Asylum (First List of Safe Countries) (Amendment) Order 2006

My Lords, I very much support the questions put by the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman. The asylum amendment order adds Bulgaria and Romania to the list of safe third countries to which an asylum seeker can be removed from the United Kingdom without consideration of the merits of his asylum claim. We ought to be very clear about that. We raised this concern during the passage of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 when my noble friend Lord Avebury said: "““Clause 18 and Schedule 3 create a new and fiendishly complicated structure of ‘safe country’ provisions which allow a person to be removed without substantive consideration of his asylum application … There are now four sets of circumstances in which a person may be removed without a right of appeal, arranged according to the degree of confidence in their safety.""The first category is removal to states where a person is deemed to be safe vis-à-vis both the Refugee Convention and the ECHR … The second category comprises unnamed states which are deemed to be Refugee Convention safe, but not necessarily safe from refoulement to a country where a person may not be safe … The third category comprises another empty list, also Refugee Convention safe, but where claims based on the ECHR may be certified as clearly unfounded.""““Finally, there is individual certification, which may be applied to a person who is not a national of the country to which he is being sent, if he is not at risk of being refouled and is not at risk of being persecuted there for any Refugee Convention reason””.—[Official Report, 27/4/04; col. 718.]" We have moved from the previous requirements where each case had to be individually certified. I am uneasy whenever we speak about ““safe countries””. I want a clear assurance from the Minister that if a country was not operating to the letter of the human rights convention, its inclusion on the list should be seriously reconsidered. This undertaking was given in the other place during the debate in Standing Committee on 22 January and should apply to Bulgaria and Romania. On Bulgaria and Romania, the regulations make transitional provision to take account of the free movement rights that nationals from these states will have on accession. They also set up a worker authorisation scheme restricting access by Bulgarian and Romanian nationals to the UK labour market during a five-year transitional period. Under the terms of the EU accession treaties governing Bulgarian and Romanian entry into the EU, Britain is perfectly within its rights to introduce transitional arrangements before full access to Bulgarian and Romanian workers is granted. All EU countries have the option to keep such transitional measures in place for a maximum of seven years. There is no dispute on that particular provision. However, certain transitional measures should not be undertaken lightly. They should be clearly justified, workable and fair in their application, and lifted at the earliest possible opportunity. We remain of the view that it is clearly beneficial to the British economy to support an open approach to labour migration within the European Union. Indeed, it is a right that hundreds of thousands of Britons exploit to their advantage by living and working elsewhere in the European Union. None the less, we acknowledge that legitimate concerns have been raised about the temporary effect of a much larger than expected inflow of labour from Poland and other accession countries in recent years. The effect on housing, schooling and overstretched local government resources in some specific areas has been significant. The fact that the Home Office dramatically underestimated the number of newcomers to the UK from those countries has clearly dented public confidence in the system. Our view is that any transitional measures are workable only if they are developed in close co-ordination with the other EU countries that are likely to prove attractive to Bulgarian and Romanian workers. Given the presence of large, settled Bulgarian and Romanian communities in Spain and particularly Italy, it is essential that government measures to manage the flow of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants are similar in nature and timetable to a temporary restriction applied to those two countries. To date, the Government have not given any indication that they have made an attempt to work in co-ordination with the EU member states on their proposals. Indeed, the Home Secretary has announced a series of unilateral measures that are almost certain to prove unworkable and difficult to enforce in practice. We will certainly closely scrutinise the implications of the Government’s measure, and we will continue to put forward a more rational approach to the issues of principle and practice that are at stake.