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Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Bill
4:45 pm
Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight, Conservative)
I accept that and I shall shortly come to my amendments, which are probing amendments.
I came to the perhaps unworthy conclusion that the Government have put the clause into the Bill in the expectation that there would be a great row about it in the House of Lords and it would eventually be overturned and become one of those clauses that bounces back and forth between the Lords and the Commons. That would allow that great lawyer, the Prime Minister, to mock full-bottomed wigs, people in tights and so on, instead of dealing with the serious business of the legislation.
I thought that that was why the clause was included, then I heard the Minister, and it sounds as though he genuinely believes that it is because of legal impediments that the Government are failing to deal effectively with what people believe are uncontrolled—not uncontrollable—asylum applications in this country. I suspect that that is just a symptom of the Government. They belong to the Monty Python school of legislating according to myth rather than fact. It is a dishonest sort of politics: they erect a man of straw and then knock him down. They did so on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and they did so on fox hunting. The Prime Minister claimed that the House of Lords blocked the Bill, when in fact it had never been near the House of Lords. Now the Government seem to be doing the same with the asylum system. They blame their problems on the courts, even though very few cases get to the higher courts.
I accept the point made a moment ago by the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mr. McWalter). That said, I sympathise hugely with the frustration of the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart and his hon. Friends. Some expressed their lack of sympathy with
lawyers, whether Scottish or English, loudly, and some, such as the Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Brent, North (Mr. Gardiner), did so under their breath.
The feeling that lawyers are spinning out the process is certainly widespread. In many cases, they are not even qualified lawyers; they are unqualified immigration practitioners. That is not surprising. If we invite people to apply for lots of money, lots of people will join the queue. That is how the legal aid system appears to be working as far as lawyers and immigration practitioners are concerned. If the supposed beneficiary of that money—the individual whose case they are taking up—has no direct control over the price, it is not surprising that they do not necessarily get good value for money. I hope that the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart will join me if we reach amendment No. 124, which is designed to deal with the misuse of legal aid.
I conclude that the Government are dealing with the wrong problem. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough said that if we have a problem, we must do something to make the system more efficient. He gave excellent examples of how we could make it more efficient. I shall not repeat them: he is more knowledgeable than I am about ways in which the operation of the law could be improved.
My amendments Nos. 120 and 121 are modest and designed to probe—I hope that the Minister deals with this explicitly—whether the definition of the word ''court'' in new section 108A includes tribunals such as the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. If it does, and the legislation bans all appeals to those courts, the Minister will at least be consistent. If, however, as I suspect, the legislation does not prevent appeals to those courts, while preventing appeals to the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords—domestic tribunals—we shall have the absurd situation of people appealing to the European Court of Human Rights on matters that they could have dealt with in the Court of Appeal, if only they had been allowed to appeal to it. The point made a moment ago will bear fruit, because those cases will take far longer than any case could take if it were dealt with in the Court of Appeal.
I shall give an example of one absurd case in the application of European law; it happened to one of my constituents and her son, who is a national of an African country. The mother is a British citizen. She was told that
''British citizens are European Economic Area nationals. However, European law relates to facilitating the free movement of European Economic Area nationals, and their family members, within the European Economic area. Therefore, were''
Mr. B
''and his mother to be residing in any of the other 14 member states, and were she to be exercising the European Treaty rights, in the form of employment or self-employment, or were she to have retired from economic activity, then''
Mr. B—I remind the Committee that he is a citizen of an African country—
''could be availed by European law and could qualify for a right of residence in the member state in which his mother was residing. As a British citizen living in Britain his mother cannot be regarded as exercising Treaty rights in another member state, and therefore neither she, or by extension her son, can rely on these provisions''
The letter continues that Mr. B
''as someone over 21, would need to demonstrate that he was dependent on his mother. However, in European law, dependency for relatives in the ascending or descending line can be by choice.''
Mr. B is therefore being discriminated against in this country because his mother is British rather than Irish or Italian, French, German or a national of any other member state of the European economic area. If that is the consequence of importing European law into the operation of our immigration and asylum process, it is absurd. I hope that the Minister will confirm that appeals to European courts are outlawed under the clause.