Orders of the Day — Asylum and Immigration Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:22 pm on 11 December 1995.

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Photo of Jack Straw Jack Straw Shadow Secretary of State (Home Office) 4:22, 11 December 1995

It does not provide any reassurance at all. Four days after the Secretary of State published his consultative document, Mr. Tim Melville-Ross, in the Financial Times, said of the proposals that it was too much to expect businesses to act in such a policeman's capacity, and that they had plain "racial implications".

With 20 million spare national insurance numbers, the checks will not deter those intent on fraud. They will deter the small and medium-sized employer, who will be scared away from taking any risk with the employment of applicants with black or brown skins or foreign-sounding names.

The 1951 convention places Britain under a clear obligation to provide social security to "refugees lawfully staying" in the contracting state. Until now, that obligation has been interpreted as including those whose application for refugee status is under consideration. The Home Secretary complains that the benefit bill for asylum seekers has increased to £200 million a year. The reason for that increase is not so much because the number of asylum seekers in Britain has risen as because of the time they stay while their applications and appeals are being considered.

If the 1993 deadlines had been kept to, the benefit bill would be not £200 million but £40 million. How typical of the Government that, instead of seeking to cut delays, they cut people's benefit. Under the proposals, there will be no benefit: not for those in severe hardship or ill-health; nothing for babies, infants or children; not a penny for pregnant women; none for the victims of torture. To mock the plight of those people even more, Ministers say that these asylum seekers can apply for a social fund crisis loan, when they know that no such applications can be accepted because the asylum seeker will have no benefit from which to pay back the loan.

What is saved on benefit may have to be spent elsewhere, because many of the refugee children made destitute by these changes will become the responsibility of local authorities under the Children Act 1989, to be taken into care, at a cost of £870 a week, to save benefits of around £100 a week.

Of all the measures in the Bill, the one which most cries out for proper scrutiny by a Special Standing Committee, and which meanwhile has raised the gravest doubts about the Government's motives, is that relating to child benefit. My right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) quoted from clauses 10 and 12. Clause 10 plainly states:

No immigrant within the meaning of the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 shall be entitled to child benefit for any week unless he satisfies prescribed conditions. Clause 12 defines an immigrant in the widest possible terms, and states:

"'immigrant' means a person who under the 1971 Act requires leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom (whether or not such leave has been given)."

In the interview in the Independent, the Prime Minister said that he did not want to deal with the problem of immigration and asylum seekers in a way

which may unsettle people who do not deserve to be unsettled". If that is his view, what on earth was he doing allowing the Secretary of State to proceed with this appallingly wide provision?

The new and derogatory definition of an immigrant is so wide that it provides the power to remove child benefit from anyone who has been here for more than 10 or 20 years, made Britain his home and paid his taxes like anyone else, but who does not have an EU or UK passport. Such people can only be "unsettled" by this provision. [Interruption.] The Minister of State is babbling. If she does not intend to use the power as widely as it is drawn, why take it in the first place?