides of the House agree that on this issue language is important. Asylum seekers are people—fellow human beings who deserve to be treated with respect and in a fair manner—and following a decade when we have experienced the hostile environment orchestrated by the Home Office under this Government, I urge the Minister to do the right thing and offer those people a route out of poverty and destitution.

We do not need more distressing words and scenes from the Home Secretary. Sadly, just yesterday, we bore witness to the Home Secretary’s latest demonisation of migrants, with her shamefully describing those vulnerable people as “vile criminals”, smearing the vast majority of honest, law-abiding citizens who seek sanctuary in our country. As HOPE not hate made clear in its response, the Home Secretary’s words were disgraceful.

The Home Secretary also set out callous plans with proposals revealed for new legislation that will pave the way for offshore centres for asylum seekers, and criminal charges for migrants arriving in the UK without permission. The new laws will likely see thousands of refugees turned away and vulnerable migrants criminalised for seeking a better life. Furthermore, a Refugee Council analysis of Home Office data suggests that 9,000 people who would be accepted as refugees under the current rules—those confirmed by official checks to have left war and persecution—might no longer be given safety in the UK because of how they arrived. That really would be an all-time low for this Government.

The Government must do more to enable those seeking asylum to have the right to work. Last year, the Lift the Ban campaign—a coalition of more than 240 charities and trade unions, including Unison, the National Education Union and the NASUWT, as well as businesses, faith groups and think-tanks—presented the Home Office with a petition signed by more than 180,000 people, which called on the Government to lift the ban. They are still waiting for that ban to be overturned, which is why I recently tabled an early-day motion, which has been signed by 42 MPs to date. It calls on the Government to

“recognise the injustice of preventing people seeking asylum from working”,

particularly when they are forced to live on a derisory £5.66 a day. After all, that is in the Government’s own interest: if those seeking asylum had the right to work, that would lead to fewer support payments and increased income tax and national insurance receipts of up to £100 million for the public purse.

The bottom line is that the pandemic has exposed the harsh reality that asylum seekers cannot be safe under such restrictive rules. Far from being looked after, they are forced to depend on tiny handouts each day and to choose between food, medicine and hygiene products, while being prevented from having the dignity of work.

The Government must do far more to address their unfair dispersal system. The majority of asylum seekers are housed in disadvantaged local authority areas while dozens of councils support none at all. Figures show that more than half of those who seek asylum or who have been brought to Britain for resettlement are accommodated by just 6% of local councils, all of which have household incomes that are below average.

Finally, the Government must heed the United Nations Human Rights Council proposal to reform the registration, screening and decision making process, including introducing an effective triaging and prioritisation system, as well as simplified asylum case processing and front-loading the asylum system to enable more information to be gathered earlier in the process.

It is time our Government stopped their gunboat diplomacy and treated asylum seekers with the dignity and humanity that they deserve. When most are fleeing war-torn countries that the UK helped to play a role in devastating, that is surely the very least we can do.

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

I am not going to enforce a formal time limit on speeches at this stage, but I expect Members to adhere to an informal limit of around four minutes. I call Virendra Sharma.

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[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) on securing this debate, which provides Members with an opportunity to raise concerns about both specific cases and the generality of the increasing and increasingly worrying delays experienced by so many people in the asylum and immigration system. It is pretty clear from today’s debate that the delays are just one failure among many in a system that is no longer fit for purpose, and has not been for many years, and is one that—whether by accident or, as is more likely, design—contributes to the continuing hostile environment for people seeking safety and refuge in this country.

We should thank the Refugee Council and some of the other organisations that have been mentioned for their hard work in producing the report that has provided the statistics about difficulties and delays in the system, which are borne out by the experiences from our own case work. That is, I suspect, a cross-party experience—even in the absence of any Government Back Benchers. To ensure that the Minister and the Labour Front-Bench spokesperson have plenty of time to respond, I will briefly consider the situation, the evidence, the consequences, some specific examples, the wider context of the hostile environment, and the need for action from the Government.

The stark reality of the situation has been set out in the report from the Refugee Council and in today’s speeches. There is a significant and growing backlog of cases and asylum applications waiting to be cleared, and that simply compounds the pressure, with things starting to spiral out of control. In recent months, we have all become familiar with the difficulties of exponential growth, and that is almost happening here. That comes despite the fact that, yes, there has been some investment in Home Office caseworkers. It is worth noting that many of them are hard-working—like our own caseworkers, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker) pointed out—and have to deal with incredibly difficult situations and listen to people’s difficult life stories. This is challenging for our caseworkers and for Home Office staff.

Individual Home Office officials are not to blame, but they are implementing the policies that are to blame. What they are having to do is ultimately driven by political decisions and a culture that pervades the Home Office. Earlier today in this Chamber there was a debate about visas for high-value migrants who are having their status denied due to minor tax return issues. I have spoken repeatedly in Westminster Hall and in Adjournment debates about the trouble with visas for artists, for priests and even for diplomats invited to this House to speak to all-party parliamentary groups. Later on, my SNP colleagues will be debating the impact of the bringing to an end of the European settled status scheme.

The basic message from the UK Government seems to be that people are simply not welcome in this country unless they have an awful lot of money that they are prepared to spend very quickly before they leave again. So, despite all of the rhetoric, it is clear that the “hostile environment” is still very much in operation, not least in the detention system, as the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) pointed out.

We have heard about plenty of individual cases today. In my own constituency, by May 2021 we had at least eight cases waiting more than six months for a response, and it was not the individual asylum seekers who were waiting more than six months for a response—it was our constituency office. Eventually we got some of those cases cleared by writing directly to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, but it should not have to be that way. Going to Members of Parliament to get a case dealt with should be a worst-case scenario, not a routine part of the process. Having a case raised by a Member on the Floor of the House, either in Westminster Hall or in Prime Minister’s Question Time, as we hear so frequently now, should not be a normal part of the process.

It is clear that the UK simply wants to make it as difficult and unpleasant as possible for people to apply for asylum in this country, despite the fact that, as Members have said, many of those who come here have been driven here by factors that we helped to cause, whether it is conflict, the use of weapons that we have manufactured and sold, or climate change caused by pollution from this country and other countries in the west. They have had to overcome extreme hardship and make incredibly difficult journeys, and they have not done that so they can live on £5 a day or so that they cannot even access things by using their Aspen card, which we have also heard about today.

Meanwhile, we deny our economy the opportunity to benefit from the skills and experience that people bring by denying them the right to work. The Conservatives are supposed to be in favour of entrepreneurship and a liberal, free-market economy, yet the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) spoke about the fact, which is true across the country, that tourist areas are crying out for people to work and the health service is crying out for support during covid. How many doctors and nurses do we know who are waiting for their asylum claims to be processed, but are being denied the opportunity to help others in this society?

In addition, people are forced into substandard and inappropriate accommodation, not least in Glasgow. There was the tragic situation of the people caught up in the incident in the Park Inn hotel. Just in the past couple of weeks, I have spoken to two constituents who were traumatised by their experiences there, as if they were not traumatised enough by the situations that caused them to come here and seek asylum in the first place. I would particularly like to hear from the Minister about what support, including what trauma counselling, is being provided to people who were caught up in that incident through no fault of their own, but through a decision taken by the Home Office to force people into hotel accommodation.

Many asylum seekers receive support from incredible community-based organisations, a number of which have been mentioned today. In particular, the hon. Members for Stockport and for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) spoke about the local organisations in their areas. I will just mention the Maryhill Integration Network, which does incredible work in Glasgow, North. This year, it is celebrating 20 years of working with the community and its outgoing director, Rema Sherifi, has worked for it for over 17 of those years. I wish her all the best.

Such organisations should not have to be firefighting. They are supposed to be about proactive integration across the community as a whole, building stronger communities. Many of them do that, but they could do more.

[Navendu Mishra]

On the point of voluntary organisations and professional organisations that campaign on these issues, lots of them have said that lifting the ban on work is very important. However, there is also a toxic environment in the media—perpetrated by the Home Office and several Government Members—that these humans should not be treated as humans. Does he agree that treating people with basic decency and kindness is extremely important?

[Patrick Grady]

Yes, absolutely, and that is the approach taken by the Scottish Government. They have published their “New Scots” strategy, to ensure that people arriving are supported and integrated from day one. That strategy sets out the vision:

“For a welcoming Scotland where refugees and asylum seekers are able to rebuild their lives from the day they arrive.”

The strategy commits to better access to essential services, such as education, housing, health and employment, recognising the skills, knowledge and resilience that refugees bring, and it aims to help people to settle, become part of the community and pursue their ambitions. The message that comes from Scotland, and from many of the Members here despite the message that comes from the UK Government, is that refugees are welcome and we want them to stay.

I endorse all the calls in the report from the Refugee Council; the hon. Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) in particular spoke about them in detail. However, what is clearly needed is a step change in attitude, and that is not provided in the “New Plan For Immigration” and the forthcoming Nationality and Borders Bill. Debates such as this one will help to make sure that the UK Government continue to be held to account, even if it is uncomfortable for the Minister that none of his party’s Back Benchers are here, either to support the Government’s policy or to speak about the difficulties that their constituents are facing. The message from the rest of us who have spoken in this debate today is very clear indeed—refugees are welcome and we will do all that we can to continue to make that a reality.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Chris Philp)]

Thank you, Mr Mundell. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship—I think for the first time, and I hope not for the last.

It is worth mentioning that I am appearing here today on behalf of the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), who is participating in an Opposition day debate at the moment. He has direct responsibility for the area that we are discussing this afternoon.

Let me start by adding my congratulations to the hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) on raising this important issue and on the thoughtful speech he gave in opening the debate.

Let me outline the steps that the United Kingdom has been taking and is taking to discharge our obligations to people who are in need of protection; they are obligations that we stand by and will not resile from. I first point to our resettlement programme, which the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) referenced in his speech earlier. The programme has been going for some time, but it really took off in around 2015. Working with the UNHCR, we directly resettle into the United Kingdom people who are most directly in danger. The scheme is particularly focused on people in and around the Syria area, for obvious reasons. Over six years, a total of 25,000 people have been resettled directly into the United Kingdom from places of danger; 20,000 of them under the vulnerable persons resettlementj scheme, which focused particularly on Syria. That 25,000 is more than any other European country, which is something that the Government and we as a nation can be extremely proud of.

We also offer safe and legal routes via refugee family reunion, where people granted refugee status can bring in close family members and, in exceptional circumstances, wider family members. That scheme, over the past five or six years, has seen about 29,000 people come into the UK, about half of whom were children. We can also be proud of our record in that area.

Some comments were made earlier, particularly by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), asking whether we were playing our fair part. I have already pointed out that our resettlement programme is the largest of any European country. He also mentioned asylum numbers. In 2019, the last full year for which the European Union published data, the UK received 44,800 individual applications, according to the European Union’s website. Of the 28 countries covered, including the UK at that time, we came fifth. As far as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children under 18 are concerned, in 2019 the UK’s intake was, from memory, 3,775—higher than any other country in Europe. Last year, 2020, only Greece had a higher UASC intake than we did. All of that shows that the UK is committed to meeting its obligations.

When it comes to supporting asylum seekers, referred to by a number of hon. Members, the provisions we make are more generous than many European countries. We provide accommodation and free health care. Council tax and utilities are paid for. There is free education for those under 18, and a cash allowance is paid in addition, which has been endorsed by the courts as adequate to cover essential costs. We are meeting our obligations. That system as a whole is extremely expensive, partly because of the backlog, which I will come to. It costs about £1 billion a year, so we are spending a huge amount of money supporting the asylum-seeking population. Those measures we are taking are more generous than most other European countries.

Hon. Members referred to the “New Plan for Immigration”, a policy statement published a few months ago, and the Nationality and Borders Bill, which was introduced yesterday. Second Reading will be shortly before the summer recess, so we will have the opportunity to debate that more fully in a few weeks’ time. I would like to make a couple of points regarding the policy statement and the Bill. The Bill is intended to be fair to those who are genuinely in need but firm where people are trying to abuse the system. By fair, we mean continuing to commit to that resettlement programme. We have already continued the resettlement programme beyond the 20,000 people I mentioned earlier. The VPRS 20,000 commitment was met in February of this year, a few months than expected because of coronavirus. We are still resettling people under the replacement UK resettlement scheme.

[Navendu Mishra]

I appreciate the figures that the Minister is quoting. What does he feel about the contribution the German Government made in accepting more than 1 million people from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq? How does he compare that to the UK figures?

[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.

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[Navendu Mishra]

I am incredibly grateful to all hon. Members who contributed to the debate and brought many powerful stories from constituency casework. I thank the Minister for his contribution, although I must highlight that he did not comment on the Aspen card disaster and people being left without food or hygiene products, or on my remarks on the special requirements for women asylum seekers fleeing domestic abuse and rape. The one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work. Asylum seekers and refugees are five times more likely than British nationals to have serious mental health issues.

Clearly, there is a lot of appetite among MPs for the Government to lift the ban on people working. Just over £5 a day is simply unacceptable. We also want to see an end to the toxic and divisive language from the Home Office, the Home Secretary and some MPs on the Government Benches. Treating people like insects is not acceptable; everyone deserves decency and respect. We also want proper financial support for local authorities that support asylum seekers. We have a system whereby some local authorities support asylum seekers and will accept them, while others do not—that needs to be changed. We need reform to the system.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).