Immigration Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Rebecca Harris and Mims Davies

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Rebecca Harris]

Poor decision making, slow decision making, labyrinthine—does anyone know of an exemplar European nation that does things well?

Karl Pike: There are so many different parts of it. To be fair to the Home Office, certainly the speed of decision making is potentially better than in some European countries. France is an obvious example. People often say that countries such as Sweden have better processes of return and support for asylum seekers, particularly for assisted voluntary return. It is a bit of a mixed bag.

Peter Grady: I agree. To credit the Home Office as well, here—from UNHCR’s perspective at least—the quality of asylum policy is generally of a high standard. As Karl has mentioned, it is certainly a mixed bag when looking at other national asylum systems—whether of pros or cons.

To give just one example, credibility assessment is something we have worked on with a number of states. It is absolutely fundamental to asylum decision making. There are positive aspects of how it is conducted here, in terms of some of the infrastructure and policy that I mentioned before, but there are still issues for us and we need to work with the Home Office to develop training and strengthen decision making in the area. It is not unique to the UK—credibility assessment is, across the board, in a number of different countries, a challenging area for asylum decision making. So it is a mixed bag and it is hard to pull out one state and say, “This is the perfect state for asylum decision making.”

[Mims Davies (Eastleigh) (Con)]

Q 278 Earlier today, we heard that cases are getting more complex—the rules are more complex. Does that really just affect the people who are caught up in the system having more complex issues? You have described people unable to get paperwork, because they are caught up in the politics between countries.

Karl Pike: Those are not new issues. Obviously, potentially we are going through a unique period in the movement of people, so the numbers of decisions that the Home Office is having to make are gradually increasing. It is not like the level of the early noughties, but it is certainly increasing. In a lot of these countries, sometimes the systems that they have clash with the systems that we have, and that seems to cause the Home Office difficulties.

I will just give you an example about a Syrian national which someone told me about a couple of days ago. It is a family reunion case, and they were trying to bring a child over. The Home Office wanted a birth certificate; the family did not have a birth certificate, so they had to go to a local civil organisation in Syria to get a new one, but the way in which they issue those in Syria means that they date them from the date of issuance, so the Home Office said it must be bogus, because it was dated 2015. Silly little cultural things such as that often get in the way, and that is what we mean by complexity, because that is just one example of one person from one country, and there are hundreds.

Immigration Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Rebecca Harris and Mims Davies

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Mims Davies]

Q 111 I want to pick up on something that was raised this morning by the Refugee Council and Still Human Still Here. They were inferring that the reform of the support will affect asylum seekers, leaving children destitute and obviously affecting social services and local authorities. I wondered whether you had an understanding of the level of numbers that may be affected by that, and therefore the impact that could be anticipated, or whether that is in essence scaremongering?

Lord Green of Deddington: In terms of numbers, offhand I do not know. I would make a distinction between families where there are children present, which would surely affect the way in which they were handled, and those where there are no children. Where there are no children, when people come to the end of their process, they should go—end of story. We certainly should not have the taxpayer paying for them.

[Rebecca Harris (Castle Point) (Con)]

Q 112 Back to that point, there are two questions relating to what we were told early this morning by witnesses. On that point—namely, we were told that with a lack of resources, when people have finally lost their appeal, that would drive them further underground and they would cease to engage; it would not work and we would find that less people were leaving—can you comment on whether that is a fair assessment? Will that measure and the other measures in this Bill make it more likely that people go underground and less likely that they are going to come forward and engage, as we are told the term is, and come to the conclusion that they need to go of their own accord?

Lord Green of Deddington: Of course, it would depend very much on the individual cases. The overall statistics are very clear. First, of those who have applied for asylum—this is the average over the last 10 years, just to give you the broad scope—50% only did so when they were discovered. Secondly, when those cases were heard, 50% were granted. So the other 50% were refused, and of those only half were removed. So if you set foot in this country, as people are doing every day from Calais, and you say the word “asylum” you have a 75% chance of staying here. Of course, they know that—they have relatives, they have friends, they have mobile phones, most of them. If you are going to weight the system, which is the only thing you could do by legislation, then you have to weight it against bogus asylum seekers. That is my bottom line.