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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

Although I am getting comments from my hon. Friends, I accept that point. These are not easy matters and we do not help the quality of debate by flipping accusations across the Chamber. We are more likely to come to decisions that will benefit our country and, in particular, those seeking asylum if we do not throw about accusations relating to good faith or otherwise, either inside our parties or across the Floor of the House. A debate such as this does not respond well to party political point scoring. The other mess relating to the tribunal and appeal system becomes apparent when people are finally refused—a point to which my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) alluded. When people are refused after appeal—as I said, the system is sometimes deeply flawed—they get a letter withdrawing their access to NASS and telling them that they will be evicted from their house the following week. They have no visible means of support. Clearly, the purpose behind that is to put pressure on them to deport themselves voluntarily. That is a disingenuous policy. The Government know full well that they are not going to deport them—or at least they are certainly not in a hurry to do so—because the countries from which they have come are not safe and they cannot send them back, yet they cut off their means of survival. That is an act of great cynicism. Those people are left dangling. It suits the Government because they can say, ““We’ve rejected them. They ought to go,”” but they know full well that they have nowhere to go to. My hon. Friend rightly referred to the problem of turning to vouchers and the unsatisfactory nature of that, but there is also, of course, the totally unsatisfactory nature of a situation in which those people no longer have any housing. All hon. Members who have asylum centres in their constituencies know that those people are too frightened to return to their own countries and, as they are not being deported by the Government, live in a terrible form of limbo. They have to rely on the charity and good will of their fellow asylum seekers, which means that they sleep three, four or five on the floor of a pretty rotten piece of NASS accommodation that is designed for one, and carve up that £37 a week into ever smaller bundles. That cannot be acceptable.