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

110 Open Borders
of local authority support in those years was £650. The cost under the ‘new
support arrangements – white paper proposals’ was expected also to be
£650 in 2000/01, and to rise to £666 in 2001/02. All these extra costs,
and more, are accounted for by the extra costs of administration; asylum
seekers themselves actually receive less. Since the number of unresolved
asylum cases is now over 100,000, and depending how many of them are
allowed to work, the government thus appears to be willing to spend up to
£270 million of public money to make life harder for refugees, in the hope
of deterring future applications. The white paper, in paragraph 8.20, put it
like this:
Cash based support is administratively convenient, and usually though not inevitably
less expensive in terms of unit cost. Provision in kind is more cumbersome to
administer, but experience has shown that this is less attractive and provides less of
a financial inducement for those who would be drawn by a cash scheme. The number
of asylum applications fell by 30 per cent following the withdrawal of some social
security benefits in 1996.
Asylum seekers are to subsist on vouchers and small amounts of cash worth
70 per cent of income support. Although the home secretary Jack Straw
claimed that the support on offer amounted to 90 per cent of normal benefits
rather than 70 per cent when utility bills were taken into account, most
interpretations are that even on this basis it would amount to at most 76 per
cent. Asylum seekers are to be denied the protection of the National
Assistance, Housing and Children’s Acts. For the first time families are to be
included as well as single people, and local authorities are prohibited from
helping them. Outcry about the needs of children in particular in committee
in the House of Commons resulted in a residual role for the Children’s Act,
and an increase in the amount of cash from £1 for adults and 50p a day for
children to £10 a week for each adult or child. But this concession was
deducted from the value of the vouchers. The vouchers, as before, are usable
only in designated shops and issued in fixed amounts, from which no change
is to be given. iNexile’s article (see above, p. 109) concludes as follows:
Vouchers will be stigmatising, humiliating and degrading for those asylum seekers
who flee to the UK after April 2,000. ‘If the vouchers are to work’, Bob Ilunga [of the
Zairean Congolese Community Association] told iNexile, ‘then they need to be flexible,
in smaller denominations and exchangeable at other shops. Then people could exist
in dignity and the scheme would work’.
The reality, of course, is that we already have a system like that in place. It’s called
cash.
The 1999 act states that support will be ‘discretionary’, in the sense that it
will be based on an assessment of whether the person is destitute or not.
Asylum seekers will be expected to go to their communities and families first
before seeking support from the Home Office. At a conference organised by
Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, the National Assembly Against
Racism and the Jewish Council for Racial Equality in October 1999, the