Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness. I hope she will have an opportunity of speaking later. I begin by saying that this clause, as the Minister has explained, allows local authorities to provide accommodation to failed asylum seekers in accordance with arrangements that have been made by the Secretary of State. The amendments now before your Lordships extend this to the provision of vouchers for people receiving this accommodation. As the honourable Member for Walthamstow observed in another place, people supported under Section 4 used to be given cash, but then luncheon vouchers were provided instead. That caused all the problems that were encountered with the former hated voucher system. This change was as a result of legal advice obtained by NASS in March 2005, which, as far as I know, has not been seen by anybody else—at least, that was the position at the end of May 2005, when Refugee Action and Citizens Advice obtained advice from Doughty Street Chambers on the extent of the powers under Section 4. This opinion stated that there was no express prohibition in Section 4 against making cash payments and that the arguments that cash payments would allow the recipient to obtain items outside the scope of Section 4 was invalid because people could sell the vouchers and spend the cash on whatever they wanted, as indeed they do and have always done. As Citizens Advice has pointed out, giving vouchers that can be used only for food and drink has a number of major disadvantages. The recipient cannot get everyday essentials, such as clothes, baby items and toiletries. He cannot use public transport, even for essential journeys that are necessary to comply with reporting conditions. He cannot buy food other than from designated retailers, which may not be local to the accommodation supplied. He cannot attend medical appointments and so on. He may not be able to buy culturally appropriate food, such as halal meat, or to conform to medically prescribed dietary requirements. He will not have access to basic medication, since those on Section 4 support are not entitled to free NHS care. Finally, there is a flourishing black market in vouchers, with criminal profiteers buying them—usually at 50 per cent of their face value—in return for cash. Last month, there were 5,000 failed asylum seekers of 70 different nationalities on Section 4 support. In spite of Home Office efforts to open a route of return to Iraq and so reduce the number of Iraqis on such support, there were still over 3,300 on 9 January. Following legal challenges, the Section 4 scheme is developing from a small-scale, short-term support system to a large-scale, long-term one. Many individuals have now been on Section 4 support for a great many months; Citizens Advice knows of one Congolese woman who has been on it for two years, while many Iraqis have been on it since early 2005. The number of applications for Section 4 support rose from 3,000 in 2004 to 15,000 in 2005 and, since June last year, two thirds of the appeals to the asylum support adjudicators have been in relation to refusal of that support. We were therefore disappointed that the Government, having said that they would consider the representations by the honourable Member for Walthamstow—who is, after all, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees and has considerable expertise in the subject—and having conceded that NASS’s legal advice may have been wrong, decided to return to the abominable voucher system. That is a deplorable return to the past, and I hope that we shall give another place a chance to think again about what the Home Office is doing.