UK Borders Bill

moved Amendment No. 34: 34: After Clause 17, insert the following new Clause— ““Withdrawal of support: repeal Section 9 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 (c. 19) (failed asylum seekers: withdrawal of support) is repealed.”” The noble Lord said: This amendment, like the two amendments we considered at the end of the third day’s proceedings, concerns the despicable policy of trying to force asylum seekers to return to their countries of origin by making them destitute. It approaches the question simply and straightforwardly by repealing the infamous Clause 9 in accordance with existing statutory powers. The director of the BIA case resolution directorate acknowledged in a witness statement to the High Court at the end of May that there were still 400,000 to 450,000 incomplete asylum cases on the books—the same number that the Home Secretary gave in July 2006. She said that these were cases where an asylum claim had been made but the case record had not been concluded, due to errors in recording information or because there were outstanding actions that still needed to be taken. Some of the 400,000 files relate to persons who have left the country voluntarily or who were citizens of countries that subsequently became members of the European Union. However, a significant number in the backlog—the National Audit Office’s estimate was 283,000 between 1994 and 2004, an estimate which the Home Secretary has appeared to accept—were applicants who had exhausted all their appeal rights yet remained in the UK. The case resolution directorate has the job of examining every one of the 400,000 files, deleting the duplicates, updating the remainder and giving top priority to removing those who prove to have criminal records. Your Lordships may be surprised to know that at the beginning of May this work still had to be undertaken, 10 months after it was acknowledged by the Home Secretary. In the context of this amendment, it is the people who have not committed any offence who are of prime concern. These people are to be contacted and asked to provide current reasons for seeking to remain in the UK, and in the light of that information consideration will be given to granting leave, if appropriate, or to effecting removal. The implication is that although no general amnesty is contemplated, some people will be eligible for discretionary leave, which applies when a person’s ECHR rights would be breached or, in the case of a child, where inadequate arrangements exist for the child’s care and protection in the country of origin. There were also some 30,000 cases of applications made before 31 December 1995 where special conditions were applied in accordance with the 1998 White Paper Faster, Firmer and Fairer. We need a progress report from the Government on how the case resolution directorate is tackling this enormous backlog of files and, in particular, whether they have a better idea of how many they think will be left on the books when the sifting of the files and the removal of the criminals has been completed. It is this total, which includes the families, to which the infamous Section 9 could be applied and which the Government want to keep as a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. We objected to it at the time. At Report stage of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill, in February 2006, we persuaded your Lordships that the Secretary of State should have power to repeal it by order. To summarise very briefly, we said that Section 9 breached the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; that the pilots had already caused enormous distress and terrible destitution; that a number of families had vanished under threat of being separated from their children; and that it was an inhumane way to coerce vulnerable families. There are countries to which families are not normally returned and this at the very least should be acknowledged by the law. If Section 9 is retained as a power of last resort, it ought not to be capable of being used against those families. The list would have to include: Zimbabwe, to which no one is being returned pending a decision of the courts; Somalia but not Somaliland; Iraq, with the exception of the Kurdish region; Afghanistan, the DRC and Darfur. It would be manifestly unreasonable to dump families in war zones and I hope that the Government will agree at least with that. The Government have spent a lot of money in the courts upholding their right to return Zimbabweans to a country which they acknowledge is a ruthless and brutal dictatorship which—according to the UN—in Operation Murambatsvina made 700,000 people homeless and affected another 2.4 million people countrywide. It seems to me that, with the endgame rapidly approaching for Mugabe's rule, we should grant all irregular Zimbabwean migrants now living here one year's leave to remain with permission to work. That would send a signal to Africa that we consider Zimbabwe to be a uniquely dreadful place for anyone to live whether they are directly persecuted by the ZANU-PF dictatorship or deprived of all means of living a normal life by the catastrophic mismanagement of the country. One-third of the population has fled into neighbouring countries. Last week, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, said that a further 2 million people were expected to flee in the not-too-distant future. It is unthinkable that, as long as Mugabe lasts, anyone, let alone families, should be forced back to the hopelessness and starvation that he has created. On the contrary, they should be allowed to work here, contributing to the economy and developing the skills that Zimbabwe will need when it is liberated. When the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, accepted our amendment allowing the repeal of Section 9, she said that the pilots were being evaluated together with the exploration of other options that could encourage failed asylum seekers to leave the UK. Assisted voluntary returns are already having some effect and the better management of asylum applications is expected to deliver faster outcomes, resulting in improved chances of a speedy removal. After a delay of nearly 18 months, during which the Home Office sat on the results, the BIA’s report on the pilots was finally published in June 2007, with an update to that month. It confirmed that, "““a significant number of the families may have absconded … because of concerns about the section 9 process””—" at least 32 according to the Refugee Council and Refugee Action in their joint report, Inhumane and Ineffective. Local authorities said that they had difficulties reconciling conflicting principles of child welfare in Section 9. That point was reinforced in a letter I received from the chairman of the LGA Asylum and Refugee Task Group, dated 2 July, in which he said the following: "““We have consistently highlighted this apparent contradiction between the implementation of immigration legislation and the accepted principles of childcare legislation. This is particularly evident in Section 9 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment Of Claimants etc) Act 2004. The Task Group recognises the need to remove failed asylum seekers and their families but is keen to ensure that the removal process is an effective and human one but … there were a number of issues that the implementation of Section 9 created that proved extremely difficult for local authorities in pilot areas to overcome””." The report on the pilots finds that Section 9, "““did not significantly influence behaviour in favour of cooperating with removal””," but it fails to point out that only one family—I stress only one—out of 116 in the cohort to which Section 9 was applied, was actually removed by the end of the study, with nine families leaving voluntarily under the scheme run by the IOM. In the control group, of the same number of families, nine were removed and two left voluntarily. After two years’ work which, according to the chairman of the LGA task group, "““placed significant demands upon local authority resources””," one more family out of the control group left the country than in the cohort. Yet instead of admitting that the exercise was a dismal failure, both inhuman and ineffective, the BIA wants to keep Section 9 on the books for use against targeted families who are not co-operating in their removal. How it imagines that it is going to coerce individual families to co-operate when it has been able compulsorily to remove only one family out of 116 over a period of two years passes my comprehension. The JCHR has added its voice to the long list of voluntary agencies that have called for Section 9 to be repealed. In the reply to their report published last Thursday, the Government said that they were still conducting the Section 9 review. Can the Minister explain how that has happened? The Government said that it would be premature to repeal Section 9 before the completion of the review, implying—as they have all along—that if the review showed that coercion was a total failure they would strike it out. Never in the dozens of debates and questions in both Houses has it been suggested that, even if the pilots were a disaster, social and financial coercion might be kept for use against particularly recalcitrant families. I can hardly think of a more hateful and controversial idea, and one which reinforces my view that noble Lords should not have agreed to take this Bill in Grand Committee. If we cannot get rid of Section 9 altogether now with the consent of the Minister, we will certainly have to put it to the House on Report. On support for asylum seekers generally, we are particularly concerned about the burdens which have been arbitrarily laid on particular local authorities. In their carefully argued response to the consultation paper on UASC, the LGA, its Scottish and Welsh counterparts and the directors of social services, through the UASC reform steering group, warn that the present crude grants regime needs to be reformed to take account of the changes in care needs at the age of 16, for instance. Clearly local authorities are not going to volunteer to become specialist authorities as envisaged in the consultation document unless they are assured of full cost recovery and that asylum support will be funded separately from the general grant settlement. There is also a particular issue with the funding arrangements to cover the provision of services to UASC post-18, where the spend for 2006-07 is estimated to have been £50 million while the government grant was only £12.3 million. It would be sensible for the Government to err on the side of generosity, making the grant offer to ensure that candidate specialist authorities can enter into detailed discussions with the Government without fearing that council tax payers in their area will be required to subsidise the scheme or cut existing services to pay for it. If they pay slightly more than the cost, this may well assist the local authorities when selling the idea to their residents. I beg to move.