UK Border Agency

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dholakia]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Avebury for securing this debate. He is probably the best qualified person to speak on border controls. His tireless campaigning on behalf of refugees and asylum seekers is legendary. A lot of people across the world are alive today because of his work on the rights and liberties of the individual.

Headlines in this week’s papers are unlikely to build confidence in the way UKBA conducts its business. Performance has slumped after it lost 1,000 more workers than planned. The report from the National Audit Office is devastating. It talks of loss of focus and poor performance, and of a tendency towards optimism bias in planning, delivery and reporting that has contributed to the current problems.

This is nothing new. Successive Governments must accept blame for this chaos. We have only to cast our minds back to 1997 when the incoming Labour Government found piles of unattended and lost files at Lunar House. The orderly queue of applicants awaiting immigration decisions grew to the extent that the process became unmanageable. All this happened because the number of immigration staff was reduced by 1,000 at that time. The impression given was that asylum seekers were flooding the country, and that tough new measures were required to control the flow of economic migrants, students and others who were seeking admission to the United Kingdom.

I have said before that all political parties subscribe to a fair immigration policy and fair procedures. This has never been in dispute. The policy is to admit those who are eligible and to exclude or—subject to the appropriate humanitarian principles—remove those who are not. But in any administrative system, questions arise about priorities. The administration of the immigration system is no exception.

The problem the UKBA faces is very simple. The need to exclude those who are ineligible means that checks have to be made to determine who is eligible and who is not. The greater the emphasis on excluding those who are ineligible, the more intensive the checks have to be. The more intensive the checks are, and the more complicated they are to administer, the more delay and expense accrue to those who are eligible.

Again, if the objective of excluding those who are ineligible is taken to extremes, in matters that are often not susceptible to documentary proof the risk of excluding those who are eligible to enter but lack the resources to prove it becomes serious. When we add to this the insatiable appetite by politicians to play the numbers game, is it any wonder that a culture develops over time where administrators are expected to deliver results which often lack fairness and justice in the process? The heavy emphasis on excluding those who are ineligible rather than giving prompt and sympathetic attention to the rights of the eligible has led to practices that have an adverse effect on people from the New Commonwealth, and also on refugees and asylum seekers. Often the numbers seeking admission are exaggerated to an extent that asylum seekers bear the brunt of public disgust.

We do not condone illegal immigration. Nor do we condone the entry of those who do not qualify to be here. I suspect that genuine refugees seeking admission under the UN convention are few, and the sooner reliable statistics are produced, the better it will be for building a cohesive society here. We need our Governments to proclaim at the highest level the contribution migrants make to the British economy. We need a shift in priorities towards greater emphasis on the rights of those eligible to enter the United Kingdom. This has been the principle on which Britain’s points-based migration system was introduced. The aim was to remove the subjective decision of immigration staff and to establish objective criteria so as to avoid any misunderstanding about how controls are applied. However, if the final objective is to cut down on numbers, we are back to the starting point of differential treatment offered to different countries, which is more likely to affect applicants from third-world countries.

The argument that often surfaces is about perceived economic and social costs and benefits. We tend to forget that, given that EU immigration is protected by the freedom of movement rules, successive Governments have focused efforts on more tightly controlling non-EU migration. The positive contribution that we forget is that those who benefit from education here also take back with them the soft diplomacy of democratic values which in our case is the envy of the world. No amount of overseas aid could compensate for this very important contribution towards democracy in many parts of the world.

Another matter that I need to stress relates to headlines in the press this week, such as, “Immigrants drive biggest population rise in 200 years”. The figures published by the Office for National Statistics indicated that the population of England and Wales had surged by 3.7 million in the past decade, and about 2.1 million of that was the result of the number of immigrants outweighing the number of those leaving the country. The growth in population obviously presents social challenges, but the calls for an arbitrary population limit such as 70 million are sinister and, frankly, more in keeping with a totalitarian dictatorship than Britain in the 21st century.

If the issue is immigration, the pace of change needs to be managed, but migrants bring major benefits to the country. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility last week, while zero net migration would keep population down below 70 million, it would also lead to the national debt rising to 120% of GDP by the middle of the century. This would mean that the scale of cuts and taxes increases to be borne by the UK population over the next 50 years would be tripled if we are to bring debt back under control at 40% of GDP. The economic impact of cutting migration in this way would turn the UK into a country such as Greece for most of the 21st century. We have to promote a simple message. Let us stop playing the numbers game. Let us think about what makes Britain great. It is our people, irrespective of their origin, who will produce the wealth that will sustain the country’s health, welfare, social services and pensions for years to come.

Some years ago, I was involved in looking at immigration control procedures. What became clear was that there is an appetite by the Home Office to ask questions about the purpose of a visit to the UK, but overall it puts very little faith in the answers provided by applicants. That culture seems to continue even now. I will give noble Lords an example. I was involved with the then chief constable of Sussex, Paul Whitehouse, in raising funds for the Starehe project in Kenya. We raised more than £1 million in this country. The girls’ centre opened in 2005 and provides the only free education in that country, drawing poor girls from the worst slums in and around Nairobi. The original pioneer class of 72 has swelled to 400 in just seven years. The success has been remarkable. The centre has a small farm that grows food and rears livestock. There are also beehives and a small fish farm.

Most importantly, the hub of the matter is that International Produce Limited, the UK’s largest importer of fresh produce, which is owned by ASDA-Wal-Mart, has generously offered an internship for two students from the girls’ centre to come to the UK. They applied, but their applications were rejected. They applied again to come for a shorter period, but again they were rejected. I ask a simple question: what does it say about us that when it comes to raising people out of the poverty syndrome and giving them experience with a company based in this country that is prepared to help them, we turn them down and simply do not believe them? The reasons provided for the rejection of the applications was that the entry-clearance immigration officer was not satisfied that the girls were genuinely seeking entry as business visitors for the limited period, as they had stated.

I come back to the point I made earlier. It is simply this: in order to improve in particular the quality of asylum decision-making, the Home Office should show leadership on the importance of breaking down the culture of disbelief that is particularly obvious the treatment of women. There are many who live among us in the UK who exist in a legal limbo and with the fear of forced removal. Many have fled persecution that we would struggle to imagine. Let us give a lead so that every woman who comes to this country fleeing persecution gets a fair hearing and a chance to build a new life.

I look forward to the day when I can travel through immigration controls here with the Home Office Minister, my noble friend Lord Henley, and not have to wait and provide an explanation of why I am entering the country while he walks on through.