Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

88 Open Borders
If the government does actually protect asylum seekers from the activities of
such lawyers this would be welcome. But the fact that the reasons the
government gives for controlling ‘unscrupulous advisers’ are solely that they
allegedly waste public funds and string out abusive claims does not inspire
confidence.
The 1999 act abolished the so-called white list. But it leaves open the
possibility that those whose claims are considered unfounded, and who are
likely in practice to come from former ‘white list’ countries, will be subjected
to ‘fast-track procedures’. In a move that has not received much attention,
it potentially greatly reduces the right of appeal by ‘consolidating multiple
appeal rights into a single appeal right and strengthening the role of the
Immigration Appeal Tribunal’: ‘The intention is that in most cases the appeal
before the adjudicator should produce finality and that the entire process
should be completed within six months.’ It abolishes the separate right of
appeal against deportation. Specific deadlines are to be imposed on asylum
seekers, not the Home Office. The period for presenting further material after
an initial interview is to be shortened from 28 days to five days. ‘While large
backlogs remain’, says the White Paper, ‘abusive applicants will continue to
believe that they can exploit the system.’
But the backlogs do remain, and they are growing. By January 2000 the
backlog had risen, not fallen, from 70,000 to 103,000. The government’s
attempts to speed up initially failed, mired in the incompetence of the Home
Office which attempted to introduce a new computer system, which failed,
at the same time as it was moving its Croydon offices. Only 425 decisions on
asylum claims were made in January 1999, compared to nearly 4,000 per
month in 1998. (However, in 2000 the government claimed to be exceeding
the latter figure.) The £77 million computerisation scheme contracted with
Siemens Business Services was investigated by the National Audit Office; by
March 1999 it was 14 months behind schedule, and the plans to sack 500
immigration officials had to be abandoned. Siemens also had the contract to
computerise the Passport Agency; its failure there caused a flurry of publicity
when people missed their holidays. But the problems for refugees are much
greater. In January 2000 a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts
Committee recognised that delay ‘has caused enormous personal distress to
hundreds of thousands of applicants and their families’. Lunar House in
Croydon had more than 200,000 paper files occupying 14 miles of shelves.
Some 150,000 of these files are now partly or totally inaccessible, some of
them in underground storage filled with fumes from a car park above.
Telephone lines are constantly jammed. Letters are not opened, let alone
answered or attached to the relevant file. The Home Office admitted it was
holding 22,000 passports of foreign nationals, many of them belonging to
businessmen and other supposedly desirable visitors requiring visa
extensions, as well as those of refugees. Many refugees wait in detention
centres and prisons. Others queue for hours on end outside Lunar House, in
a concrete and sunless ‘wind tunnel’; once inside, they discover incompe-