UK Visas and Immigration

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the operation and accountability of UK Visas and Immigration.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood (LD)]

My Lords, I do not intend to have a great debate on immigration. I put down this Question for Short Debate as a result of two recent experiences of dealing with individual cases, about which I would like to inform the Committee. Last August, I received a letter from a small charity, the Friends of Meisori School. This is a group of schools and churches that have got together to help sustain a primary school in Kenya with scholarships and that kind of thing. It had invited the headmaster of the school to come to Britain and conduct a programme of visits to schools in York, Hereford and Bristol. At the last minute, it found that he could not get a visa and his whole visit fell to the ground. The charity wrote to me angrily because it had seen my name on the foundation stone of a library, which I had laid some years before. I had no connection at all with the charity.

I wrote to Mark Harper, who was then the Minister for Immigration, to ask for reasons why the visa had been refused and I was completely dismayed by his reply, which simply told me about the visa requirements. I wrote to him on 30 October last year to say that I was dismayed. My last sentence was:

“I feel a parliamentary question coming on unless I can get a clear reason why the visa for Mr Lekae was refused”.

Well, 2013 came and went and I had no reply so I duly put down a Written Question which was replied to by our good and noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach. He simply said that:

“Due to its obligations under the Data Protection Act, the Home Office is unable to comment on an individual case”,—[Official Report, 16/1/14; col. WA68.]

without the permission of the applicant, so that did not get me anywhere.

I then wrote to Mr Samuel Lekae and asked for his permission to pursue the case. He sent me that permission and, eventually, having failed to get a response, I put down a Question and wrote to the Minister again. He replied on 10 January and, to be fair to Mr Harper, he wrote a very nice handwritten apology at the bottom of the letter. He gave the same argument about the Data Protection Act, so having got the authority from the headmaster to act on his behalf I wrote to the Minister again on 27 January. To date, I have had no reply. Of course, that Minister has disappeared and been replaced by another one, but that is not really an excuse. However, I visited the school last month and met the headmaster. The point I want to make is that it is in a remote area and he had made several visits to Nairobi to try to get the visa. That is four or five hours by car each way but, at the end of the day, the visa was refused.

The other case was just last month. I was taking part in a conference to commemorate the bicentenary of David Livingstone, organised by the Scotland Malawi Partnership. That body has government funding and the conference was co-sponsored by the Open University, which is also a body with public funding. A distinguished lady from Malawi was invited to be one of the speakers and, at the last minute, she was refused a visa. The charges that they have to pay—£400 a time—are of course lost but so is their airfare for which we, the taxpayer, had paid. The attempt to raise money by raising the fees is negated every time there is a refusal, while the public body which has invited and sponsored a visitor ends up paying for an abandoned airfare.

The timescale involved is ridiculous. It usually takes three weeks to get an answer, in the case of Malawi. In December last year, just three months ago, a new system was introduced by e-mail but it seems to be entirely dysfunctional. The website is an embarrassment. It routinely crashes and there are sections that simply have not been finished. For example, the user has to state which country they are applying from by using a drop-down menu, within which the only information is the starting letter of the country. If you are looking for Malawi, you look for the letter M and you then have to guess how far down the list it might be and what other countries there are whose name begins with M, and then you tick the right box. There seems to be an assumption that all applicants will have regular and easy access to a computer, to an internet connection with strong bandwidth and to a printer. That effectively rules out almost everybody in Africa except the urban elite.

It appears that the Government have outsourced their legal responsibilities on immigration to a private company which was the cheapest bidder. It is almost impossible for an applicant to contact the private company, because, in the case of Malawi, the private company is in Pretoria in South Africa, which handles all UK visa applications for the whole of southern Africa. Even if they could make contact, the company closes all its offices at midday on Fridays for an early weekend, irrespective of the workload or the urgency of applications. Being a private company, it is not governed by the same standards of delivery, service and transparency which one would expect from a government department.

There is a further complication in the case of Malawi. As all its visa applications are handled in South Africa, significant delays are caused, as passports, birth certificates, bank details and other documents are sent backwards and forwards across the continent. It also means that decisions are being made remotely by people who have do not necessarily have intimate knowledge of the country from which the application has been made.

In the case of Malawi, there is a further, peculiar difficulty. The applicant has to pay for a visa application using a credit card and pay in the currency of the country where the regional visa-issuing centre is based. That means paying in South African rand. The Scotland Malawi Partnership has been advised that it is illegal in Malawi to make online payments in a foreign currency unless you have specific permission from the Reserve Bank of Malawi. We are also informed that almost no Malawians have international credit cards that would be suitable for the purpose. My argument to the Committee is that the system is not conducive to visitors coming to this country, and I think that the reputation of the country is being damaged by the incompetence and cost of it.

I raise with the Minister one particular query about rule 41(vii) of the Immigration Rules, which insists that visitors to the UK have evidence of sufficient funds to cover the cost of their visit and their return to their country of origin. That is apparently UK policy, but a recent conference in Cardiff was told that that was not the case and that it would be sufficient if the sponsor had enough money to cover the costs of the applicant. So there seems to be an element of confusion even about what the policy is.

I end by making three suggestions to the Government. First, before the Commonwealth Games start in Glasgow in a few months’ time, the agency must make it clear that people attending from Africa—in this case, athletes, their trainers and so on—will require visas. The Commonwealth Games will be disrupted if many of the applicants are not able to get there because of visa restrictions. How many short-term applications have been turned down? How many applications have been received and what percentage of them were rejected?

Secondly, it should be an instruction to the agency that, when visitors are being sponsored by reputable bodies in this country, there should be an obligation on it to contact the sponsors and double-check. It can do that quite easily by e-mail quite and check the bona fides of the applicant, rather than go on demanding more and more visits to a remote centre and more and more fees. I would not object even if we were to introduce a system of bonds, whereby sponsors could give—let us say—£1,000 as an assurance that the person concerned would return. That is a suggestion which the Minister might like to pass on to his colleagues in the Home Office.

I mention in my QSD the question of accountability. I do not think it is good enough to hide behind the Data Protection Act and I think that any MP or Peer who raises a question about a visa application is automatically doing so on behalf of the applicant and should not be put off by being told that the Data Protection Act is in the way. When I was an MP, it was possible in visa cases to write to or even phone a high commissioner and ask them to examine a particular case. Sometimes the visa was refused for good reasons, which would be explained, and other times the decision would be overruled. There is a total lack of accountability now and it is that that I am really complaining about.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Attlee]

I am absolutely not saying that it is wrong. I am saying that the caseworker has made a judgment and the tribunal has come to a different one. The judgment they have to make is whether the applicant will return home at the end of their stay, bearing in mind the circumstances. That has to be a judgment call.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

On that very same point, what about my suggestion that the caseworker should make contact with the sponsors to double-check the veracity of their application?

[Earl Attlee]

I do not think I am able to respond to that question this evening but I will, of course, be writing to all noble Lords, and I will respond on that point. However, this is an issue on which I have been in discussion with officials—fairly vigorously, on my part.

My noble friend Lady Neville-Jones referred to correspondence. We need to ensure that Peers’ correspondence is being dealt with correctly and to look at the specific issues raised. I will write to her, which I am sure is what my noble friend expects. From my noble friend’s experience, she will understand that only Peers and MPs can expect to receive a reply from Ministers.

The decisions made by officials will sometimes lead to situations that people do not like but we have safeguards in place to make sure that they work properly. While there is room for improvement in both the operation and transparency of UK Visas and Immigration, this should not overshadow the fact that we are making real progress. One year on, UK Visas and Immigration is both better performing and more open than what came before.

In the remaining time, I will try to answer as many questions as I can. My noble friends Lord Steel and Lady Neville-Jones raised the issue of bonds and sponsorship. The Government considered during 2013 whether to pilot a bond scheme that would deter people from overstaying their visas. We decided not to proceed. Various considerations must be factored in when considering any such new scheme. These range from administrative complexities through to issues around fairness and whether it would be open to abuse.