MR KEITH BEST, MR NICK HARDWICK AND SIR ANDREW GREEN

TUESDAY 17 SEPTEMBER 2002

  140. It is different if you are just over the border but not if you are in Iraq. This business of counting people out and counting people in, was it stopped because it was extremely bureaucratic and difficult technologically to implement? Is that right?
  (Sir Andrew Green) My understanding is that it was happening as a matter of course. It was intended to be a saving and I think there were some arguments about its effectiveness, but the issue is one of deterrence really. All these communities know that if they come as a student or visitor no-one checks their departure.

  Chairman: Thank you for that. Mrs Prentice is going to ask some questions about removals.

  141. In some ways we have touched on many of the issues that we are now looking at, and I think Sir Andrew has answered this question already, so I am going direct it to Mr Best and Mr Hardwick. Do you accept that an effective removals system would act as a deterrent to people who are really not proper asylum seekers?
  (Mr Best) The presupposition is—and I am not sure whether it has yet been proved beyond peradventure—the fact that you can remain in this country unlawfully is a pull factor, so then of course it must be that if you could effectively remove those who did not have lawful entitlement to remain, accepting all the caveats you have put before, that must be a disincentive if people are motivated to come to the United Kingdom for that reason. I think it is also a question of public confidence in the system because again I acknowledged earlier that probably the thing that exercises most members of the public in this field is this problem, as they see it and indeed as is perceived to be by the media, of a failure to remove those who no longer have a lawful entitlement to remain.
  (Sir Andrew Green) Which it is.

  142. Do you think that the Home Office has made a rod for its own back by setting itself a target for removal which it cannot achieve and that is adding to people's lack of confidence both in them and the system?
  (Mr Best) I think it was a blunderbuss in the foot, I have to say. To come up with a figure of 30,000, which Mr Jack Straw did when he was Home Secretary, and to have that slightly changed by Mr David Blunkett into 2,500 a month where you end up with the same figure which has now been dropped, as I understand it, pending looking at new targets (at the moment the only target is to remove as many as possible) I think it is better for the Government and the general public not to be led down a false trail on this one and for people to see the Government using its resources effectively in trying to rehabilitate people back in their country of origin, without saying what those targets should be. It seems to me targets are entirely meaningless in this because it pre-supposes that you have got a constant flow-through of people and that the percentages of success and failure are going to remain constant as well, which of course they do not. The world is changing all the time. The profile of asylum seekers is changing all the time. It could be remarkably different in three or four years' time to what it is now. How can you possibly have targets even for a year let alone for longer which are meaningful against that background? You cannot.
  (Mr Hardwick) I think it is very important that asylum seekers know and have confidence in what will happen to them when they come through the system and they know that if they have been persecuted they will be allowed to stay and if they have not there is a good chance they will be properly ejected and returned. People are shelling out a lot of money to get here and if they are unlikely to be allowed to stay that will act as a disincentive. I agree with Keith Best that it is also important for public confidence in the system. In order for that to happen, it is about getting the decision making right. I think these big measures that have been announced about accommodation centres actually miss the point. What the Home Secretary should be doing is focusing like a laser on the decision-making process, getting those done quickly and fairly, so those people who are rejected can be quickly and properly returned and those who are not can properly rebuild their lives and stay. That is the key issue and we keep missing the point.
  (Sir Andrew Green) I rather agree with that last remark. I think the question of public confidence is important. Both Mr Best and Mr Hardwick have referred to it. In this latest set of statistics which you have in front of you, if you look at the figures you will see that 100,000 people in one year remained illegally. Here is what the Minister said in announcing the figures: "The statistics present a mixed picture . . ." She goes on to say: "Funding from the Spending Review 2000 has resulted in a much improved end-to-end process with greater management and control of our asylum system". It does not seem to me that is a statement which accurately reflects the true picture behind these statistics.

  143. That is something perhaps we can raise with the Home Secretary when we speak to him. Why is it so difficult for the Government to remove failed asylum seekers or failed immigrants?
  (Mr Hardwick) For some of the reasons that we have already discussed, such as the length of time. There are very practical difficulties that the Home Office has set out in its memorandum. To go back to the point the Committee made earlier, the point here is not perfection. The point is can we improve in significant ways on performance as it is at the moment? And yes, I think we can, but only if we keep focused and only if we stop changing the system every three years and only if we concentrate on the right things and not get distracted. Even then, there will be people who cannot get back, and that has to be accepted.

  144. There is, of course, always the safe third country people could go to in some cases but we will not go down that route for a moment. The Home Office will say on non-asylum cases that the removal is much less problematic, in fact so unproblematic they do not even have targets for that. Do you think that the Home Office could learn lessons from that, if that is the case? Are we right to assume that the Home Office is right on this?
  (Mr Hardwick) Non-asylum cases are a bit outside my field.
  (Sir Andrew Green) The Home Office paper did say they have internal targets but they do not say what they are. Their statistics indicate that they remove about 5,000 cases a year which are non-asylum cases. As we discussed earlier, nobody knows how many non-asylum cases there are. I believe the effort is directed at asylum cases because that is where the public concern is and the non-asylum cases are somewhat left to one side. Do we really think that there are only 5,000 a year of visitors, students and others who ought to be removed? Clearly it is unlikely to be as small as that.
  (Mr Best) The whole immigration non-asylum field, sadly, has been treated as a poor cousin over the years and the whole thing has been dominated by the asylum issue, and that is why we are so concerned, as we have put in our memorandum, about the absence in the current Bill, for example, of setting meaningful targets for the Home Office in the non-asylum cases. There are students who are losing irrevocably a whole year of their academic life purely because of bureaucratic delays. There are relatives dying before they are able to join their loved ones in the country because of bureaucratic delays, even when ultimately they would have been successful. These are serious problems of how we as a country treat human beings who are not only seeking to come to this country but British residents in this country as well who are affected by those decisions. It seems to us that really we need to see much more from the Government about having meaningful targets in the non-asylum field as well. At the moment, as you will have seen from our memorandum, there is a paucity of those. There are targets but they are not monitorable. Nobody is keeping tags on it.
  (Sir Andrew Green) We ought to be fair to the Home Office on this. The fact is they are overwhelmed by huge numbers of applications mainly for asylum, the majority of when are not genuine. So they do have limits and, as Mr Best said, it is the perfectly genuine cases, including refugee cases that are genuine, that are suffering from these huge numbers. We have to find some means of deterring them. The latest figures from UNHCR show Europe as a whole down by 12% but up by 8% in the United Kingdom. So any deterrent effect that these measures or the prospect that these measures could be thought to have has clearly not come through, to put it mildly.

  145. We are going backwards and forwards on the same issue.
  (Mr Best) We have never understood why there is not a fast track to identify those who are likely to be able to remain in this country, and why people have to wait for months, even though the timescale is coming down, to be told whether their refugee status has been established, rather than if we know they are from a particular country to which you cannot remove people at the present time at least put them out of their misery at an early stage and say, "We are going to give you exceptional leave to remain and it will take a little longer to process your asylum claim." That seems to me to be one of the most basic things that could have been done, and indeed my understanding is that it is done in Canada but is not done here.

  146. We have dealt pretty much with voluntary removals and whether they can be expanded. Mr Best and Mr Hardwick both think they could. I want to check with you, Mr Best, when you say you would like to expand them and make them more generous, how much more generous?
  (Mr Best) I think it will depend on the individual circumstances and the country to which people are going back. I share Nick Hardwick's view about the individually tailored casework to people. One of the problems is the whole debate has been dominated by statistical matters rather than issues of human concern to individuals. If you are trying to send somebody back to Afghanistan, for example, one of the first things you have got to do is have an agency on the ground to find them accommodation away from the area of persecution and, secondly, you have got to help these people either back into employment or into self-employment even if that means giving them a sum of money to buy a plot of land or something like that, to be able to do that to ensure that when people get back to the country of origin it is going to be a permanent situation.

  147. I accept the point that people are not sitting in Kandahar thinking, "If I made it after six months in the United Kingdom, I would get a sum of money", but are there not people sitting in France and Germany who come from Afghanistan who think, "If I make this last step it is like landing on Go in Monopoly"?
  (Mr Best) That is why I say it has got to be tailored to the individual and clearly there will be certain persons who are targeted more. If you look at the figures, and I think this is central to what Sir Andrew was saying, consistently month after month there have been four or five nationalities dominating numerically those who are seeking asylum. It comes as no surprise—they are certainly not top of the holiday travel list—so people certainly understand why people are coming from those countries. If your desire is to enable as many people as possible from those countries to return, who numerically would represent the largest number, then you would clearly concentrate on those countries like Afghanistan and now particularly Sri Lanka of course where there is now quite a considerable move of people going back to Sri Lanka.

  148. Unless you have got something specific, and that was a relatively specific question, I wanted to move on to something that the IAS and also the Refugee Council have raised which is your concerns that some people who are taken into detention are not warned in advance. Do you not have a slight sympathy with the Home Office view that if you inform people about the removal process they are likely to disappear?
  (Mr Best) First of all, we do not know how many, but let's take Sir Andrew's speculative figures of a large number of over-stayers in this country who have lost all contact with the Home Office. The Home Office do not know where they are and they do not know how to find them without putting disproportionate resources into trying to achieve that. That is one of the biggest problems and it is arguably those people who cause the greatest offence to the casual observers who are allowed to remain rather than those who have recently over-stayed. So that is one problem and it seems to us that much greater use could have been made of reporting, for example, to keep in touch with people over a longer period than may have been done in the past. But, secondly, there is the question of people who are complying with the requirements of the Home Office who without being warned that removal is going to take place immediately are one day removed when they turn up for reporting. That is not only going to cause resentment and misery, it is also going to mean that people, once the message gets out, will fail to observe the reporting. So it becomes a self-defeating mechanism and we have now got a very large number of examples, some of them referred to me by members of the general public who are appalled at what is going on, of people abiding by Home Office requirements to report regularly and then one day getting removed. I will give you an example of a Romanian woman only two or three weeks ago who was working, helping elderly people, lawfully, the Home Office having allowed her to work, and she turned up one day to report and they said, "We are taking you into detention, you are going to be removed tomorrow, you can make one phone call on your mobile phone and then it is being confiscated." She was then taken to Harmondsworth and the next day she was removed. The landlord no doubt wondered why his tenant had done a bunk, no doubt wondered why all her personal possessions were left there because she was given no chance to collect them whatsoever, and I suspect that a few old ladies wondered what had happened to the care that was due to them that day because she did not turn up for it.

  149. Sir Andrew, if you can address this question of warning people in advance.
  (Sir Andrew Green) The first point is the point you make, if you warn them they will abscond.
  (Mr Best) That is not proven.
  (Sir Andrew Green) They are likely to. I think Mr Best has a point on the humane aspect, people who have been here for some time and put roots down. The actual circumstances are appalling like the ones he mentioned. There are two things. One is to deter or dissuade people from coming here and to have a system that works including a removals system, and the other is to have a rapid turnaround, so you sort people out and move them on. Frankly, I do not believe that the present legal system is capable of that. I think that most of the evidence that we have heard today, and you must have heard a thousand times, indicates that it is just not workable.
  (Mr Hardwick) Can I comment quickly on that. One new factor in this matter is the Home Office introduction of an asylum registration card and registration requirement for introducing new asylum seekers and it does seem to me that if the Home Office can show that somebody has kept regularly in touch with them, has abided by all the rules it would be perverse at that stage to—

  150.—What happened to the Romanian lady.
  (Mr Hardwick) From my own day-to-day practical experience I would say that any idea that all these people go into hiding is misplaced. It is very often the case that the Home Office lose them and force them out of the system. I am certainly aware of cases where people have come to us and said, "Look, I keep writing to the Home Office with my new address. They keep writing to my old address. I am going to get into terrible trouble. Can you do something?" I think the absconding problem is over-stated at times.

  151. From what we have heard today, if we take this figure of 97,500 people who have not got asylum, ELR or are successful in their appeals and who have not been removed or have not returned voluntarily—and we know that the Government is incapable at the moment of removing 30,000 a year because they have dropped the target—do any of you believe that it is possible to have a removals policy that can cope with that sort of number of people in a year or, without prejudging our inquiry, have we also got to look elsewhere?
  (Sir Andrew Green) I think that is an extremely good question, if I may say so, and I think you also have to pose the converse. If the Government cannot remove very large numbers of people who have no right to be here, firstly, that is wrong in principle; secondly, it would be very unacceptable to a large number of people; and, thirdly, it is a huge pull factor for more people to come. What you are looking at or may be looking at is a progressive loss of control of your borders. I think we have seen the start of that. That seems to me a very serious matter. It leads me to the view that I have just expressed that the legal framework that we have is hopelessly out of date and is based on a Convention that is irrelevant to the present day and needs a complete revision.
  (Mr Hardwick) I would answer that differently. If you are saying can you completely eradicate the problem; no. But can you substantially improve on its performance; yes. I would stress again that the answer is not simply to focus on the enforcement end of the pipeline but also to focus at the beginning of the decision making and making sure that is done better and more quickly than happens at the moment. If there is sustained attention given to that, the numbers of removals will in time increase.

  152. Do you think it would be possible to get to half of that 97,000 either voluntarily or compulsorily returning?
  (Mr Hardwick) My view is that the target should be, if people have been properly removed after a fair process, all of them. That is what we should be aiming for. In time we should work towards delivering that level of integrity into the system. Obviously it is easier to remove people if you have made the decisions more quickly than if you have made them slowly. It is clearly going to be a problem in terms of a backlog, but we can avoid the problem reoccurring and restore confidence to the system.
  (Mr Best) The 1951 Convention is a remarkable document which is largely as relevant today as it was over 50 years ago, and its durability and its effectiveness is demonstrated by the number of people who are successful in claiming asylum. Sadly, it is a function of what is happening in the rest of the world that so many need to do so. As far as the integrity of the system is concerned, that is what we are really talking about. If the integrity of the system means that people can see a beginning-to-end process whereby people claim asylum and if they fail then they go, then I see no reason why you cannot start that process along the lines of what we have been suggesting, using what I described somewhat crudely as the carrot rather than the stick. I do not know if the Home Office has a special line to the Treasury. What I can say is that in my experience of working in this field for over nine years, I have seen a very large sum of money thrown almost indiscriminately at certain aspects which have subsequently failed. I think that money could have been much better spent in a comprehensive and cohesive way. This is one of the areas where money could be spent more effectively. It seems to me it is a matter not for us but for you because it comes down to a question of political will. If this is perceived to be a sufficient problem exercising the British public such as for there to be a need to take action, then action and money will take place.

  153. Can I leave one point with Sir Andrew. What would you do about the fact that some of the countries from which asylum seekers come will not accept them back? For example, in the case of Iraqi Kurds, Turkey will not co-operate.
  (Sir Andrew Green) I would do what the Prime Minister was trying to do, which is lean on them. He has not leant hard enough.

  154. You do accept, do you not, that one of the reasons why they have not been returned is not because they have disappeared but because there was no means of getting them taken back. China, for example, does not accept people back.
  (Sir Andrew Green) That is correct. It is both, of course. Chairman, I think time will tell. I do not disagree with Mr Hardwick. We have got a system; let's see if we can make it work. It is not working and the key issue, which Mr Best touched on just now, is public confidence. If we do not get this system straight and get people out of the country that have no right to be here, we will simply lose public confidence.

  155. One other point that I wanted to check. One of our interests is how can we humanise the deportation process which is very brutal, of which we have all had first-hand experience, often involving children, often involving people who have set down roots, their children plucked out of school classes who may have been here all their conscious lives. Even if there are not children, the fact is these are people who got themselves here probably by borrowing from relatives and scraping together every penny they can to pay the traffickers and they are about to be dumped back in their home country without any resources whatever, and some of the home countries—The Congo and Afghanistan—are very brutal places at the best of times. So would you accept that some form of re-settlement grant should be paid, perhaps varied according to circumstances, to everyone who is being returned?
  (Sir Andrew Green) I think it needs to be considered at least on an individual country basis, as Mr Best says. The fact is successive governments have allowed this to fall into a shambles.

  156. We have agreed about all that, we know about all that. I just want to stick on one point because even in Hong Kong, which operated one of the most ruthless repatriations with the repatriation of the Vietnamese Boat people, and Chinese immigrants from the mainland of China, put a few dollars in their pocket so that when they stepped out of the plane at the other end, they could get themselves home and perhaps survive for a week or two. We have no disagreement about that.
  (Sir Andrew Green) If that was achieving it without adding to the pull factor, then do it. It is much better for them and much better for us.
  (Mr Hardwick) I do not think it is simply a question of money. I was with a parliamentary delegation that went to Kosovo after the evacuation and they did get a grant and it is very interesting for whom that return has been successful and for whom it has not. If you were young and you spoke English and had some IT skills, then you could make a go of it. If you were older, you did not speak English and you did not have IT skills, it is incredibly difficult to survive. There are older people who are living in absolute poverty. One of the things we can do is think about ways in which we can use the time which people do spend here more productively so that if they do go back they have skills and the means of supporting themselves back in their own country.

  157. Again, that is something that is likely to apply to the more upwardly mobile and dynamic anyway.
  (Mr Hardwick) Of course, there are differences. Given that most asylum seekers are going to be young, there is lots more you can do to give them a grounding of the skills whereby if they are accepted as refugees and taken in they can use them as a base to do things here, and if they do go back, they have got a basic set of skills that might improve their economic circumstances there. I think it is in our interests to do that.
  (Mr Best) I agree with that entirely. This is why it is so short-sighted not allowing people to work and improve their skills, and not educating people and helping people into new skills here. Whether they are going to stay permanently or whether they are going to have to go, it is to everybody's advantage that that happens.

  158. Would you accept that, Sir Andrew?
  (Sir Andrew Green) Yes but, again, it turns on removals. If you do not have removals, this is another incentive for people to come.

  159. Gentlemen, thank you very much. I think, on balance, we have shed more light than heat, although there were moments when I wondered!
  (Sir Andrew Green) Thank you for chairing it so effectively, if I may say so.

  Chairman: Thank you very much for coming.