Immigration and Nationality (Fees) (Amendment) Order 2024

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Grand Committee

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

My Lords, this order has been laid to introduce a power to charge a fee for UK visa qualification equivalency and English language proficiency assessment services, and to set the maximum fee that can be charged. For noble Lords’ benefit, I will provide some background to the fee structure we currently have in place. For the Home Office to charge for immigration and nationality functions, the Immigration Act 2014 requires that fees must be set in secondary legislation. The Immigration and Nationality (Fees) Order 2016, an amendment to which we are discussing, sets out the functions for which a fee can be charged and sets the maximum fee that can be charged. Fee levels are subsequently set in separate secondary legislation—the Immigration and Nationality (Fees) Regulations 2018—which is subject to parliamentary agreement through the negative procedure.

The fees for the services we are seeking to regulate are for assessments used on certain visa and nationality routes, including family, skilled worker, settlement, and student routes, where that route requires an applicant to demonstrate proficiency in the English language at a specified level or that they have gained a qualification that is equivalent to one obtained in the UK. There are a number of ways in which the English language proficiency test can be taken, using an academic qualification obtained in English and awarded by an educational establishment outside the United Kingdom.

Where an applicant is seeking to demonstrate that they have gained a qualification equivalent to one obtained in the UK, or their proficiency in the English language by using an academic qualification obtained outside the UK, these must be provided by Ecctis Ltd. Ecctis Ltd provides these services through a concession contract with the Home Office and has done so for over a decade.

It is important to be clear at this point that we are not introducing a new cost for applicants seeking to enter or remain in the UK: the requirement for applicants to use these services has existed for a number of years. Where a visa or nationality applicant uses the services provided by Ecctis, they apply through the website and pay an appropriate fee. The outcome of the assessment can take in the region of 10 working days for the English language assessment and around 30 working days for a qualification equivalency assessment. The maximum fee in this order for the qualification and English language proficiency assessment is set at £400. This will allow the Home Office to set fee levels later this year at the current levels, which are £140 for English language and £210 for the qualification equivalency assessment. By setting the maximum above this level, we have a reasonable degree of headroom to adjust fees if, for example, there is an increase in the cost of providing these services.

The Home Office is bringing this order forward today and legislation to regulate these fees now where they have already been charged and where the nature of the service itself, or the requirement in the Immigration Rules, have changed. This is due, again, to the department identifying, in the course of preparing for a reprocurement of the existing service earlier this year, that these fees should already have been regulated, due to the requirement to use the service in respect of applications on certain routes. Having identified this oversight, action was taken immediately to legislate at this earliest opportunity to ensure that the fees have an appropriate statutory footing, although this process was delayed, as indeed was the instrument we dealt with earlier, because of the general election in mid-2024.

Noble Lords will be aware that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee drew special attention to the Explanatory Memorandum that was published alongside this order, and produced a report on 10 October raising concerns that the Explanatory Memorandum did not provide a clear and open statement about why this instrument was brought forward. I fully appreciate the need for transparency. I recognise the committee’s view that further explanation of the context of this legislation was required, and my colleague the Minister for Migration and Citizenship sent a letter to the committee chair, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, on 15 October explaining in more detail why the order was brought forward now and the exploration of the possibility of pursuing retrospective legislation that would put fees paid to date on a statutory footing.

I am not yet able to confirm the specific approach to be taken on how we regulate those fees downstream and, given the uncertainty, it is not appropriate or helpful to go into further detail now. However, I emphasise that this department takes its responsibilities on parliamentary transparency seriously. I assure noble Lords that we are taking forward considerations in respect of previously charged fees as a priority and the intention of this order, subject to the approval of this House, is to lay an amendment to the Immigration and Nationality (Fees) Regulations in early December to set the fee levels that we have considered in the order today. I hope noble Lords will accept that we are trying to rectify an oversight that has crossed over from before the general election. We are regulating to close that loophole and I beg to move.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I cannot sit at the right desk, so I apologise for being in the wrong place.

I thank the Minister for explaining the reason for the order, although I think his description of “an oversight” for fees that have actually been charged illegally, because they were not approved by Parliament, is a bit of an understatement. I am also concerned that we still have no opportunity to see a new Explanatory Memorandum that sets out the record, but I will come back to that. I particularly thank the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for its careful and thoughtful third report of Session 2024-25.

However, before I come on to that, I want to note that this is the second Home Office SI on immigration matters that has come to Grand Committee since the Summer Recess which has not just been problematic. The other one—the Illegal Migration Act 2023 (Amendment) Regulations 2024—corrected policy matters in the Act that meant it could not be enacted because they were wrong, so it was also illegal. Therefore the amendments that the Grand Committee saw—I was going to say last month but it might have been a little before that—were to remove retrospective elements of the Illegal Migration Act that were themselves illegal.