Sweeping reforms of the asylum system were announced on Monday. LEIGH COLLINS investigates what this means for prospective refugees in Barnet.

The issue of asylum seekers has been political dynamite in this country for the last few years.

As the number of asylum applications continues to rise, seemingly inexorably, politicians of all hues acknowledge that the current system is not working.

The Home Office is struggling to cope with around 6,000 applications every month and is faced with an almost impossible task of sorting the genuine asylum seeker from the so-called economic migrants. Add to that the problem of locating and returning the false asylum seekers back to their homeland and you have a system that is no longer able to operate as it was designed to.

Councillor Kanti Patel, chairman of the Conservative group on Barnet Council, is himself a refugee, having first fled the Belgian Congo in the 1960s and then Uganda under Idi Amin in the 1970s, before arriving in Britain.

"He says there is a backlog of 40,000 asylum applications. Economic migrants are abusing the system and we have done nothing to tighten up the laws.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, introduced new measures on Monday to improve the current system, including dropping the controversial voucher scheme and creating accommodation centres to hold asylum seekers until their application has gone through.

Mr Patel said: "It will help, but this is what we have been saying for a long time." He says that the centres are a necessary evil: "It's a bad thing but you need to process them. If they are genuine, then you can disperse them.

"The government needs to get the asylum laws right this time. It's a political time bomb if it's not diffused and it will probably explode in the future."

Phil Yeoman, the Labour cabinet member for social security, said: "From what I have seen, I welcome the change to the system. How that affects the council I do not know."

Bibeki Thomas, a 40-year-old Angolan living in East Barnet, came to Britain in 1996. He has nothing but praise for the way he was treated when he arrived at Heathrow after fleeing the civil war in Angola.

"For me it was wonderful," he said. "It made me forget all the kinds of things I was living with in Angola."

For the first few months he was housed in hotels before given the use of a council flat in East Barnet.

"The old system is better than induction centres. When I hear about it I say it is discrimination. If you don't know the problems they ran from, how can you treat them as a prisoner? Their human rights are not taken seriously. Most people were discriminated against where they came from and then they come here these sorts of things will not make their life better."

Tamba Jimmy, who came to the borough after fleeing the executions and fighting in Sierra Leone, disagrees. He welcomes the government's new stance.

"That would be good," he said. "That would make life easy, especially if you have no family or friends here, or you cannot speak English. I wasn't treated in a bad way."

A Somali refugee from East Barnet, who did not want to be named, said: "It's really hard, especially this voucher thing. If a mother goes to a shop and her son wants a packet of crisps and she buys it through the voucher she can't get the change. It's so humiliating. The smart card is not going to change this problem."

Tim Cowen works with refugees and asylum seekers in the borough on a daily basis at the Refugee Health Access Project based in North Finchley. He gave a cautious welcome to the new ideas.

"We want to see the detail as to how the reception centres work in terms of having the support services in place. As a short term solution for when people first arrive they can be a safety net, but asylum seekers and refugees should be treated with dignity."

He was also cautious about the smartcard scheme. "It just replaces one problem with another. If you restore their right to benefit, which they had before February 1996, they can live independently."

Mr Thomas believes the adjudication process needs to be speeded up he has been waiting for a decision from the Home Office for five years.

Mr Jimmy was more philosophical: "In any system you have the good and bad sides. Until it comes to implementation of the new system you can't tell which it is."

October 31, 2001 17:54

LEIGH COLLINS