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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

The speech of the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) was inspired by compassion and delivered with eloquence. I do not want to embarrass him unduly, but this is one of those occasions on which people can come together, because we are agreed on the principle at stake. I, too, in common with the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), hope that the hon. Member for Walthamstow will press his amendment to a Division, and if he or others do, I am strongly minded to support it. Let us be clear. As the Minister who is engaged in the public debate well knows and has already acknowledged, vouchers are not new. They are not only not new in the sense that they have applied to a certain category, section 4 recipients—failed asylum seekers—since April 2005—they are not new in another sense, in that, as he will acknowledge, they have applied before. I believe and, in fairness, the Minister believes—I raise these issues in a positive spirit—that the Government were right to remove vouchers across the piece in 2002. It is relevant to the public debate to recall what was said at that time, by the then Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett). Announcing the intention to remove vouchers for asylum seekers more generally, he said that those vouchers were"““too slow, vulnerable to fraud, and felt to be unfair””.—[Official Report, 29 October 2001; Vol. 373, c. 627.]" He was right. Yes, the debate has moved on since then, and the Government have decided, for reasons that I think are scarcely intelligible let alone defensible, that voucher provisions should apply to a very limited category of persons—the section 4 cases, people whose applications for asylum have failed and who are destined eventually to go back to the countries from which they have come. They are not going back at this stage, because there is an impediment to them doing so—it would not be safe for them to travel. That might be because the country to which they would have to return is unsafe and they would be at risk of imprisonment, torture, death or a grisly combination of all three, or it might be that they cannot travel for the more prosaic but equally important reason that they are unwell or, in the case of a woman, pregnant. In those circumstances, it is true that for virtually a year now those people have received voucher support to the tune of £35 a week. We all know the cases of people who have been affected. My anxiety about what the Government are doing is that it seems to me that Ministers are unnecessarily closing down the options. I am always ready to joust with the Minister of State, as he knows, and to listen to the points that he makes, but I have not yet heard a persuasive argument. I found the case made by the hon. Member for Walthamstow and the Refugee Council compelling.