Contribution
I rise to support the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, in every single word of her in introduction about the move-on period. It always struck me as very strange that you create pilot scheme that you know you want to evaluate, then halfway through you take out part of the pilot simply to address a problem which is occurring in the community at that time. I accept that it was obviously a tough time for the Government when there were all those protests outside hotels in the summer. Our Amendment 73, which follows this one, would help the Government reduce the numbers on the waiting lists. However, having a smaller number of days as soon as you get your status is just impossible; 28 days creates a cliff edge between destitution and homelessness, which was a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister.
The pilot is due to come to an end sometime during the autumn. I know that, in government terms, the parts of a year are flexible; autumn, in this case, is now going to be somewhere closer to Christmas—you might call it late autumn. However, the few weeks since the announcement in September have meant that there are a significant cohort who are being put into the homelessness category. That has been confirmed to me by people in local authorities, whom I met last weekend, who could not understand—with the success of the pilot on their doorstep, and making and seeing it work—why they were going to have to face up to the problem of homelessness.
There is a stronger point in that the longer period of 56 days was very important because it enabled asylum seekers to get crucial support during the period that they were looking after themselves. It assisted with their integration into society and allowed them to stand on their own two feet much more quickly. It also, of course, reduced hardship and homelessness. We reduced the burden of homelessness on local authorities, prevented newly recognised refugees from becoming completely destitute and enabled them to make the best choices for themselves and their families. Can the Minister say what consultation was had with local authorities prior to reverting to 28 days? Clearly, if the problem is being dumped on to local authorities, which then have to deal with homelessness, they might have expected to have some consultation and time for that.
Amendment 73 deals with “Nightingale” centres. This is a means by which we seek to improve and speed up the approval system. It calls for the establishing of processing centres to clear the asylum backlog for initial decisions within six months. The primary objective is to speed up the process; successive Governments have promised greater efficiency and promptly created their own backlogs, demonstrating that efficiency and fairness must go hand in hand. A functioning asylum system is one in which people’s claims are assessed swifty and accurately. The benefit will be a reduction in costly hotel accommodation. The enormous backlogs have put impossible pressure on asylum accommodation, forcing the use of expensive hotels at scale, costing the taxpayer significant sums—around about £8 million a day on hotel accommodation alone.
By enabling the creation of temporary facilities for expedited assessment closer to where people are based, rather than moving them some distance to have their assessment, we can move people out of costly temporary accommodation and thereby reduce the asylum support budget. There are more than 90,000 people stuck in the Home Office’s asylum backlog, which are cases awaiting an initial decision. Of those, over half have been waiting more than six months and over one-quarter more than one year. This is a humanitarian crisis—created, of course, by the Conservative Government, who just put people in limbo, which went on and on while people queued up without any potential for a decision. I know that this Government have had to pick up a very tricky issue here, but we need to move it on as fast as possible. The policy of housing asylum seekers in hotels is disastrous for asylum seekers and for communities —we all know that. The situation needs to be addressed urgently, as an emergency.