Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Avebury and Baroness Manzoor

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

I am concerned that the reduction in the number of immigration decisions that can be appealed from 17 to four, as the Bill intends, may lead to injustice and that the administrative review system which is to be substituted for the right to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal in those cases is manifestly unfit for purpose in making decisions that can fundamentally affect the whole course of an appellant’s life. As my noble friend Lord Paddick says, in all the cases where there is an appeal at present, the file goes to the presenting officer, who conducts the case before the tribunal. That official is in a more senior grade than the executive officer who made the original decision, which may be a partial reassurance to my noble friend; that person conducts an administrative review, which can lead to the refusal being withdrawn, and does so in a small proportion of cases. However, following this process, the Home Office loses half its appeals. It has to be assumed, therefore, that half the cases that go through administrative review as a result of this Bill are likely to be wrongly decided against the applicant.

The injured applicant can still make an appeal on human rights grounds, some of which are eligible for legal aid, and it is expected that quite a few will do so, cancelling out, as my noble friend hints, some of the savings that the Government hope to achieve by restricting the common law right of access to the courts. There will also be applications for judicial review, although legal aid for that purpose will be available only in a limited set of cases, including some but not all refugees, but excluding trafficked persons and victims of domestic violence. Does the net saving of £219 million over 10 years, which is expected according to the Home Office briefing, take into account the estimated costs of these appeals, and can my noble friend give us the figure?

The briefing says that the service standard will be to complete the administrative review within 28 days. That is the existing service standard, but when the chief inspector looked at the visa section at Amman it was found that the average time taken was 74 days. The statement of intent may say that we look to achieve the standard of 28 days, but it has not been done in the past. Although I dare say that there has been some improvement since the chief inspector visited Amman, it is doubtful whether the system will be able to keep up with the additional 40,000 cases a year without extra staff and extra training, for which I assume that allowance has been made in the arithmetic. I would be grateful for reassurance on that point. What about the half a million backlog identified by the Home Affairs Select Committee? Are they entitled to an administrative review and have the Government considered how they will deal with the additional cases that will arise when landlords, university staff and health workers are pressed into service as ancillary immigration officers?

Administrative review is a way not of securing fairness and justice for immigrants who are refused leave to enter or remain, but of reducing the number who would have succeeded if they had been able to put their case to the tribunal. It may not even result in any saving of public funds. The right way to achieve both those objectives would be, as my noble friend Lady Hamwee said, to tighten up on the training and supervision of the case workers who make the original decisions so that they get it right first time. That should have been the aim; then we would not even have thought about depriving people of their legitimate rights. At the very least, we should give the Home Office the chance to prove that administrative reviews can be made effective by the means proposed in this amendment. If it can be shown that the existing prehearing reviews pick up wrong decisions, it is well and good; but if the outcome is simply to confirm that reviews are no substitute for the judicial process, Clause 11 should not come into force.

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, I support my noble friends Lady Hamwee, Lord Paddick and Lord Avebury, and align myself with the comments that they made regarding a robust and independent review. As the previous Legal Services Ombudsman and Legal Services Complaints Commissioner, I know the importance of this. It is imperative that the administrative review is not only independent but is seen to be independent for people to have confidence in the decision. I give your Lordships this analogy: a manager of a football team does not referee a game in which his own team is playing.