John Robertson (Glasgow, North-West) (Lab): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) on securing this debate. The only thing that I am sorry about is the low attendance. I prepared a short contribution because I thought that many colleagues, particularly from south f the border, would want to be involved. It is a sad indictment of our colleagues that they are not here to make contributions.

Mr. Mullin : With all due respect to the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), who is a fine fellow, what I am most concerned about is the disappointing absence of the Minister of State responsible for policy in this area. I am sure that when my hon. Friend returns to the Home Office he will convey to him the sentiments expressed here today, but I would have liked to do that in person.

John Robertson: I agree, but in defence of the Minister of State, I must tell my hon. Friend that he has been to Glasgow on several occasions. On one prolonged recent visit he took considerable time to talk to Members of Parliament and the people most affected by the removals. I will commend him for doing that, while chastising him for not being here today.

It is pleasing to see the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) and the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie) here today. It would be even more pleasing if those Members went back and asked their local councils to take on board the job that Glasgow city council took on in allowing asylum seekers to come to our friendly city, where I believe that they are looked after better there than in any other city in the country. It would be more pleasing if the rest of Scotland, instead of getting on board the discussion on asylum, got on with trying to look after those people— giving them a home and welcoming them into society. That is my little plea for Glasgow and against the rest of Scotland.

A lot of press coverage north of the border, including the extracts in the excellent information pack that has been put together for today’s debate, mentions Glasgow in particular. Yet some press statements that are emerging, by people who have been shouting the most against what has been happening to asylum seekers in the Glasgow area, are, unfortunately, from outside that area. Sad as it is, they have done very little to help alleviate the problem.

There are many points on which we can agree. We all agree that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) said, we have a moral obligation to look after refugees—genuine refugees, that is. We need to adjust the asylum process to establish who is entitled, and everybody undergoing that process must be treated fairly and have access to a full range of services. Everyone who meets the asylum criteria must be welcomed fully into our society. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North did not actually say those words, but I am sure that is what he meant in saying that those people offer much to the multicultural development of the UK. They add many of their cultures to ours and will make the UK a better place in the long run; it is to be hoped that parties such as the British National party will then find no place in our society.

What should happen to people who have been through the process and failed in their application? Have they no right to be in the country? How should they be returned to their country of origin? Or, as some would say, should they be allowed to remain here no matter what the circumstances? Those are the questions that we must raise in this debate. They have already been raised in certain ways, and I hope to add to that debate in my short contribution.

It is clear that the asylum system needs to be examined and improved. None the less, many people who come to this country to seek asylum make applications that are utterly unfounded. They seek to use the system to remain here, and eventually to benefit from an amnesty. I am against the amnesties that have been called for. As a result of amnesties—which have caused me many problems as an MP trying to deal with asylum cases—many people suddenly come out of the woodwork, as it were, and try to stay here when they should never have been allowed to stay in the first place. They had disappeared into the country, when they should probably have been removed at the outset.

Jeremy Corbyn : I was not aware that there was an amnesty; I thought that 2,000 pre-existing family applications were to be reviewed, possibly with a more sympathetic approach than might be used in other cases. So far as I am aware, there is no general amnesty—although there may well be a case for one, and I might well support such a scheme.

John Robertson: I thank my hon. Friend; he has put that much better than I did, and he is absolutely correct. There was no general amnesty as such, but there was certainly a slackening of the rules to allow people who have been here a long time to stay.

I can understand the arguments of immigration officials. I have been to the immigration service in Glasgow with asylum seekers many times to talk to officials and try to alleviate the misunderstandings created—in some cases, maliciously—between people seeking asylum and the immigration service. Unfortunately, there are those in our society who seem to want to use the subject of asylum for their own political ends, and I find that totally abhorrent. Whenever I can, I denounce those parties. They know who they are; they are on the extreme right or extreme left of our society, and as far as I am concerned, they have no place in British politics. I hope that we shall weed them out. They do no service to people who genuinely seek asylum, and who ask their MPs to solve their problems and help them to remain in the country.

By the time the media take control, they have totally distorted the actualities of the case. By the time the case gets to the Home Office, the Home Office has been put in an intolerable position. Eventually the people concerned are removed, although in some cases I know that I could probably have saved them if they had got to me first, and had not got involved in a series of lies and stories given to them by certain people. That has to be investigated—but the Home Office and its officials, too, have to think seriously about the information that they give out.

I appreciate that many of the details that the Home Office receives are personal and should not be revealed to the general public, but if someone goes to the press and gives their whole life story, as they see it, in support of their case for remaining here, I feel that the Home Office should be entitled to give the story as it sees it, too. It is also important that it should give the hows and whens of the enforced removals. We want to know why people have been removed at a particular time, after having been four, five or six years in this country, as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North has described.

I commend Drumchapel High School in my constituency. The students there have won many awards, and many of them are from asylum-seeking families. They have done work to promote and campaign not just for themselves and their families but for other children from such families, and they should be commended. It is pleasant to see children taking an interest in what happens in everyday life, rather than just worrying about whether they will get the new PlayStation or Xbox or whatever, which is all that some young people care about. It is a pleasure to see that they care about each other and their fellow pupils. Long may it continue, and long may the students keep giving me a hard time. They come to my office and ask me why this happens and why that happens.

We politicians need to look at ourselves, too. I have a quote from one of my colleagues from Glasgow who is a Member of the Scottish Parliament. In a statement about a family who were allegedly thrown out of their home in a so-called dawn raid, he said:

“Police should not wear body armour”.

The report adds the comment:

“despite the fact that one officer in England has been killed carrying out such duties.”

Norrie Flowers of the Scottish Police Federation said:

“They don’t really understand the issue. We are asked to go along in these situations in order to assist immigration officers. The bottom line is that we don’t know what we are walking into. It can go from being very quiet to a frantic affair with minutes and they therefore wear protecting clothing for that.”

I totally agree with him.

That is the kind of information that the Home Office should give us. They must tell us what happened when they removed a family. I want to know if the removal was easy or hard, what kind of force was needed and why, how many people were there, and what time it was. That is simple information, which any Member of Parliament would want to know about something that had happened in their constituency. If I found that something had gone wrong, that would give me the opportunity to try to do something about it. I would be grateful if the Minister would take that on board, talk to his officials and try to get something done about it.

Talk of children being handcuffed is very distressing. However, I have been to the immigration service and heard some of the horror stories from its side, of parents hurling children at officers who are there to remove them. The question would then be: should we take the children from the parents in the first place? Are those responsible parents? Sometimes such questions are addressed, and it does happen that children are removed from asylum-seeking parents. Those children are now part of our society, because the parents were incapable, or did not want to look after them in the first place.

We need to be told about such things. There are people in our society who are living and working, have been part of the system and are happy to be here. We may not want to know who they are, but we certainly want to know the numbers of such cases. The story is not always bad news.

I would be grateful if the Minister, in describing the procedures, could put some more meat on the bones of the thought behind the removals—although of course, he may not know about that. Why, after four and a half years, do we suddenly come to the decision that a family must be removed today?

The hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland talked about a more responsible way of removing people. Surely there must be a more humane way. I do not think that there is a humane way of removing any family that has been here for such a long time, but there must be a better way. I understand why the early morning visits happen. They may not be dawn raids as such, but people certainly go early in the morning and, if they go back, I know that that is because they can be sure that the family is in situ in the house at the time. I understand that.

Part of the main problem is that—as many have said here today—children are the innocent bystanders. They just happen to be there, or happen to be born, yet they bear the brunt of the removals. We should show some kind of sympathy, but the parents have to take the responsibility. It is not the Government’s fault that people are here illegally. They have been told, I am assured, on many occasions that they can have an assisted passage back to their country of origin or they can make their own way back. They are told almost from the moment that they arrive in the country that if they refuse to do so, at the end of the process they will be removed. It is unfair to say that those people—those parents—did not know that they would be removed. They did know.

Mr. Mullin : With all due respect to my hon. Friend, I did not say anything of the sort. I deliberately kept the focus of my remarks on removal of children who have been here a long time to a handful of the most dysfunctional countries. I readily recognise that if we get into wider territory we will open up all sorts of impossibilities. I do not want to go down that road. I want to keep the Minister and the Home Office firmly focused on why we are sending those young children back to Congo, Angola or Sudan, after they have lived here all their lives. That is my principal interest.

John Robertson: I was not having a go at my hon. Friend; I am talking in general. If we read the Library pack for today’s debate, we find statements along those lines, and it is important to get those messages across.

I have been a Member of Parliament for more than five years, and I have dealt with hundreds of asylum cases in that time. I have noticed a change in the applications over that period, particularly in the past few years. Psychiatric reports seem to be used as a reason why people should remain in the country. More people suddenly seem to have psychiatric problems—although I have to say that that does not apply just to asylum seekers; these days it also applies to people seeking incapacity benefit.

Why has that suddenly happened? Is it just that we have better doctors and psychiatrists to examine the cases, and people are referred to them more? Or is it because the judicial system now sees such an approach as a good way of keeping people in the country, so people are schooled in how to talk to psychiatrists? I would be interested in examining the figures. Did we not have psychiatrists three or four years ago? Have they suddenly come on to the market in the past few years?

In every case that I see, somewhere along the line it is said that the person involved is ill, or is not fit to travel to another country. In some cases there are actual illnesses. In one of my cases a gentleman is, unfortunately, dying of cancer and it is pretty obvious that he could not be sent back; in another the person has just had a heart attack, and he could hardly go back. In every other case, however, the people have strong psychiatric problems, and for them to be removed and sent home would apparently do them and their family immeasurable harm. Does the Minister have the figures to hand, or could he obtain them and let hon. Members know them? I would be interested to know whether such problems had not been looked at before, or whether they are just an excuse that some families are using to remain.

Will the Minister also examine the judicial system, particularly in Scotland? My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North made a good point about how long cases can take, so that people stay in the UK for years. We tell families whose kids have been in school for five years to take them out and go home. Has the Minister examined the judicial system in Scotland, where a judicial review takes 18 months? South of the border a judicial review takes about six weeks. Is it any wonder that people who may be trying to abuse the system would like to come to Scotland? If they obtain a judicial review, it will take 18 months not to finish that review but for them to be allowed to go for it. Then they can bring new evidence, and they suddenly find another reason why they should get another judicial review. Such an approach stretches out the process to many years.

Jeremy Corbyn : The point that I was trying to make was not so much about the judicial review—how quickly a review takes place is obviously a matter for the courts—but simply about the process of correspondence with the Home Office, which I find unbelievable. I was referring to the number of cases in which files are lost or misplaced, or the Home Office simply does not reply to correspondence from solicitors, law centres, MPs or anybody else.

John Robertson: My hon. Friend is correct. I come across the same problems sometimes, but not as often as cases that go to judicial review. The problem cases all seem to take for ever and a day.

Mr. Carmichael : I am interested in the hon. Gentleman’s comments about judicial review. Does he think that the judicial review situation will be improved if the Government’s Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill, which is currently in the other place and which interferes substantially with the appeal rights open to asylum seekers, is finally given Royal Assent in its current form?

John Robertson: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, which leads on to a point touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North about fast-tracking and the change in the system to make it quicker. We are talking about enforced removals, and in the case that has been mentioned we would expect things to be quicker. This is why we are getting the enforced removals now: we have caught up with the backlog. We are discussing the cases of people who were left to sit in the house all day, where the kids went to school and college, and got an education but could not do anything else in terms of work. In relation to enforcement, we are talking about people who have been here for a few years.

I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying, but I shall not get involved in what has been discussed in the other place, because I know that his colleagues do their utmost to butcher whatever Bill is sent there. However, when we get the measure back, we shall put it back to how it should be. The most important thing is that in the end, we have legislation that is fair.

I shall finish now, Mrs. Humble, as I am on my last page—although I must admit that the speech that I wrote in advance bears no resemblance to what I have said. Some of what we read in the newspapers is lies, and some of it is a distortion of the truth; at best, it stretches the truth. The emotional blackmail that appears in the press is not helpful. It is certainly not helpful to those of us in this place who have to work with the Home Office to defend people. It is difficult to defend a case when it has been in the press and everybody has already made up their mind about what should be done.

We need to have a reasoned debate. I wish that more hon. Members were here today. I wish that my speech had taken less time—many other people here probably wish that, too—but it is important that we have a measured discussion. We must look after the children as best we can, but we must remember that ultimately, the parents are responsible for them. I shall finish on the following questions. Should we separate children from their parents? Should we remove the whole family or let them all stay?

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