My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, for tabling these amendments. I was pleased to add my name to them, not least because I was a member of the parliamentary inquiry into asylum support for children and young people, and I helped to launch a Freedom from Torture report called The Poverty Barrier: The Right to Rehabilitation for Survivors of Torture in the UK. Also, on a personal note, the noble Lord referred to the Express headline about German Jews pouring into this country. My father was one of those German Jews.
I shall start with the right to work. It is a human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and incorporated into human rights law as part of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which recognises,
“the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his living by work”.
After the Second World War, TH Marshall wrote that in the economic field, the basic civil right is the right to work. The importance of this right, or rather the lack of it, for individual asylum seekers is brought out movingly in the report to which I have referred. The parliamentary inquiry talked about how asylum seekers who are not able to undertake paid work lose skills, how they are not able to provide a role model for their children, and the impact on their self-esteem, self-confidence and mental health. All this has a damaging effect on their children. According to the Freedom from Torture report:
“Many questionnaire respondents, and most participants in client focus groups, highlighted the importance to them of having permission to work while their asylum claim is decided as a means of supporting themselves and being self-reliant. Indeed, the lack of permission to work for asylum seekers was a major theme of
discussion and the key change that focus group respondents called for, although they also recognised that many torture survivors are not well enough to work”.
The weekend before last, noble Lords may have read in the Guardian an interview with six refugees or asylum seekers with professional backgrounds. One of them was a senior government adviser from the Ivory Coast now living destitute in Birmingham. The article says:
“But for the moment, what makes her unhappy is the enforced idleness: the UK Border Agency stipulates, in emphatic capitals, in correspondence with her, ‘You are NOT allowed to work’”.
It goes on:
“‘Work is health,’ she says, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. ‘I started working when I was 21. I am an active person. When you have nothing to do, you look on your situation and start to think. You say to yourself: “What am I doing? What will become of me?”’”.
If we were professional people who were forced to leave our home and seek asylum in another country, how would we feel if we were not allowed to contribute to the country that we wanted to make our new home?
Much of government social policy, whichever party is in power, is premised on the principle that paid work is the primary responsibility and the most important contribution that people make to society, summed up, as the noble Lord said, in the mantra of “hard-working families”. However, successive Governments deny asylum seekers the opportunity to make such a contribution for a whole year, even though the evidence shows that it helps integration. Home Office research shows that delayed entry to the labour market can cause problems even when refugee status is then granted, leading to high levels of unemployment and underemployment. It would appear, therefore, that the Government work on the assumption that asylum seekers will not be granted refugee status, so it does not matter to this society what the long-term effects of enforced idleness are. I hope I am wrong, and would be grateful if the Minister could disabuse me, but that is how it comes across.
As the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, said, the Government argue that to allow asylum seekers the right to work would blur the distinction between economic migrants and asylum seekers, and act as a pull factor. However, we are not calling for an immediate right to work: there would still be a six-month delay. In 11 other European Union countries, in both northern and southern Europe, asylum seekers are permitted access to the labour market after six months, or sometimes even less, of waiting for a decision. In all of those countries, except Sweden, fewer applications for asylum were received than in the UK, which does not suggest that it acts as a pull factor. The lack of impact on the number of applicants is confirmed by a recent study of OECD countries. If we do not allow the right to work, the danger is that asylum seekers who end up in the shadow labour market will face the kind of exploitation referred to earlier by my noble friend Lord Rosser.
I fear that Governments are often timid with regard to the rights of asylum seekers for fear of public opinion. However, surveys by the IPPR and the British Social Attitudes survey show that there is public support for allowing asylum seekers the right to work. The
Joseph Rowntree charitable trust, in an inquiry into destitution among asylum seekers a few years ago, said:
“Overwhelmingly, giving asylum seekers the right to work was the favoured solution identified”,
by those who gave evidence.
On the question of destitution, the parliamentary inquiry of which I was a member found that the current asylum support system is forcing thousands of children and young people who are seeking safety in the UK into severe poverty. We were shocked to hear of instances where children were left destitute and homeless, entirely without institutional support and forced to rely on food parcels or charitable donations. This cannot be right.
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The Freedom from Torture report that I mentioned shed light on this. It stated:
“Several clinicians interviewed for the research said that in their experience when survivors of torture are made effectively destitute, this can lead to deterioration in their mental health and/or to an increased risk of suicide. It can also have a long term impact on their ability to recover from their past trauma, even after they are no longer in destitute circumstances. One clinician said: ‘I think it’s profoundly exhausting to survive destitution, and if you’re in that situation for a long time—when there’s no hope, there’s no certainty, there’s no activity that’s meaningful—it’s then very hard to believe that you have a right to contribute to society, that you’ve got something you can offer’.
When asked to comment on how they have felt in their own words, people described feeling desperate about the lack of control over their lives, knowing that their difficulties are exacerbated by inadequate diet and consequent weakness, chronic pain and poor sleep”.
I will quote from one person in the study, who said:
“There is one animal that I envy so much in this country and it’s the pet dog. When I see people with pet dogs and see how they are taken care of in homes, fed and everything, I compare myself with them and cannot measure up. I lose hope in living. I envy the dog”.
All parties are committed to the eradication of child poverty, yet somehow the children of asylum seekers do not seem to be part of this commitment and no one seems to care about the poverty that they experience. Common humanity and human decency must make us question this situation, but also, as the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, explained, Still Human Still Here estimates that it would actually save money to abolish the parallel support structure of the Azure card system. This point was made by Julian Huppert MP in the Public Bill Committee, and the Minister agreed to look into it and report on his conclusions. Can the Minister report to this House the Minister’s conclusions after looking at the question of whether money could be saved by abolishing this parallel support structure?
Finally, I would like to turn again to the Joint Committee on Human Rights report and its inquiry into the treatment of asylum seekers back in 2006-07. It said:
“We consider that by refusing permission for most asylum seekers to work and operating a system of support which results in widespread destitution, the treatment of asylum seekers in a number of cases reaches the Article 3 ECHR threshold of inhuman
and degrading treatment. … We have seen instances in all cases where the Government’s treatment of asylum seekers and refused asylum seekers falls below the requirements of the common law of humanity and of international human rights law”.
Before I joined the Committee, it said:
“The policy of enforced destitution must cease. The system of asylum seeker support is a confusing mess. We have seen no justification for providing varying standards of support and recommend the introduction of a coherent, unified, simplified and accessible system of support for asylum seekers, from arrival until voluntary departure or compulsory removal from the UK”.
The policy has not ceased, but these amendments are an attempt to end this shameful state of affairs.