UK Border Agency: Visas and Passports

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

I, too, am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, for giving us the opportunity to debate this important subject. I have always received courteous and helpful responses from the UK Border Agency whenever I have had reason to contact its officials, either in country or in Whitehall. My most recent experience was of a difficult case that peaked over Christmas and New Year. Throughout that most difficult period, with constant telephone calls from me and my staff, we received nothing but helpfulness, for which I thank the agency.

The UK border officials discharge an exceptionally taxing task effectively and well, despite the considerable pressures that the agency and its staff are under constantly. They deal with one of the most basic human needs and desires: the freedom to move. With people in difficulty and trouble, there will always be an enormously emotional, as well as an effectively practical, exchange with the staff. The many people whom I have invited over the years from central and South America, the Middle East, central and eastern Europe and other places have never commented adversely on their treatment, even most recently, from the UK Border Agency. On the other hand, the policy is something that gives rise to considerable, consistent and powerful objections from all quarters.

The hub-and-spoke policy creates a routine that I and my visitors have experienced. It needs profound review and total overhaul. Noble Lords have spoken of many instances, but there are hundreds more available. I give just one. About a year ago, I invited 12 Iraqi high tribunal judges to visit me in Westminster so that they could see our own new supreme constitutional court and meet high-level judges both here and throughout the country. Some of those judges had already spent many months here on many occasions and were familiar with the United Kingdom, because we had been offering them training. The hub-and-spoke policy meant that those judges had to travel from Baghdad to Beirut and to stay there for more than 10 days awaiting visas. This is the most extraordinary process that any of us have ever experienced.

I can give your Lordships many more instances from different parts of the world, impacting not just on high-level judges but on businesses, industry, tourists and visitors. I do not wish to take up noble Lords’ time, but surely implementing this policy must be deeply frustrating for UK Border Agency staff. I believe that the policy gives an insurmountable barrier to visitors on grossly unfair grounds. Who can afford to travel to the hub of the spoke system and stay there for many days awaiting a visa that they may or may not get? It is simply not a possibility. At the spoke end, staff of the British embassies become deeply and greatly frustrated because they face the frustration of those who apply, are told to travel, cannot travel and have to go away. Yet the British embassy staff are those who, at all times and in common with the UK Border Agency, are putting forward the best of Britain—the best face of the Untied Kingdom—and presenting us in our most positive light.

The hub-and-spoke policy, I therefore suggest, gives a shockingly false picture of our traditional welcome to visitors and guests to the United Kingdom. I suggest that this policy has failed lamentably and that the Government should review it as an urgent preoccupation and priority. After all, has the Foreign Secretary not declared that economic movement, investment, trade and business should be at the heart of foreign policy? Yet if businessmen cannot visit the United Kingdom without this extraordinary formulaic lunacy, how on earth is that foreign policy to be achieved? We believe powerfully—do we not?—in democracy and the rule of law, yet we put up these barriers in a policy that all who have discussed it with me at official, political or personal level have declared to be an utter disaster. I beg the minister to change it.