MR KEITH BEST, MR NICK HARDWICK AND SIR ANDREW GREEN

TUESDAY 17 SEPTEMBER 2002

  1. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and welcome, particularly, to our witnesses. This is the first of three sessions we are holding over the next day-and-a-half. This afternoon's is a deliberative session on a report we are in the process of completing and, therefore, not open to the public and tomorrow morning is with the Home Secretary. This morning's session is a general one on asylum and immigration issues, though we are about to start a short inquiry which will focus on removals, with the object of examining ways in which they can be made (a) more efficient and (b) more humane, but today's session will be much wider than that, though we will touch on those issues and anything you say may be taken into account when we come to conclude that report. Can I ask our witnesses, first of all, for the record, just to say something about their organisation, membership, funding, customers—starting with Mr Best?

  (Mr Best) Thank you very much, Chairman. We are a national charity giving a free legal advice and representation service. We, and our predecessor, UKIAS (United Kingdom Immigrants Advisory Service) is certainly well-known to two of your colleagues and has been in existence now for over 30 years. We came into being as a result of the 1969 Immigration Act which was consolidated into the 1971 Act—hence our provenance dating from 1970—as a result of a specific provision in the Act which gave the Secretary of State the right to give grants to voluntary organisations to assist those with rights of appeal. You will be aware that that was the institution of the present system of appeals, the appeals were put into the tribunals system, for which at that stage you could not get Legal Aid for forensic representation and, as a result, it was felt right that because those affected were likely to be impecunious and not able to afford private legal fees there should be a body to provide that service free of charge, and that service has continued. So the main source of our funds has come from the Home Office. Perhaps this is somewhat anomalous at the moment, but in those days the appeals structure was actually administered by the Home Office and it only subsequently changed over to the Lord Chancellor's Department. There is now a move afoot that our source of funding should move from the Home Office across, probably through the Lord Chancellor's Department, into the Legal Services Commission itself. The other source of our income, which is an increasing one and one to which we are encouraged to look for growth in the future, is the Legal Services Commission itself, by way of not-for-profit contracts. We now have 16 offices in the United Kingdom, ranging from about three people in the smallest up to 40 or so in the largest. We have got some 60 people in Oakington providing a free legal advice service for those sent there on the so-called manifestly unfounded cases; we have got one overseas office in Bangladesh and about 300 staff.

  2. Most of those 300 are providing advice, are they?
  (Mr Best) Yes. I cannot give you the exact breakdown now but I would think two-thirds of those are what we would call operational staff. We categorise them in two ways: counsellors who conduct forensic advocacy representing people in the tribunals and, also, advisers whose function is to give the advice but not to go into court. Others are what we call case work assistants and administrative support staff, who are there to provide the typing and other back-up that you might expect.

  3. How do you serve those who have been dispersed—basically, where you are not present?
  (Mr Best) That has been as a result of negotiating with the local managers of the Regional Services Commission. We can assess ourselves where the need is and so we then approach the local Regional Services Commission and ask if we can have a not-for-profit contract. I think one cause of concern is that sometimes—I think with the best will in the world—the Legal Services Commission is relying on data, sometimes out-of-date Census data and things like this, in order to try to ascertain the need and we come along and say that we know the need is greater than you can work out for yourselves because we have got the people on the ground saying they cannot find lawyers. Sometimes they come to us and ask us if we can set up, but we are entirely in the hands of the Legal Services Commission as to whether we are given a contract or not there. As I said earlier, it has been made very clear to us by the Home Office that we should not look to the Home Office for any increase in funding for expansion for that source.

  4. Thank you for that. The Refugee Council?
  (Mr Hardwick) I am Nick Hardwick, I am the Chief Executive of the Refugee Council. We are a charity with 150 or so members which range from some of the big international aid agencies, like Oxfam and Save the Children, to smaller, locally based refugee community organisations. Essentially, we do three things: we provide direct support services to individual refugees and asylum services and have, at the moment, a large reception programme. We have a specialist programme for unaccompanied refugee children and we run a training and employment programme. In addition, we also provide second tier services to other organisations which work directly with refugees and asylum seekers, both as voluntary organisations and statutory bodies. Finally, we will try and influence the policy of Governments and others that impact on the lives of refugees and asylum seekers. Our funding comes from a mixture of sources. Our largest funder is the Home Office which currently funds about 60% of our operating costs and, also, provides additional funds for emergency accommodation we provide. Other money comes from the European Union, other government departments and a range of charitable sources, trusts, foundations and individual donors. Our head office is in Vauxhall in a big project based in Brixton and we also have other services in Leeds, Ipswich, Birmingham and in the Oakington Reception Centre. We employ about 400 staff and over 300 volunteers.

  5. Thank you. Sir Andrew, MigrationWatch UK. You are the newest organisation.
  (Sir Andrew Green) Chairman, thank you for your invitation to this session. As you say, we are the new boys on the block. We are a voluntary body, nobody is paid. Secondly, we are independent, we have no links with any political party. Thirdly, our objectives, if I may very briefly describe them, are, first of all, to provide the facts about migration in a form that is comprehensible to the public and, indeed, Members of Parliament who are not specialists in this area. Secondly (and, perhaps, at a later stage) to examine the arguments for and against migration, economic and social. I think there is scope for a debate there. Thirdly, again later, we would hope to provide some suggestions for policy measures, but, after that—and I would like to make this clear—we would regard it as a matter for the political system to look at these ideas and say what they think is sensible and feasible. So the bottom line, Chairman, is that we regard these as very serious issues, ones which of course affect our whole society, ones which have not really been discussed very much for a generation, and we would like to generate a frank, open and serious debate.

  6. How are you funded?
  (Sir Andrew Green) We thought about that quite carefully. We decided we should not be a membership organisation because of the risk of infiltration, to put it frankly. What we have done is we have said that the public are welcome to donate or subscribe to our documents, which they are doing—very generously, I am glad to say—and that provides the funds we need for what are really very modest needs.

  7. How many subscribers do you have?
  (Sir Andrew Green) Several hundred so far. We only came to public attention a couple of months ago.

  8. How many of you are there?
  (Sir Andrew Green) About eight or 10 researchers and our main adviser is Dr David Coleman on things demographic. He is Reader in demography at Oxford University and I believe shortly to be appointed Professor.

  9. Are you the founder?
  (Sir Andrew Green) I am the Chairman and founder, yes.

  10. What prompted you to found this organisation?
  (Sir Andrew Green) Well, accidents of life, Chairman.

  11. Tell us what you did in your previous incarnation.
  (Sir Andrew Green) I was a professional diplomat for 35 years, and in that time I spent about 16 years in the Middle East. The rest was either in London or in Paris or Washington, so hopefully it was a relatively balanced career. My last three jobs were Ambassador in Syria, then after that I was the Under Secretary in charge of the Middle East in London and then, finally, I was the Ambassador in Saudi Arabia until a couple of years ago. To answer your question very briefly, I first came across this issue when I was the Under Secretary in charge of the Middle East and we were seeking to remove from Britain some Islamic extremists—from Saudi Arabia in this case. I can say now, I think, that I was under the personal instructions of the Prime Minister to remove these people. I have to say I spent a great deal of time at a very senior level in Government in that effort. Not everybody agreed with it but that is what the Government wanted to do and we failed. We failed because of the complexity of asylum law—something that you know very well. So that drew my attention to the difficulties that we have in this field. It seems to me that a very large number of people have since discovered—100,000 a year—the nature of that system and that is what at first attracted my interest.

  12. Thank you for that. We want to avoid, if possible, three answers to every question, so do not feel obliged to repeat the point where you agree. However, if somebody says something you strongly disagree with, do not hesitate to indicate and I will certainly let you in. Since I am anxious to get to the back end of our agenda I may move things on a little bit at some stage. Can I ask you a couple of questions about the globalisation of migration. Barbara Roche, when she was responsible, said: "I want to be the first immigration minister to say that immigration is a good thing. Britain has been made by wave after wave of migration. There are skills shortages. You have to look at what the market needs." Is there a sense in which all this discussion of migration has been overtaken by the arguments surrounding deserving or undeserving asylum seekers?
  (Mr Best) Thank you, Chairman. Broadly, yes, I would agree with your deduction from that. I appreciate that there are very great political constraints here and I think at the time it was really quite courageous of Barbara Roche the then minister to make these points, knowing that there were going to be some people who would shoot her down on the basis that we were not really wanting to welcome large numbers of people from around the world. The reality is it is a global economy now; people with different skills move around the world with a fair degree of facility, interrupted only by national immigration laws. I think political sensitivities are that, arguably, the whole area of immigration, nationality and asylum is a final bastion of the exercise of national sovereignty. I think that is probably why it evokes such emotive reactions. Certainly from our point of view we have welcomed the Government's change of emphasis in immigration, which has moved it away, arguably, from the racist principles of the 1960s. All the Committee will be aware of the Commonwealth Immigration Acts of 1962 and 1968—a somewhat perfidious period in British history some might feel—but that really informed the immigration debate and immigration policy for the next 30 years, and it is only now that we have seen that change of emphasis towards what is in the best economic and social interests of the country rather than one based upon colour. I appreciate why the Home Office is moving cautiously on that—far more cautiously than I think some people would wish in terms of freeing up the labour market—but it is a welcome change and one that—I am not an economist but I deduce from my casual reading of these matters—is well needed in this country. In order to sustain the economic growth we are going to need to have more people coming into this country than can be generated indigenously to fill the skills shortages.

  13. You would accept that many of those coming here at the moment are unskilled people for whom there is no particular demand?
  (Mr Best) I think you have to separate out those who come here as a result of the initiative of employers. Other than coming as a working holiday-maker, or one or two minor categories, you are still reliant upon an employer making an application for a work permit, you cannot apply yourself overseas for a work permit. That is something that we hope will come along down the line. I think you have to distinguish that, which clearly the Government has considerable control over in terms of how many people it admits under particular categories or whatever, against asylum seekers, where the country is subject to an international convention, of which it is a signatory. Indeed, the right to asylum is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well, long before the 1951 Convention came along. To that extent it is really hit and miss; those who seek asylum are not necessarily going to be the ones with the skills that are needed in the UK. I think I ought to hand over to Nick Hardwick because his organisation has done a lot of research into the actual skills base of asylum seekers who do come here, and what that shows is a very great proportion of them do have an enormous number of skills, linguistic ability and such like. Perhaps one of the sad things, in a way, is that the sort of people who get to Britain are very often the ones who have the money to be able to pay the traffickers in order to get here now because it is so difficult to get here in the first place as a result of the increasing restrictions on trying to prevent asylum seekers coming to the United Kingdom, and these are the intelligentsia, the middle classes, they are the ones with the skills who actually get to Britain. Most of the world's refugees, if they are lucky, only get across one international border. Indeed, many of them remain within their own country.
  (Mr Hardwick) I agree with what Keith Best has said so I will not repeat it. Our primary concern is with refugees who are forced to leave their own country because of persecution rather than others who make a conscious choice for economic reasons. It has been argued for some time that it is difficult to have a sensible asylum policy and a sensible debate about asylum unless that runs alongside a more sensible approach to immigration and migration as a whole, and we accept the need for immigration controls. What we think is a mistake is to go from that to therefore saying that what those controls should consist of is somehow or other trying to pretend to people that that means letting nobody in. We do not think that in the globalised economy to which you have referred, and also, given the UK's historic links with a number of countries round the world—particularly those which are unstable—the idea that you can somehow or other have zero immigration is achievable. I think it is self-evidently the case, even in the UK, as our population gets older and demographic factors come into play, that there is a need not just for skilled labour but also for unskilled labour as well. If you walk around this area in which we are now, you can see people who are clearly migrants of one sort or another working in coffee bars, working in hotels, doing jobs where there does not seem to be the indigenous labour to do those kinds of things. We think it would be better if that was done in a regulated and transparent way rather than pretend it is not necessary for people to come in, without transparency in the process. If I may just add one point, I think in terms of the economic contribution that refugees bring, I do think that is something that has gone on unremarked, and I do generally think that in terms of the kind of public debate around asylum issues it might be that one of the mistakes the Government is making is in placing restrictions on people's ability to work legally. I do think that if the general public, for the most part, could see asylum seekers and refugees working and paying their way and there was some reference to the reciprocity of what they are doing and what the existing population are doing I think that would ease some of the tensions. I do not think that would act as a pull factor because I think if people were working legally that would be regulated and the Government would know where people are.

  14. There are some categories of asylum seekers who are allowed to work. Just tell us what they are.
  (Mr Hardwick) The Government has just, rather unfortunately (from our point of view), changed the rules. Up until recently if you were an asylum seeker and you had not had the initial decision on your claim for six months you could, at that point, apply for permission to work, and that was normally given. The Government has just changed that policy and said they are going to withdraw that concession. So from this point on—it will not be retrospective so people already working will be allowed to continue to work—the Government has said it will no longer make that concession. They have justified that on two grounds: one, they say "It is unnecessary because we are making decisions in six months". Our argument would be, well, if you are making decisions within six months why is it necessary to withdraw the concessions, particularly for those who, in some cases, take longer? They have also said that allowing people into work acts as a pull factor. Probably the availability of work in the black economy may act as a pull factor but I do not think working in a regulated way, paying tax and National Insurance, and being, if you like, a visible member of the community would have the deleterious effects the Government thinks.
  (Mr Best) Chairman, could I just very briefly add one very short rider. I was visiting Lindholme removal centre last week and the point was made to me very forcefully there, not just about the therapeutic value of allowing people, particularly in detention, to be able to work but, also, the cost to the taxpayer, as a result of this change of policy. They had large numbers of people working in the kitchens and doing the cleaning there—all detainees—which cost, I think, if my memory serves me correctly, something like £29,000 a year. Now the use of contract labour and agency people coming in is escalating that beyond measure.

  Bob Russell: Chairman, very briefly, Mr Hardwick has referred to the former Home Office Minister Barbara Roche making her favourable comments and she has now been removed. Are you aware—

  Chairman: Not from the country.

  15.—that another Home Office Minister was also removed from his post? Lord Rooker made the observation that those immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers who are permitted to work make a net contribution of between £1 billion and £2 billion to the economy. What efforts are you making to promote that good message?
  (Mr Hardwick) We are certainly working very hard to do that. I have to say it does not seem to us that we need to actually win that message with the Home Office. One of the interesting things about the latest White Paper was that it made a very eloquent argument about why Britain needs economic migrants. It just failed to follow that up with any practical steps that would enable that to take place. As I understand it, there is a disagreement within Government at quite senior levels about that very issue. We have certainly had meetings with the Department for Work and Pensions, as it now is, and I have met with Beverley Hughes the current Minister to express our concern about the removal of the concession and the way in which it was done—with no consultation and, I think, with no real thought as to the consequences. The other thing, if I might say, is that we have also done opinion polls on public attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers. As you would expect, on the whole, from our point of view, often that makes pretty depressing reading, but the one thing where the public do seem to agree with us is the idea that people should be allowed to work legally and pay their way. We certainly try to draw attention to that fact. The other point, I think, is if you just look at some of the crucial areas of commercial activity and look at things like the health service, it is quite clear that some of the problems that occur in the health service are due to the shortage of staff. In London, for instance, at the moment, 23% of doctors working in the health service were born abroad and 47% of nurses. If we were to stop that the problems we experience in parts of the service would get much worse. There is a real case to be made about the skills and attributes that these people bring, and that would create a much more balanced argument.

  16. Sir Andrew?
  (Sir Andrew Green) Chairman, I can see there is scope for a very good debate here. Apart from the points of detail my colleagues made, I think I disagree with almost every point they make, except for the need to receive genuine refugees and look after them properly. The real difficulty is that these huge numbers are making that very difficult. Chairman, you quite rightly opened some wider considerations which my colleagues have commented on, and if I may I would like to put the other side of the argument, in part because there is a very strong other side and in part because at the moment there is no other organisation or body putting those arguments. You mention history. The history of this country is that there has been no significant demographic influx of people until 1950 for about 1,000 years, and the details of that are on our website in a document marked "history". That simply is the fact and Mrs Roche was completely wrong in saying that, and I am surprised she did. Secondly, my colleague here, Mr Best, was I think speaking in favour of more or less open borders, for broad reasons, and that is a view he is perfectly entitled to take, of course. I take a slightly different view because it seems to me that we have rather a small island here. It is the fact that the population density—and this is the point, it is not arrivals per population, it is population density—of England is twice that of Germany, it is four times that of France and it is 12 times that of the United States. In that situation, we estimate that there will be at least 2 million net migration into Britain every 10 years for the indefinite future, and it could be more. (I think I will have an opportunity later, Chairman, to explain that.) That is a massive number of people, of whom two-thirds are going to London and the South East, and they are placing a very substantial burden on schools, hospitals, transport and housing—as I am sure Members of Parliament will very well know. I think in that circumstance it is simply not realistic to talk about open borders and how we need people. Opinion polls were mentioned. Can I draw your attention, Chairman, to an opinion poll that was commissioned by the Commission for Racial Equality and carried out by MORI, who are well-known. On the very last page of that, if you were to read to the last paragraph of it—and I do not suppose many people have—they say in their report "Among all ethnic groups there is a feeling that there are too many immigrants in Britain. 61% of the overall population agree with this statement as well as 46% of ethnic minority groups". I just mention that as being a factor. It has been suggested, Chairman, that there are labour shortages. As you know, there are 1.5 million people who are unemployed in Britain. That is not a high number, actually it is historically low, but there are a further 4 million whom the Government seeks to move from welfare to work. If there was joined up government we would not be trying to move 4 million people into work and bringing very large numbers of unskilled migrants into the country. It is directly where that bears, because the effect of a large number of unskilled migrants is to depress wage levels for the unskilled. There is no doubt about that; you may have seen a letter to The Financial Times by Lord Layard that made that very point. So they are actually reducing the living standards of the unskilled and reducing the incentive for those whom the Government wants to move into work to do so. The question of pensions was mentioned. Even the Home Office have abandoned that argument, for a very simple reason, that immigrants also grow older. The sheer statistical fact is—and I challenge anyone to deny it because I have first-class advice on this—that to maintain the proportion of population of working age to those who have retired (and that formulation is important) would require over one million immigrants a year until 2050. At that point, of course, our population would have doubled. Again, we would all be getting older and so you would have exactly the same problem but with double the population. So that argument is, frankly, absurd and I have a Home Office document here that recognises that. I think Mr Russell mentioned the contribution of immigrants to the Exchequer.

  17. It was the Home Office minister.
  (Sir Andrew Green) Yes. What she was doing was presenting a paper written by the Home Office. You have to read these papers quite carefully. If you actually look at how that study was done and you look at how they defined the category for the study, they defined it as anyone who was born abroad plus their dependent children. As they say themselves, that is a category of five million people and it includes American bankers, French businessmen, my mother-in-law—five million people. So, quite clearly, that is not the people that we are now talking about who are currently coming into the country. In fact, that argument has no basis. It is suggested that we need more people. The population is not declining, it will not decline for another 20 years (if then because we do not know after 20 years because they have not been born yet), nor is our workforce declining, at least significantly, again for 20 years, partly because women are now working longer. It is suggested that there is a great benefit from this very large-scale migration to our economic growth. The Economist magazine recently—about a month ago, I think—did a study in which they said that the extra economic growth per capita (again, the point that matters—you can fill any country with people and the total will go up) they guessed at about one-eighth of 1% of GDP per year.

  18. Let me stop you there, if I may.
  (Sir Andrew Green) May I make two more points?

  19. Very briefly.
  (Sir Andrew Green) It is suggested that work permits are in some way an answer to the pressures of asylum. That is complete nonsense, for a very, very simple reason; that the top countries that provide the asylum seekers—who have a total population, by the way, of 1.3 billion—are completely different from the ten countries that provide the work permit needed, except for one—China. So to suggest that work permits given to these countries solves the problem with the other countries is clearly absurd. Finally, Chairman—and I will not give you long answers in future but you did cover quite a lot of ground—there was a reference to pull factors and your own Committee, of course, has done a very full study of that. There is a new pull factor and it is an overwhelming pull factor, it is that nine out of 10 of the people who set foot in this country manage to stay here—most of them illegally. Now, if you can think of a factor that is going to pull people any more strongly than that, it would be hard to do. So I congratulate you, Chairman, on your decision to look at the question of removals, because if we do not have an effective policy for removals we do not have an effective border control. It is as clear and simple as that, however difficult it may be.

  Chairman: Thank you.