Delays in the Asylum System

[David Mundell in the Chair]

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I beg to move,

That this House has considered delays in the asylum system.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. I thank the many Members attending the debate for their ongoing efforts to push the Government to address the delays in the asylum system. It is shocking that not a single Conservative Member thought it necessary to take part in a debate on such an important issue.

I pay tribute to the many organisations and charities that campaign tirelessly to raise awareness of the issue, as well as those—including the Refugee Council, Detention Action, the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, and Lift the Ban, to name just a few—that provide vital support to some of the most vulnerable people on our planet. So many people are worthy of recognition for their incredible work, such as Councillor Wilson Nkurunziza, Councillor Irfan Syed and Stockport’s own Mrs Sandy Broadhurst. There are also those who do so much at national level to keep the issue at the forefront of everyone’s minds, such as Lord Alf Dubs.

In my region, Refugee Action Manchester and the Refugee Council provide life-saving and life-changing support to asylum seekers, while Stockport Baptist church in my constituency has done so much over the years to help to raise funds to provide accommodation, food, pocket money and transport to those in need. I am grateful to the volunteers from the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, who support the incredibly vulnerable people who are subject to immigration control. Significantly, they have worked with local authorities across Greater Manchester, and seven of the 10 councils have signed up to remote asylum interviewing for looked-after children: Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford and Wigan.

Our country has a proud history of standing up for and protecting refugees, who are among the most vulnerable people on earth, having undertaken perilous journeys to reach our shores to seek sanctuary from the very worst of humanity. We are the fifth richest country in the world and that is absolutely the right thing to do. It is also right that our country provides shelter to people—not excluding them, but enabling them to earn a living to support themselves and their family.

I am not going to enforce a formal time limit on speeches at this stage, but I expect Members to adhere to an informal limit of around four minutes. I call Virendra Sharma.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell, and I congratulate my good and hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) on securing this important debate.

This country had a long-standing tradition of providing sanctuary to those fleeing danger and violence. It is our duty to assist those in need, and in a timely manner, especially those who have already suffered grievously through war and persecution, yet when those most in need arrive here, they immediately find themselves confronted by an asylum system seemingly broken beyond repair.

The Refugee Council’s latest report, “Living In Limbo”, found that the number of people awaiting an initial decision for more than a year increased tenfold from over 3,000 people in 2010 to 33,000 in 2020. The cost of that failure is staggering, with every year of delay costing the Home Office at least an additional £8,000 per person. The Refugee Council estimates that the total cost of delays is over £200 million.

The Home Affairs Committee, among many other bodies, has made that message very clear over many years, yet nothing has been done to ease the plight of asylum seekers. The Home Office must simplify its asylum case processes and recruit more caseworkers. It must also undergo a thorough review to find out why it has gone so badly wrong over the last 10 years and then take appropriate action in good faith. None of the proposals in the Government’s report, entitled “New Plan for Immigration”, will get even remotely close to achieving that. In fact, the Home Secretary’s response seems to be to follow the merciless responses of her predecessors, as she suggests that asylum seekers should be held on disused ferries, or even oil rigs, or using floating walls to deter them.

We must lead by example. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers living in the UK receive just £37 a week on which to survive. After all they have gone through, that paltry sum forces even greater indignity on people who have overcome tremendous hardship just to make it here. Their suffering must not be allowed to continue in their sanctuary. In my view, asylum seekers need to be given the right to work, which would give them the chance to prosper in this country and stand on their own two feet.

Amid the despair and the delays, there is still great hope among asylum seekers. During Refugee Week at the end of June, I took part in a Working West London employment event hosted by East London Advanced Technology Training, which offers training and skills development courses for asylum seekers and refugees. I met a group of people who were crying out for the chance to contribute to this country, and I could see the rich array of skills, talent and passion they have to offer.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell.

I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) for securing this vital debate. I say to the Minister that I am angry. I am angry because, as an MP, I see the daily occurrence of the human misery caused by the failings in his Government’s asylum system. I see that everywhere in my constituency. I am angry because I see my staff dedicating so much of their time to asylum cases, although that is a mere sticking plaster on his Government’s shortcomings.

Countless examples demonstrate how the chaos in the system is inextricably linked to the human misery on display in our urban centres. Let me give one example. I will refer to the man involved as C. He was in the asylum system for four years. He made an initial application followed by a fresh claim. He waited 18 months for a decision on his fresh claim. During that time, his mental health deteriorated. He was hospitalised on several occasions following serious incidents of self-harm. He repeatedly told those helping him that he needed a decision, one way or another. The waiting was so unbearable for him that he resorted to going to the Home Office building in Liverpool and attempted to take his own life in its reception area.

I pay tribute to the work of organisations such as Asylum Link Merseyside, which, alongside MPs’ staff, do the vital work of supporting those in need of support. For all the tough talk that emanates from the Home Secretary’s mouth, it is not her self-styled steeliness that will come to define her tenure; it is incompetence. The Home Secretary is more concerned with playing to the gallery than with tackling any of the causes, symptoms or problems that exist in the system. That incompetence fails asylum seekers, fails communities and fails the British people.

Let us understand the facts. First, the problems in our asylum system long predate the pandemic. As of March 2021, the total work in progress asylum case load consisted of 109,000 cases. Since 2014, the asylum case load has doubled—yes, doubled—in size. It has been driven by both applicants waiting longer for initial decision and a growth in the number of people subject to removal action following a negative decision. Minister, we cannot separate that spiralling case load from workforce issues. These range from downgrading the decision-making grade in the Home Office earlier in the last decade, to announcing increases in weekly targets to 10, as well as failing to initiate recruitment in a timely fashion when higher executive officers started to jump ship. All of those issues have been raised time and again by the Public and Commercial Services Union and ignored by the powers that be. Even one of the former permanent secretaries, Mark Sedwill, called the decision “ill-judged”. This caused so much chaos that attrition rates in the asylum workforce reached 37%.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) on both securing and leading this debate.

As we have heard today, delays in the asylum system are currently all too common, and the impact they have on those trying to navigate that system should not be underestimated. Almost every day, I receive communications from constituents who have been left in limbo by the Home Office—constituents like Hanna, who arrived in this country from Yemen. Having made an asylum claim in early 2019, Hanna did not get a response until my office stepped in almost two years later. For years, Hanna had dreamed of completing a PhD, and she received an offer from a good university only to have to refuse it because of Home Office delays. She described that as

“one of the worst moments of my life”.

That is one example of the impact that delays have, but each week I see many more, like my constituent Erkin, a Uyghur Muslim who fled the genocide in China three years ago. He approached my office in March 2020, at which point he had been waiting more than a year for an asylum interview. It was not until earlier this year that the Home Office decided that he did not need an asylum interview after all and granted Erkin and his family refugee status on the evidence available.

With the experiences of my constituents in mind, I have three proposals for the Minister. I know that he understands these issues very well, and I look forward to hearing his response. First, the Home Office’s decision to move away from the six-month service standard needs to be reversed. As every Member will know, one of the main points of distress for our constituents who are experiencing Home Office delays is that they do not know when their torment will end or at what point they can take action to expedite the process. Giving claimants a clear timescale is a key part of reducing delays and the distress those delays cause our constituents.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) for securing this important debate.

Only this morning I received an email from a constituent who has been waiting for more than four and a half years for a decision on her asylum claim. That is four and a half years she has been unable to work, four and a half years of mental anguish, and four and a half years excluded from the fabric of the country to which she desperately wants to contribute because it offered her a place of safety. This is no way to treat a fellow human being who fled unimaginable horrors in search of a safe, secure life.

We are lucky in Salford to have the brilliant Salford Forum for Refugees and People Seeking Asylum, which is led by Councillors Wilson Nkurunziza, Irfan Syed, Alexis Shama and a team of brilliant people who have established a support network for people such as my constituent. Sadly, her case is one of thousands and most areas do not have a support network like ours. The Select Committee on Home Affairs, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, the National Audit Office and the all-party parliamentary group on refugees have all raised concerns over the rise in the backlog of cases over recent years and the failure of the Home Office so far to address the issue.

As we have heard, the Government’s “New Plan for Immigration” sadly appears to contain no proposals to address this backlog, and I fear it will make the problem much worse. The most dangerous part of the proposals is that someone’s means of arrival will determine how worthy they are of protection in the UK. Asylum seekers arriving through anything other than resettlement will receive a lesser form of protection, including temporary status, with no access to financial support and limited rights to family reunion. In fact, the new proposals go as far as criminalising anyone arriving “irregularly”, not through official channels. As we know, people fleeing war and persecution are rarely afforded the luxury of arriving through official channels.

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) for raising this massively important issue. How we treat people who come to this country seeking sanctuary is probably the most significant measure of whether we are allowed to call ourselves Great Britain. It speaks of us as a people and it speaks around the world about what kind of country we are.

I have some figures of which people will perhaps be aware. At present, 66,185 people in our asylum system are waiting for a decision—that is the highest figure for a decade. Of those people, 50,000 have been waiting for an initial decision for more than six months—again, that figure is the highest for a decade. In 2014, 87% of cases were decided within six months; in 2020, it was just 20%.

I understand, as we have heard it before, that Ministers will say that that is down to the covid crisis, the pressure on the system and excessive numbers. The reality, of course, is that the number of asylum seekers coming to this country fell by 21% last year, to among the lowest recent levels, with just 35,355 applications—down from the height of 84,000 in 2002. That gives us a bit of a sense that what we have is a massive backlog that has a colossal impact on the lives of people who have already gone through desperate situations.

Let us not have any nonsense about them being bogus asylum seekers, because we know that the majority of them will succeed in claiming refugee status and a right to remain in the end. By the way, if I apply for a job and I do not get it, I was not bogus; I was unsuccessful. The notion that people who come here seeking asylum are doing something nefarious is a rotten thing to start off with in any event.

The idea that we are being swamped by asylum seekers, and that that is why there is a problem, does not stack up. What does stack up is a failure of Government—perhaps we could be generous and argue that it is a failure of Governments over the years—to tackle this issue. Their lack of competence is being disguised by the bogus rhetoric that we have too many asylum seekers. As I say, we have fewer this year than last year by the order of 21%, so there is even less excuse for this backlog than there has been in the past.

Our virtual participants were very good at sticking to the four-minute time limit. Members here physically should try to do that as well.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) on securing this hugely important debate.

The current delays in the asylum system are appalling, with 66,000 people waiting for an initial decision from the Home Office on their asylum claim—the highest number for more than a decade. Three quarters of them have been waiting for more than six months, with many waiting in a state of severe anxiety for as long as three years or more. I am dealing with cases in my constituency of people waiting seven or eight years for a decision. That is why we must fully support the Lift the Ban campaign, which calls on the Government to overturn the ban on people seeking asylum being able to work. How do the Government expect people to survive for months and years without earning a living?

Under this Government, the number of children waiting for an initial decision for more than a year has increased more than twelvefold—from 563 in 2010, to 6,887 in 2020. That appalling record robs those children and young people, who have already endured unimaginable suffering, of their childhood. The size of the backlog is a result not of an increasing number of asylum applications but rather of the inability of the Home Office to keep pace with initial decisions. This is a crisis of the Government’s own making and it stems from their utter disregard towards those seeking safety. I fear that this crisis will only get worse, as the Government’s immigration plans lack basic humanity and represent the latest step in their pernicious demonisation of migrants and asylum seekers. They have rightly been criticised by human rights organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the British Red Cross.

Yesterday, as we heard, the Government confirmed that they will press ahead with the Nationality and Borders Bill, which is anti-refugee to its core. The Bill will enable the UK Government to block visas for overseas visitors if the Home Secretary believes that their country of origin is refusing to co-operate in taking back rejected asylum seekers or offenders. It will also allow for the removal of asylum seekers from the UK while their asylum claim or appeal is pending, which opens the door to offshore asylum processing, and family reunion rights will be further curtailed as well. Analysis of Home Office data by the Refugee Council found that, under the reforms, 9,000 people who would be accepted as refugees under the current rules may no longer be given a place of safety in the UK due to their method of arrival. Time and again, the Government have chosen to turn their back on those seeking protection from climate catastrophe, war, torture, persecution and other heinous acts. The Bill will compound the misery of people fleeing intolerable conditions.