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

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 107
of affairs. ... [this] uncompromising draconian policy contemplates a life so destitute
that to my mind no civilised nation can tolerate it.
The Tory social security secretary, Peter Lilley, proceeded to demonstrate
that that was exactly parliament’s intention. He asked parliament to reverse
the Court of Appeal’s ruling by passing new primary legislation. In spite of
strong opposition in the House of Lords, the 1996 Asylum and Immigration
Act was passed, incorporating the new rules on benefits for asylum seekers.
Lawyers then went to court against Kensington and Chelsea Council, and
won the judgment that somebody without any money could be held to be
vulnerable under homelessness legislation, and should therefore be housed.
In a third case, in the High Court on 8 October 1996, four asylum seekers
won the judgment that they were eligible for support under the 1948
National Assistance Act, which obliges local authorities to provide shelter
and food for anybody who is destitute for whatever reason, and that this had
not been changed by the 1996 Act, which did not mention it. Mr Justice
Collins commented that he found it:
impossible to believe that Parliament had intended that an asylum seeker, who was
lawfully here and who could not lawfully be removed from the country, should be left
destitute, starving and at risk of grave illness and even death because he could find no
one to provide him with the bare necessities of life.
He added that if parliament attempted to pass a law restating its intentions,
it would be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and the
Geneva Convention on Refugees. His judgment was upheld in an appeal on
17 February 1997 by the master of the rolls, Lord Woolf, and two other
judges, who wrote that ‘The plight of asylum-seekers who are in the position
of the respondents obviously can and should provoke deep sympathy. Their
plight is indeed horrendous.’ The Times reported that:
The four asylum seekers who brought the case are a Romanian who arrived aboard
a lorry last July, has slept rough under Waterloo Bridge and has nowhere to live, no
money and speaks no English; an Algerian who arrived last July and has slept rough
in Hyde Park, London; a Chinese citizen who arrived last May; and an Iraqi Kurd who
arrived secretly last August.
After this, and until the introduction of Labour’s plans for a Home Office-run
voucher and accommodation scheme, asylum seekers were more or less
supplied ‘with the bare necessities of life’. In addition, the 1989 Children’s
Act was used to help families with children. The changes meant that asylum
seekers were supported not from the central government-funded social
security budget, thus making a ‘saving’ of approximately £200 million a
year, but from the already much depleted social services budgets of a fairly
small number of local authorities, most of them in deprived inner London.
The much-publicised ‘burden’ on local authorities is of the government’s
making. Although the Conservative government decided to reimburse local
authorities at the rate of £165 a week for each asylum seeker, this was said