Immigration Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I think we have different recollections of the evidence sessions. I do not recall just one organisation doing that.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I agree with my hon. Friend; I did not hear only one organisation say that. I will say that I used to run a children’s hospice and, even when people were told the reality of what was going to happen, they always had hope. Even if it is to someone through the entire process, not everyone listens to reality.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I believe it is clear that whatever happens, the Government intend to introduce stricter conditions than currently exist for supporting failed asylum seekers, to try to encourage people to leave the UK more quickly once an asylum claim has failed. There is one obvious problem with that approach, which is that the evidence shows that it simply does not work. I will return to that when we discuss later amendments, but for the moment it is enough to say that cutting off support will make families less, not more, likely to engage with the Home Office and leave the UK voluntarily. Denying people support will be counterproductive if the Government aim to increase the number of voluntary returns. If those are the consequences of withdrawing support, having a proper right of appeal becomes even important.

The reason to support the amendment is simple. The right of appeal is needed because on far too many occasions, initial decisions are incorrect. Nearly two thirds of appeals are successful, and that amounts each year to hundreds of cases or, to put it another way, hundreds of people and families. When new section 95A comes into force, those people will be wrongly deprived of food and shelter.

The Home Office’s assessments of destitution are very poor. The asylum support tribunal overturns a high proportion of decisions; in 2011, the figure was an incredible 82%. If those people had not had a right of appeal, how would they have accessed the support that they were entitled to? How will they be able to do so in future? Without a right of appeal, the only recourse for those individuals would be judicial review, which is no substitute for a proper right of appeal. Judicial review, as we all know, requires time and money, which are things that people whose asylum claim has failed simply do not have.

Inevitably, hundreds of people who will have every right to support under new section 95A will be unable to access it. I cannot accept that the Minister and the Government are comfortable knowing that hundreds of people who are legally entitled to support will be left with nothing, but that will be the effect of schedule 6 if it is not amended. Ultimately, the debate is about the quality of decision making. Are the Government prepared to accept poor decision making and the injustices that stem from it? If they are not, they should accept our amendment.

[Sarah Champion]

I, too, want to speak in support of amendment 222. Throughout the Bill, the Government propose various measures to remove the right to appeal against Home Office decisions. Reading the Bill, one cannot but conclude that the Government are fundamentally opposed to their decisions being challenged in anything approaching an independent manner.

The consequences of the decision to deny support are potentially catastrophic. A migrant who is denied support has no right to work and no right to rent. Their bank account is closed and their assets are frozen. The choices that people in that position face are bleak. The Bill acknowledges the need to support refused migrants who have genuine obstacles to leaving the UK, but it has not been made clear what a genuine obstacle will be, even though my Opposition colleagues have been pushing for clarity. My hon. Friend the Member for South Shields has just raised the matter yet again. What is clear, however, is who decides whether the obstacle exists. It is the Home Office, without scrutiny, oversight or effective challenge. That is bad practice in any process, but in the light of the Home Office’s frankly miserable record of making the correct decision the first time, it will be disastrous.

There is currently a right of appeal on decisions made about section 4 support. Statistics from the asylum support tribunal should make for uncomfortable reading for the Government, because 62% of appeals between September 2014 and August 2015 were successful. The claims were allowed, sent back to the Home Office for a fresh decision or withdrawn in acknowledgement of a flawed decision.

The Home Office has a similarly poor record in assessing destitution. In 2014-15, the Asylum Support Appeals Project represented 168 asylum seekers whom the Home Office had denied support on the grounds that it did not believe that they were destitute. Of those decisions, 70% were overturned on appeal. Such figures cannot but lead us to the conclusion that there is a serious problem with Home Office decision making. During the Committee’s evidence sessions, witnesses offered various explanations for those failings, from inadequate training to overly complex immigration regulations, and Ministers have given other examples. Whatever the reasons, however, when nearly two thirds of decisions are being overturned on appeal, something needs to be done to address the problem.

The Government’s solution in the Bill and in previous immigration legislation is indeed novel: simply abolish the right to appeal. That will certainly result in far fewer Home Office decisions being reversed, but it is hardly a solution that will in any way contribute to better decision making. Children and families will be badly affected by the loss of appeal rights. Section 95 support will no longer continue for families with children at the end of the asylum process. That poses a serious risk of leaving children destitute with no judicial oversight, as was clearly detailed by my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields.

Given the high proportion of Home Office decisions that will be overturned by the tribunal, the lack of appeal rights will inevitably transfer the responsibility for supporting destitute children to local authorities. We have heard from the Minister that the Department is in good consultation with local authorities, which is great, but the reality is that children who should be being supported by the Home Office will instead have to rely on overstretched local authority budgets to meet those most basic needs.

Much has been said of the need to ensure that our immigration system is one in which the public can have confidence. However, the way to achieve that confidence is not to pander to sensationalist headlines, but to ensure that most of the time the Home Office gets it right first time. Abolishing the right to challenge poor decisions and forcing people into the most abject poverty will not in any way contribute to achieving a goal that I am sure we all share.

[Paul Blomfield]

I am pleased to have an opportunity to contribute to this debate. I will not repeat the woeful statistics that others have mentioned in relation to successful appeals, but I think that all those points should draw the Committee’s concern to the appropriate response, which must be about getting the process right, as opposed to abolishing people’s rights, because the net effect of the proposals will be that people who could otherwise win appeals will be left destitute.

The Minister talked at length about the dialogue between the Home Office and local authorities. I would like to share some concerns that local authorities in the region that I represent have expressed. They come together in an organisation called Migration Yorkshire, from across the entire county. They are anticipating that the impact of the provisions will be to leave significant numbers of refused asylum seekers destitute. They make a point, which is worth bearing in mind when the Minister says that measures such as this are about encouraging people to return: they ask, “Return to what?” We are talking about people who, in many cases, come from unstable and dangerous states. In their evidence, they cite Eritrea, Iran and Sudan. The choice of returning, or being destitute in Britain might not be a hard choice to make for many people, actually. Destitution in the UK is probably better than going back to a war zone and being destitute there.

It is clear that, under this policy, more refused asylum seekers will become destitute without the right to appeal. The local authorities’ concern is that the amount will increase in several towns and cities across Yorkshire, with all the related health and cohesion issues that will disproportionately affect some of our bigger cities, where we already face problems with the rise in rough sleeping and wider destitution. They are worried that local agencies will lose contact with refused asylum seekers, who will have very little incentive to stay in touch. They are concerned that unsupported, refused asylum seekers will feel compelled to use illegal forms of accommodation —to be in overcrowded, unhealthy conditions, potentially putting their friends in breach of tenancy agreements—and that they will feel compelled, in conflict with the Government’s policy objectives, to undertake illegal forms of employment to survive, opening themselves up to exploitation and abuse.

In Committee so far I have cited the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary; now I will turn to the thoughts of another member of the Cabinet. The comment is not contemporary, but arose from a 2008 study by the Centre for Social Justice, which, incidentally, stated:

“Making refused asylum seekers homeless and penniless is hugely counterproductive: it makes it much more difficult to work with them to encourage voluntary return or to ensure timely removal, and in driving them underground makes it harder to keep track of them.”

The foreword to the report was provided by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), now the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who has provided inspirational guidance to the Government in a number of areas. We should pay serious attention to his words. He said:

“It also appears that a British government is using forced destitution as a means of encouraging people to leave voluntarily. It is a failed policy…still driven by the thesis, clearly falsified, that we can encourage people to leave by being nasty.”

I rest my case.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Brokenshire]

I will come to that. The issue is equally one of fairness to those who play by the rules—those who put in applications, are here lawfully, and have not sought to overstay their visa or put in an asylum claim to try to drag it out in a further attempt to remain in the country. It is fair to those people who have done the right thing that people who do not have that right should leave. We need a better basis of incentives and possible sanctions and, together with local authorities, we need to engage with families in the process to secure more returns and to underline those clear messages.

[Sarah Champion]

I genuinely do not think that any of my colleagues are disagreeing that we want a strong, robust system. We are trying to argue that, looking at the number of appeals decisions that are overturned, the system is not strong and robust. We want a fair system too, but there are people falling through the net, who then get a fair outcome on appeal. To lose that right of appeal does not seem to provide that justice that the Minister seeks.

[James Brokenshire]

Obviously we have existing arrangements under sections 95 and 4 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. We are moving towards a different arrangement under proposed new section 95A, which will apply where there is a genuine obstacle to departure. To be clear, that will be defined in regulations. We expect that obstacle to be either the lack of necessary documentation or a medical reason. Of course, the person will need to show that they are making reasonable steps to obtain the relevant documentation. The Bill does not provide a right of appeal against the decision that no such obstacles exist because that should be a straightforward matter of fact for which a statutory right of appeal is not needed.