Second Reading: Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill

Second Reading: Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill

Tony Baldry: Does my hon. Friend agree that it might be sensible to give careful consideration in Committee to the size of accommodation centres, and, particularly in relation to trial accommodation centres, to give local people, deliverers of local services and local communities the proper opportunity to be heard at a public inquiry?

Mr. Letwin: My answer is yes. I shall dwell on those matters and several others of practical importance in relation to accommodation centres in a moment. My welcome for them is a welcome for the idea and not for all the details in the Bill, which, as I shall explain in a moment, are in some respects deficient. The two points that my hon. Friend mentions are among the most important.

We also welcome some—indeed, most—of the detailed provisions elsewhere in the Bill. In that context, I mention particularly the consolidation and streamlining of the appeals process. There is no doubt that if people are enabled to make several different concurrent or serial appeals, the system will remain in chaos. It is right that the whole appeal system should be consolidated, and the measures that we are considering, the drafting of which we want to inspect in detail, tend in the right direction and will carry our support—not that the Home Secretary requires our support in the House, but, perhaps more importantly, they will carry our support in the other place, too.

We have concerns about a particular class of asylum seeker—those who have not been refused appeal or lost an appeal, but who are in the course of appeal and are detained. If we understand the Bill correctly, they will not have an automatic right of bail at any time—by that I mean even an automatic right to have the proposition of bail considered. We have received representations about that and we share that concern.

Mr. Blunkett: Because of the length of my speech, I was not able to deal with every single item in the Bill, but I am grateful that the hon. Gentleman has raised this matter. It is correct that the automatic right—whereby anyone who applies for bail will automatically be granted a hearing—will be ruled out by the Bill, but not the right to put a case for a bail hearing. Those concerned will be dealt with on the same basis as other people who applied in similar circumstances. At the moment, there is an automatic right, irrespective of what case is put, for that bail hearing to be heard in circumstances that might allow people to go for bail the day before they are flying out of the country. That is ridiculous. It has therefore been used as a method of ensuring that people could avoid being held temporarily while their removal from the country was being organised.

Mr. Letwin: The House will not forgive the Home Secretary or me if we continue this detailed discussion,

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which is clearly more suitable for Committee. I merely signal that we will want to raise this issue in Committee and tease out the extent to which the position for that particular class of asylum seeker is reasonable.

Mr. Gerrard: On the question of the automatic bail hearing, was not that one part of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 that was never implemented? People do not have an automatic bail hearing at present. The concern is that, although an application can be made for bail, it has proved extremely difficult in the past for people to get it.

Mr. Letwin: That is correct. Part III of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 was never brought into force, which is why that provision is not yet implemented. That is one of the reasons why I raise this issue. We shall debate the matter in Committee, and perhaps the Opposition and the hon. Gentleman will be ad idem on it.

Simon Hughes: May I press the hon. Gentleman on his and his colleagues' view on this issue? Is it his view, as it is ours, that, until the end of the process, or just before it, the presumption should be that asylum seekers are not detained and are at liberty—that the loss of liberty should come only at the end, or just before the end, of the process of applications?

Mr. Letwin: Subject to the requirement for judicial oversight and to there being particular cases in which it is judged that there is a serious risk, my answer is yes.

Mr. Blunkett: To be even more helpful, may I clarify a point so that there is no misunderstanding? Habeas corpus still applies. People are entitled to that, and the real problem is those who are held inappropriately before they reach the point at which removal is required.

Mr. Letwin: That is exactly my view.

Having said that all those things are welcome and having congratulated the Home Secretary on the manner in which he is pursuing this whole endeavour, I must add that good intentions and an appropriate means of debate are not enough. To produce the results that he and I desire—namely, to create harmony where there is discord and to deny the extremists the purchase that they have or might have on the minds of some voters—we must not merely try hard and in the right spirit, but succeed.

We must take a system that the Home Secretary has correctly described as chaotic—it was not in perfect working order in 1997, but it has got substantially worse—and turn it into an orderly system that achieves the two results that he and I share the desire to achieve. Those are the rapid, effective admission of refugees fleeing dreadful persecution and the equally rapid and effective removal of those seeking to use this as opposed to other, legitimate means to enter the country, getting round rather than facing the immigration rules.

Those are joint aims, and we must succeed in delivering them to the British public—not 20 years from now, but very soon—if we are to achieve the effects on our democracy that the Home Secretary and I want to achieve. Therefore, it is important to consider whether the practical aspects of what is proposed will rapidly achieve those

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results. There, we have significant concerns, and those relate, in the first place, to two aspects of the accommodation centres.
I make no apology for repeating certain points, because I still believe them to be true. They did not enter the White Paper and they have not entered the Bill. Now, as the Bill progresses, we have an opportunity to include them in legislation and administrative practice. Everything that I shall say about the accommodation centres springs from a difference of view between the Home Secretary and me about what they ought to be in their first incarnation.

As I understand it, the Home Secretary envisages about 3,000 places in four accommodation centres of 750 inhabitants each, which, on average, will take about six months to process the applications of their inhabitants. Therefore, they will constitute no more than what he accurately described as a trial, leaving the overwhelming bulk of applications to be processed on the same basis as at present and with the dispersal systems as at present. Although his welcome changes on vouchers and the appeals process are exceptions, he is, on the whole, making no significant alterations.

Three years from now, the accommodation centres that the Home Secretary envisages will, I guess, probably only just have been constructed and established, given the planning constraints—I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) that those must be fairly intense—and the consultative procedures involved. Even then, they will process only some 6,000 applicants out of 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 or 90,000 a year. So, they constitute not a major shift from chaos to order, but, as the Home Secretary envisages them, an experiment on what might later be a means of doing so. The Home Secretary understates the urgency of the problem.

The difficulty with the six-month period arises essentially because the Home Secretary or his officials have not thought of these accommodation centres seriously as one-stop shops. I want to spell out what we mean by a one-stop shop.

We believe that a large part of the chaos of the present system is engendered by the paper chase and the people chase around the United Kingdom, as appeals move people and paper from place to place. What has gone wrong at the initial stages of applications arises from two causes. First, there is an insufficiency of appropriate legal advice—I stress the word "appropriate". I share the Home Secretary's doubts about the behaviour of some of the lawyers. Secondly, there is an insufficiency of reliable, accepted and judicially accepted country risk assessments.

We will not have an effective system for processing applications until we gather together in one place the relevant legal expertise that the Bill envisages—that is the intention, but we will tease out in Committee how far that is true—the relevant medical expertise and the relevant interpretive expertise, both of which are also signalled in the Bill, the caseworkers who make the initial decisions and the adjudicators. We will not eliminate the paper chase and make the whole process last weeks rather than months unless present on that site is the whole array of expertise required to reach the end of the consolidated appeals process. That is perfectly doable. No doubt there would be expenses, but vast savings would also be made.

We will not make the process work merely by having a one-stop shop if the decision-makers, the lawyers and the adjudicators—in effect, the judges—do not believe the

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country risk assessments. The Home Secretary, the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) and I had an interesting encounter not long ago on the Zimbabwe risk assessment, since when we have reviewed a number of others. The Home Secretary knows as well as I do that the Zimbabwe assessment was ludicrous. That is not his fault, but it is the fault of the current system. The assessment had probably not been ludicrous at some previous date, but it had become ludicrous.
Many other risk assessments are not so evidently ludicrous, but are nevertheless questionable. I have been dealing at some length with cases relating to Congo Brazzaville, which is a country that I happen to know well. From what I gather, I have a rather closer acquaintance with developments in that country than those responsible for the risk assessment have. My view is that the risk assessment is not very well assessed, and I suspect that that is the view the courts would take of it.

We will not solve this problem until an independent body, which has the highest possible qualifications for the job and is unchallengeable by the bureaucracy, is responsible for risk assessments. That is mainly because an independent risk assessment would not be influenced by a desire to achieve a particular result in appeals. Paradoxically or ironically, such a body would thereby more frequently achieve a result consistent with the initial decision, which would save time, money and misery.

We believe that one-stop shops should include everyone from the decision-makers through to the adjudicators, with all the expertise required, and against the background of proper, independent risk assessments. If that were to happen, and if the energy that the Home Secretary displays in conducting the political battle against us and others were displayed by the people responsible for winning the job of running those centres, those individuals could bring about the miracle of processing claims not in months but in weeks. Much would then alter.

Mr. Parmjit Dhanda (Gloucester): The hon. Gentleman makes some interesting points about the current dispersal system. On the creation of reception centres, he seems to think that the changes do not go far enough. Is he proposing the creation of more reception centres, or the contradictory approach of widening the dispersal areas, which currently take in largely urban areas? Is he suggesting that the spa towns that surround certain urban areas be included?

Mr. Letwin: I shall discuss the size of the centres in a moment. I am not advocating that they house more than 3,000 inhabitants in the first instance, but I am advocating that, by the means that I have described, we institute a system that stands a chance of processing applications in, say, an average of five weeks. According to the Home Secretary's officials, at the moment some 3,000 people are taken through the system twice a year, but under my proposal, the same amount would be processed 10 times a year. In other words, some 30,000 applicants would be processed each year, instead of 6,000. Rather than making an approximately 10 per cent. difference to the current level of applications and dispersals, a vastly greater difference—30, 40 or 50 per cent.—would be made.

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In short, I want an experiment to be conducted on a far greater scale, so that much more can be done to relieve the pressure on the dispersal system. I shall describe later how we hope that the remaining pressure on the system might be taken care of, so that it virtually disappears by the end of this Parliament. That must be our aim.

Mr. Dawson: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the phrase "one-stop shop" is perhaps a slight misnomer for the type of institution that he describes? In referring to a process in which all needs are met, all assessments are completed and all judgments are made, he is describing something more akin to a total institution. That is somewhat foreign to the liberal democracy to which the Bill seeks to welcome people, and which it recommends as the way forward.

Mr. Letwin: No, I simply do not agree. I accept entirely the Home Secretary's point that people will be able to come and go from accommodation centres, but I see no reason why the addition of adjudicators and better legal services "on site" would make such entities less attractive from a democratic point of view. If we resolve the chaos in the system, we will succeed vastly more quickly in allowing the victims of persecution to enter this country. That would be a triumph for tolerance and democracy.

Fiona Mactaggart: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Letwin: I will in a moment, but I want to deal with the question of size, which is very relevant.

Much of the problem alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury is caused by the proposed size of the operations. As I said, a total of 3,000 inhabitants is a reasonable aim if the other adjustments that I described are made, but four vast centres, each housing 750 inhabitants, is not a sensible way forward. I was pleased to hear the Home Secretary mention the possibility that at least some centres will be significantly smaller, and I take his point that a minimum scale is sensible. We should not seek to lay down particular sizes for ever, because the economies of scale will doubtless differ over time and across languages, for example. It would be sensible to try to create centres that specialise in particular kinds of asylum applicant from particular places, so that, for example, specific translation facilities and expertise can be developed.

In short, economies of scale are determined not merely by the numbers of people being processed, but by the aptness of institutions to the particular character of the people whose cases they are processing. I do not want to offend the Home Secretary's hard working officials, but I sense that the establishment of four centres each holding 750 people is an example of the Home Office's characteristic desire that such projects should be neat, large and systematic. What we really need is a set of centres that are effective because they are tailored to the characteristics of the human beings with whom they are dealing.

Smaller units would make it much easier for my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury and the other hon. Members who are affected—and, more importantly, their constituents—to accept accommodation centres in

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their back yards. Smaller units could also be constructed more quickly. The Home Office may be suffering from the old illusion that the fewer there are of such units, the more quickly they can be prepared, as there will not be so many concurrent processes to go through.
All my experience—which I suspect that the Home Secretary shares—of watching Governments at work suggests that they take a very long time to put large projects in place. That is because we in this country increasingly, and rightly, respect local rights whenever a large project is about to be dumped on a local population. There is no getting around the fact that the local populations involved will feel that they have been dumped on, even though the construction of these units is very much in the national interest. For all sorts of reasons, therefore, it would be very helpful if the Home Secretary were to reconsider the centres.

The combination of one-stop shops, the reduction of scale that I have outlined, the introduction of independent assessments, the speeding up of the proposals for establishing accommodation centres and quicker processing of applications in those centres once they have been established will, I believe, vastly alleviate the problems to do with education described by the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), among others. It seems to me to be perfectly tolerable that specialised education should be available on site if people are only staying in the centres for a matter of weeks. The hon. Lady's complaint seems to arise from the fact that the Home Secretary is envisaging that people will stay for a pretty long time, in separate educational establishments. The approach that I have set out might not solve the problems to which the hon. Lady has referred, but I believe that it would vastly alleviate them.

Ms Abbott: If I seriously thought that people would be staying only a few days or weeks, I would not be taking such a strong line. However, this is the fifth Bill on immigration and asylum during my time in the House. When Ministers say that people will stay in such centres for a maximum of six months, I know that one should think in terms of a year.

Mr. Letwin: The Opposition have made the same assessment. In our more pessimistic moments, we believe that people could stay even longer. I am delighted that the hon. Lady has said what I speculated that she would—that the problems to do with education might not arise if people stayed only a short time in such centres.

The Opposition's proposals would be better for the country, and for the Home Secretary. They would allow him a more peaceful time with his Back Benchers. What could be better? In fact, I can think of many things, but there we are.

My final point about the scale of the accommodation centres trumps all the others that I have made. The memory of the ghastly episode at Yarl's Wood is seared on the Home Secretary's mind more than it is on anyone else's because he has had to deal with the aftermath, even though he was not responsible for its origins. No living individual created that problem. I am sure that the report, when it appears, will show that there is no villain of this piece, and that no individual performed a series of evil acts that led to the problems at Yarl's Wood. No doubt, the report will show that a series of unfortunate elements came together.

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I am sure that lessons will be learned, but I am persuaded—I admit that I have no empirical evidence on this matter, just a human instinct that I suspect that the Home Secretary might share—that the chances of such disruption happening are vastly reduced when human institutions are relatively small and on a human scale, when they deal with people from roughly the same part of the world and have translation facilities in good working order, and when there is a sense that human beings are being dealt with as human beings. These huge centres, for 750 men, women and children, stand far too great a risk of creating, or recreating, the friction which, if they do not lead to the events that we saw at Yarl's Wood—and I hope that they never do—may generate other problems. That is the biggest single reason for making the centres smaller, although there are many others.

Let me turn to matters that are not in the Bill. Some of them cannot be because they are not matters of legislation, but we continue to believe that they are critical. I was encouraged by the Home Secretary's attitude to these matters earlier this afternoon. I wholly concur that he was right, when we last debated this issue, to draw the House's attention to the need to await the results of the French election before proceeding to renegotiate the bilateral agreement. I, believe, however, that the only way to solve the problem of our current system is by combining the tactics that I have described which might, if they worked appropriately and took just a few weeks in each case, accommodate about 30,000 applicants. I believe that we will solve the problem only if we can reduce the number of applicants by many thousands more by reinstituting the bilateral agreement. That is the second part of my answer to the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey. I hope that we can see the withering of the dispersal system by accommodating about 30,000 applicants in the accommodation centres and that the number of applicants will, over time, be reduced by another 30,000 or so after reinstituting the bilateral agreement. I do not think that there is any other way of getting to where we need to be.

I am delighted that the Home Secretary seems to be moving towards a negotiation with the French after their election. I profoundly hope that it will deliver Mr. Chirac—in which hope I guess the right hon. Gentleman and I are joined—and a conservative rather than a socialist Government, but certainly not one composed of evil persons. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will appeal to his colleague, the former Home Secretary—now Foreign Secretary and responsible for our diplomats—to exercise some ingenuity in achieving that result. Indeed, I hope that he will do more and achieve a renegotiation of the Dublin convention in Dublin. That convention should be systematically altered so that it reflects what is possible and practical rather than what is imaginary and theoretical.

It is imaginary and theoretical to suppose that one can trace the first port of entry to a safe country. It would be practical and useful to have a general agreement across Europe that when asylum applicants come from a safe country to another safe country, they should return to the safe country from which they started their travels to have their application processed there. If we could achieve that on a Europe-wide basis, our desire to see the dispersal system wither, the whole process take weeks and the system return to a state of order would be deliverable.

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In short, we hope to see the Bill not so much change as evolve. We hope that it will be improved as it proceeds through its stages, and we shall support it tonight. We hope that the French election will be won by the right candidate and that the Home Secretary will, through the agency of his colleagues, achieve the renegotiation of which I spoke. If we can do all those things, the Home Secretary will be able to enter the next election not just with a chain of well intentioned moves or a reputation for having maintained a robust but rational discussion of these matters but with a reputation for resolving them. As a matter of political expediency, that would be a disaster for me, because I would have to go into the next election conceding that he had succeeded. However, as an Englishman, I would welcome it.

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