Clause 10 - Unification of appeal system
Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Bill
9:45 am
Mr Humfrey Malins (Woking, Conservative)
That amounts to an argument that we should forbid people from claiming asylum. The truth is that the problem is administrative. I shall give one example of the delays. Does the hon. Gentleman know that when an appearance takes place before an adjudicator, in a huge percentage of cases, the Home Office is not represented? That leads to more delay and the increased likelihood of an appeal being granted. That is Home Office inefficiency. Of course some people abuse the system, but they are small in number. The opportunities for perpetual judicial reviews come late in the proceedings. I am in favour of tightening procedures and making the system more efficient. The hon. Gentleman has no response to my point that, because of Government inefficiencies, it usually takes as long as a year to reach the tribunal stage.
I shall now speak briefly to amendment No. 41. Under the clause, the tribunal is asked to review its own decision. What does that mean in practice? Dozens of immigration judges are on the tribunal, but they are all part of the same group. A decision might be made by three sitting in one case, or one sitting in another, but what kind of appeal is it, when the applicant's only option is to ask the judge's friend in the next room to review the decision? That is not a genuine, independent appeal. If a body is asked to review its own decision, and broadly consists of the same people, it is unlikely frequently to overturn it. The reasons for that are so obvious that I do not need to mention them. The body is effectively a judge in its own court.
Amendment No. 41 would strike out the provision limiting the tribunal's scope of review, and substitute it with the decision not to permit a review unless it was satisfied that the earlier decision
''depended upon an erroneous construction or application of a provision of an Act.''
That is a severe restriction; it is too much. Surely if the tribunal is asked to review its own decision, it must not be over-constrained either in the way in which it
performs its duty or in what it can actually do. Therefore, I ask the Minister: is there a good reason for that restriction? If there is, can he tell us what it is? We have not heard it so far.
Amendment No. 42 was my amendment, and the Government have adopted it, with the Minister's signature appearing above mine. If nothing else, that shows the merits of an Opposition in Committee. In its current form, proposed new section 105A(5)(a) says that when reviewing its decision, the tribunal may order a rehearing only if it is satisfied that the earlier decision
''depended upon an erroneous construction or application of a provision of an Act''.
In effect, a rehearing would be better than a substitution. Again, my view was that the Bill was far too restricted. I am flattered that the Government have taken the same view on that narrow point and have adopted my amendment.
If I may, I should like to say something about Government amendments. Are the Government ashamed that they published a Bill in such great haste and then started to amend it themselves in Committee? If not, they ought to be. Did they not think that they had got it vaguely right in the first pace? This is a rehearing, so to speak, of the shambles that was the Bill of 2002, with literally hundreds of Government amendments flooding the Committee hours before the debates took place, giving hon. Members precious little time to discuss them, and giving the outside bodies no time whatever to discuss them. Hundreds of amendments were tabled as they went along. This clause—this critical clause, affecting the rights of so many people in this country—is following the same pattern. Even at this stage, we have 10 or a dozen Government amendments, on which they had in practice no time to consult. It is, frankly, a shambles in terms of efficiency, and merely a reflection of how Governments—and the Home Office in particular—run the so-called asylum system.
Amendment No. 101 says that a request to review
''must assert that the Tribunal's decision would have been different but for a clear error of law''.
As the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) and his colleague, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) asked earlier, what does the word ''clear'' mean here? The debate became farcical when hon. Members were discussing this. An error of law either exists, or it does not. If it exists, it must be clear, and ''clear'' is an unnecessary word. If it does not exist, it does not exist. What is the point of it? What does ''clear'' mean, as opposed to other words such as ''obvious'' or ''manifest''? It is difficult to say. We have come down to dictionary definitions. It would be better if the word ''clear'' were omitted.