Contribution
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for poking me on the shoulder, because my hearing aids were slightly inefficient in this process. I first declare my interests as set out in the register, that I am supported by RAMP. I am grateful to my noble friend because underpinning all the discussion today is the fact that we are talking about human beings here. We are talking about people who are fleeing for their lives or fleeing from danger in a way that we cannot actually assimilate, unless you have made those connections and seen it at close hand.
This has been an interesting debate. It has spread beyond the Question that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, tabled, so I would like to focus on the issues. First, there is an acceptance that for people fleeing from these disastrous situations, long-term accommodation in hotels is just not suitable, particularly for families and children. While people are waiting for their asylum claims to be considered they should have safe, secure accommodation where they can cook for themselves and easily access local support and services and there is local support available from many sources. It is from this context that they will be more able to engage with the asylum process itself, effectively present their case for protection and start to feel secure and stable. It is true that accommodating asylum seekers in hotels is not appropriate for the communities in which they find themselves. It is also deeply unsuitable for the individuals themselves, so this situation has to be changed and altered.
One of the reasons why, which the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, mentioned, is the cost to the other services we provide in the rest of the world. Our overseas development budget has already been pulled back to 0.5% from 0.7%, and I hope that we can get back to it, but huge chunks of that money have been used inside the United Kingdom and diverted from the sort of work which might help people not to make the journeys to other countries by improving their quality of life closer to home.
Last Thursday there was an Oral Question in which I talked about the opportunity of reducing reliance on hotels for asylum seekers by giving them the ability to pay for their own accommodation by granting them permission to work, and the Minister will not be surprised that I am returning to this matter. In the Minister’s reply he said:
“Sometimes … asylum seekers could be put in positions whereby they are undertaking work they have no legal right to do”.—[Official Report, 16/1/25; col. 1268.]
On these Benches, we support the three measures the Government are taking: cracking down on the gangs, producing shorter waiting lists and providing dispersed accommodation. Those are all perfectly proper. We would like to see the Government moving a step further, as the Government’s chair of the Migration Advisory Committee has said, by giving permission for people to work while they are waiting. There must surely be ways in which the Government can deal with what they think might be the problem. They say it might be a push factor, but there is no evidence of that. In fact, we are the outlier: we are one of only three countries in Europe which do not allow people to work.
The other area I think the Minister will be concerned about is people disappearing, but I believe that the opposite will be more likely. When people are in some form of secure work, they are not going to try to disappear into the black economy. I hope the Minister can produce evidence to the contrary of the assertion I am making, but there is no evidence that this will be the case.
In conclusion, I agree that the ideal would be to have asylum claims decided right first time, but within six months is clearly not happening. It is taking longer and longer, and the appeals backlog is causing that to happen. So can we expect the Government’s proposals in their White Paper to actually address some of these very key issues we are raising in this debate, particularly about how we are going to deal with people who are here in that queue, waiting for their decision to be made?