UK Border Agency

Debate between Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford and Keith Vaz

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

It is indeed. There seems to be a paralysis on the part of senior officials of the UKBA, who just create more of these archives and move the backlog into different areas without trying to solve the problem.

The archive has now been reduced from 98,000 to 93,000, and from January to March 2012 it fell to 80,000. When Mr Whiteman, the chief executive of the UKBA, who has been brought in as a new broom to try to make sure that these matters are sorted out, last appeared before the Committee, he promised us that the archive will, in effect, be closed by 31 December 2012, and we will hold him to that promise. His predecessor, Lin Homer, who because of the fabulous work that she did at the UKBA has been promoted and is now one of the permanent secretaries at the Treasury, gave us a promise when she said, in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick), who had requested that the legacy cases be concluded by the end of last summer, that every single legacy case would be concluded by the end of last year. [Interruption.]As can be seen from the reaction of right hon. and hon. Members here today, that has not happened. The UKBA has probably just created another of the filing systems where it puts various files when it does not know what has happened to the people involved.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that one of the key areas in which we need to hold the UKBA to account is data management? It is almost impossible to understand what is going on and who is going where if we do not have clarity and transparency about the numbers.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. She makes that point every time the head of the UKBA appears before us; I do not know whether she is an expert on data management. It is a big problem because, in the end, the immigration debate is about statistics. If the statistics are not right and we are unable to get the proper data, we cannot have an effective debate about what is happening.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is right. I have many examples of people who have come to my constituency only for the colleges to be closed down. That has happened to one or two colleges in Leicester. Where do those people go in the meantime? The colleges are bogus, but the students are not. They have paid their money in good faith. They are then in limbo if they do not have a different educational establishment to go to.

[Nicola Blackwood]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Keith Vaz]

I will give way as we are talking about education and it is the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon who wishes to intervene.

[Nicola Blackwood]

As always, the right hon. Gentleman’s generosity is extraordinary. Does he agree that it is vital to get the message right on student visas? It must be clear that, although we are clamping down on illegal student immigration, we are still open to genuine student immigration, because it is vital to our higher education sector. We still need the brightest and best students to come to our fantastic universities, such as Oxford university and Oxford Brookes university.

[Keith Vaz]

I agree with the hon. Lady, but that is true not only of the elite, which includes Oxford and Oxford Brookes universities, but of all the other language schools and higher education colleges that provide such a wonderful service.

I will turn to family migration, which I know the Minister for Immigration will be asked about when he comes before the Select Committee on Tuesday. The new migration changes will come into effect on Monday. That, in my view, will be a disaster for the settled British Asian community. We are dealing not with people who come here illegally, but with the settled community, which the Prime Minister rightly praised recently at a big meeting of the Conservative Friends of India. Some 1,000 members of the diaspora turned up and listened to the Prime Minister’s speech. They liked what he said, but they will not like what the Minister and the Home Office are going to do on family visitor visas.

Last week, I was presented with a case involving a wedding that will take place in Leicester in three weeks’ time. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) and I will go along, as we do with every wedding in Leicester. Two sisters of the bride had applied to come over from Toronto. One sister had been allowed to come, but the other had been refused. I wrote a letter, because there was no time for an appeal. The appeals system is so awful and takes so long, as the Minister keeps telling us and the UKBA, that there was no point in appealing, because the appeal would have come up next year, well after the wedding. I therefore wrote to ask for a review. I wrote to my account manager, Saleah Ahmed, who is very efficient. He is a post box—he does not make the decisions, but sent my letter to New York, which is the hub for north America. The letter that I got back said, “Sorry, the second sister’s case cannot be looked at because we only look at cases where there is a death or serious injury.” The first sister will be able to get into the country for the wedding, but the second sister will not be allowed in, despite the additional evidence that I have sent in, which will not even be considered. If the bridegroom or the bride died, the decision might be reconsidered, but otherwise, the second sister will not be allowed into the country and will miss her sister’s wedding.

That situation will be repeated thousands and thousands of times when the right of appeal is removed and there is no effective system to deal with such problems. We have asked the Minister for meeting. I hope that he will meet Members from all parts of the House who have an interest in this matter. The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), members of whose community I have met, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who must have a huge immigration case load, the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) and the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller)—I could go round the whole Chamber—will not like a system which means that they can no longer tell their constituents that there is a right of appeal. They will not like a system in which there is no review or in which the review will take longer than the period that is left before such a wedding. We will be inundated with cases and the system will collapse.

When I and other members of the Home Affairs Committee went to meet Jonathan Sedgwick, who heads the international section of the UKBA, he did not have a plan, because there was no ministerial plan in place. It is very important that we get such a plan in place before the changes take place. I do not like those changes, of course, but I will look at the plan that is on offer.