This Asylum Crisis has been brewing a long time.

Where is the legislation in this Session to deal with the Asylum Crisis?

The Asylum Crisis is serious.

Such measures will ensure that Britain will not have the Current Asylum Crisis that we are experiencing and will mean a better quality of life for the asylum seekers themselves who want to come to live and work here - a sentiment so appropriately echoed by my noble friend Lord Waddington, to whom I once again express my thanks.

His last sentence led me to say, "Here we go", because he talked about an Asylum Crisis, whereas the quarter's figures published today for 2004 show that there has been a 67 per cent reduction in intake since the peak of October 2002.

This matter was referred to in the Sunday Telegraph a couple of days ago under the headline "Asylum Crisis getting worse, say officials".

Any student of immigration legislation since the second world war will know that the busiest periods of change in legislation for immigration reform were, first, in response to decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s and, secondly, in response to the Asylum Crisis that we inherited from the Conservatives in the late 1990s.

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the question is not really about figures, but about our whole approach to the Asylum Crisis?