Fiona Mactaggart
Main Page: Fiona Mactaggart (Labour - Slough)Department Debates - View all Fiona Mactaggart's debates with the Home Office
(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Keith Vaz
As the hon. Gentleman will know from his case load, it is a continuing process. He will hear about more of these cases on Friday when he holds his surgery. The Select Committee is saying that the backlog must be cleared, not just put in a different part of the UKBA. It cannot just move the files from Croydon to Liverpool and expect the situation to be sorted out. It must clear the backlog once and for all. With the willingness to do so and the £1 billion of resources that are available each year, that should be possible.
Fiona Mactaggart
I concur with what my right hon. Friend has said about clearing the backlog once and for all. One of my concerns is that, in the present exercise of dealing with legacy cases and the backlog, instead of making a final decision on cases—people used to be given indefinite leave to remain or were returned—lots of people are being given three years’ discretionary leave, which means that a new backlog is being created for three years’ time.
Mr Ward
If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I would rather make my speech than the one he probably wants to make. If he makes that speech, I shall intervene and support him, but I would like to finish mine first.
We are told that the number of complaints is a direct result of the complexity of the cases and their impact on individuals. Yes, that is the case to some degree, but the truth is also that the complaints arise from sheer mismanagement—lost files, poor administration and so on. That would not be so bad if the services provided value for money, but they are hugely expensive—as much as £1,000—which means that people rightly demand, and are entitled to, a good service. Given that the appeals process can cost another £120, which they do not get back if they are successful, they have a right to a first-rate system, yet that is clearly not being delivered. Will the Minister indicate what is being done to improve the level of service? I believe that the website talks about a six-month turnaround time. Nobody believes that. They are lucky if it is eight months. So there is this question of value for money.
Fiona Mactaggart
The hon. Gentleman says that nobody believes the turnaround time, but the problem is that many applicants do believe it, and then they come to people such as us and say, “Why am I being picked on?” I say, “You’re not being picked on. It’s like this for everyone”, and they do not believe us. It is time that the Home Office was at least honest about how long it takes.
Mr Ward
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. In fact, everyone is being picked on, so in that sense it is fair really. But that is the claim on the website, and it simply is not being delivered. We need a sense of realism. Not only are these services very expensive, but on the delivery side there is a huge let-down, which makes it even worse when people come into our offices. So I would like the Minister to respond to those issues: value for money, intelligence and the issue of account managers and retaining that local connection.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
In addressing the subject of this debate, we must always remember that it involves families, and that is what I shall concentrate on today. Those families often pay huge fees. The £1,800 that it will cost a spouse to get settlement in this country is 10% of the income that the sponsor needs for the spouse to qualify. There is a lot of money involved, and those people have a right to a decent service. At the moment, however, they are not getting it.
I readily admit that the problem is not new; it has not developed under this Government. Indeed, when I was first elected in 1997, I remember discovering the antecedent of the controlled archive. It was in a room in the bottom of a building in Croydon, where the air was so poisonous that staff could not go in. It contained a huge heap of files that had been amassed there, and nobody knew what they were. So this is a long-standing problem.
We need to address the problems of inefficiency and the bad ways in which the system works, and I want to use the debate to make a series of specific requests of the Minister. Even though he and I do not agree on the entirety of the policy, I believe that he will be able to meet those requests. The first relates to dealing with legacy cases. At the moment, all the cases involving those who are to be granted indefinite or discretionary leave have to be checked by security and by the police national computer—and quite right, too. Unfortunately, when the UK Border Agency asks for the information, further checks have to be carried out, and photographs, vignettes and biometrics have to be obtained. That process often takes so long that the security clearance, which last only three months, has expired by the time it has been completed. I ask the Minister to instruct his staff to grant leave in such circumstances none the less. When the problem is the result of inefficiency in the system and involves further rounds of checks and further delays, let us not make his staff carry out those further checks and go through those further delays, using up time and capacity that they do not have.
My second point is one that I am sure many hon. Members will be familiar with from their constituencies. It relates to cases in which a woman—it is usually, but not always, a woman—has been deceived by a partner and been abandoned the day after he is granted indefinite leave to remain. Under the previous Government, after a long struggle, I managed to persuade the then Minister that such women should get a proper response when they requested information on their husbands’ immigration status and on what the Home Office was going to do about their situation. I got an agreement on that, and for a very short time, Ministers would write not only to me to tell me what was happening with the case, but to the women who had complained. That has now stopped.
I put it to the Minister that reinstating that practice would a much more effective means than the “dobbing-in” system on the Home Office website, because those women have specific information about their cheating spouses. He should give them the respect of a full response to their inquiries. He should also follow up those inquiries. In my view, it would be perfectly possible under the immigration rules to curtail the leave of husbands who had behaved in the way that I have described, on the grounds that their presence in the UK would not be conducive to the public good, particularly if—as is often the case—they had a record of being vicious and violent towards their spouses. I would be really grateful if the Minister made that commitment today. I think that my request is fairly straightforward, and reinstating that practice would go with the grain of what he has been saying about using intelligence.
My next point is about the new immigration rules, which are due to come into force next week. I remember, when I was director of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, getting a telephone call from a country solicitor who said, “I’ve got this person here and I’ve got the Immigration Act in front of me, and it refers to these things called the immigration rules. What are they?” I told him, and I felt rather scared that that person thought he was qualified to give immigration advice. Actually, he was being honest. He was trying to find out the best advice to give his client, but—as other hon. Members have pointed out—there are solicitors who are not in the least bit honest.
Actually, even the honest solicitors are going to find these new immigration rules completely incomprehensible. There is no statement of changes in the immigration rules; they are not numbered; there are typographical and other errors in them. I do not agree with their content, but if I were the Minister, I would say, “We aren’t going to bring them into force until we have done them properly.” Frankly, they are not proper at present. I would like the Minister simply to say that he will not bring them into force until he has got rid of the errors. I pray against them and hope he will not introduce them, but from his own point of view, if he does not get them right, he will make much more work for his officials, who will be constantly subject to representations and appeals because of the confusion that arises. Speaking as someone who has dealt with these issues for some 30 years, I have to say in the context of today’s discussion about the administration of the UK Border Agency that if the Minister persists in implementing these rules at this point—irrespective of whether they are the right thing to do in the long term—he will create much more unnecessary work for his people.
John McDonnell
Like me, my hon. Friend has prayed against the rules. Today is not the time to debate them in any detail, but does she agree that the Government should now give us the opportunity to debate the rules thoroughly on the Floor of the House?
Fiona Mactaggart
I think it would be helpful to do so, but in a way that is not the point here. The point is that if the Minister accepts that there are errors in the draft—I know that they are errors and not deliberate—he should take the opportunity to withdraw the rules until they can be remedied, to ensure that the immigration system is properly administered. Given the problems of administration—the queues at Heathrow and other issues, and the problem with posts overseas where we have had good reports from the independent chief inspector responsible for entry clearance, highlighting that the wrong decisions have been made—perhaps the Minister could do something about them.
One thing I have learned from my long involvement in these issues is that the biggest problem is trying to get the Home Office administration to do what it says on the tin—to do what the rules say to make sure that the administration is effective and efficient. It is not, and it has not been for decades. The simplest thing to do would be to try to drive out unnecessary processes and to use the people subject to immigration control as allies in making the system more efficient. The vast majority of people who are trying to join their families here or to visit Britain are trying to do the right thing. If we can work in a way whereby the people trying to do the right thing can help to make the system more efficient, we could envisage a system in which not everyone was subject to the degradation—frankly, it is degradation—that is a product of the gross inefficiency and bureaucracy of that system.
I have made some specific proposals, and if the Minister were to say yes to them today, we could take a couple of little steps in that direction. Many more are needed.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
I am pleased to have the opportunity to make a few short points in the debate. My first is about the structural changes taking place within the UK Border Agency. Does the Minister have strong views about these proposals? In his view, will they make a significant contribution to making UKBA an organisation or agency that is fit for purpose? He will be aware of the specific changes to operational areas, with specific directors and cross-cutting directorates being established.
The Select Committee on Home Affairs has played a central role in tracking developments at UKBA over recent years. I refer briefly to the 15th report published in November last year. That report rightly identifies initial decision making as central to much of what we are debating and covers appeals, which are clearly a two-way process. Yes, officials may well make wrong decisions, but it is equally clear from the information I have received that appeals are often successful because the information was not supplied correctly the first time round. The appeal was not based on a decision, but was one in which supplementary information led to a positive outcome. Making the right decision at the outset is key, as is ensuring that the right information is supplied by applicants.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward), who is no longer in his place but will return shortly, highlighted the importance of intelligence, and I certainly support what he said. When people come to MPs with intelligence about the activities of individuals who they think are here illegitimately, feedback is essential so that constituents can see that some action has been taken as a result. I appreciate the difficulties associated with data protection when providing feedback that is specific to an individual case, but we need to ensure that feedback is provided in some shape or form.
On correspondence between the MPs and the UKBA, contrary to what the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) said, my experience suggests that things have improved. They are not perfect, but there is no doubt about the improvement, and my staff would confirm that. I no longer experience the sort of thing that happened back in 1997, when many people I saw in my surgery had been in the UK for perhaps 10 years, yet their status had still not been determined. That is changing, which does not mean that things are perfect.
What MPs do quite successfully is to use individual cases to identify areas with a pattern of poor performance. I will not reel off a long list of individual cases, but I shall refer to one case of a family—I shall call them Mr and Mrs J—who were granted visas on appeal in February last year in Colombo, but who have still not received them. I do not know whether a specific problem in Colombo has caused that to happen, but if such cases help to identify an issue in a particular mission, I hope that the Government would respond.
Fiona Mactaggart
May I assure the right hon. Gentleman that this is not just specific to Colombo? This pattern is common; I have a number of such cases in Islamabad, for example.
Tom Brake
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, which shows that it is essential for us collectively to identify such problems; we might believe that these are individual cases, but when the feedback comes in from all MPs, we see that the issue is a much wider one.
A number of Members have referred to data. Clearly, without strong data, it is difficult to determine whether policy is effective. I greatly welcome the fact that, following pressure from the Liberal Democrats on an issue that we have been running with for a number of years, exit checks will be reintroduced. Ultimately, that is the only way to secure high-quality data that can effectively inform debate.
On the problem of backlogs, I am sure the Minister will have received the briefing from the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, which many of us, too, have received for today’s debate. The briefing refers to the definition of a review, and it challenges the UKBA statement that reviews have been carried out in respect of all asylum backlog cases. That might involve a definitional issue involving what constitutes a review. A paper review may involve no contact with either the legal representatives or the individual who is the subject of the review. In any event, the ILPA is concerned about whether every case has been reviewed.
I do not know whether the Minister was quoted accurately when he was reported to have said:
“The UK has been forced to launch a global charm offensive to convince foreign students it is not against immigration”.
The quotation comes from a BBC report headed “Please come to UK”. The Minister is shaking his head, so it appears it that is not an accurate representation of what he said. Whether it is or not, however, I should like him to tell me whether the capacity exists to make what I accept is a difficult distinction between students who, having applied to attend a college here quite legitimately, find that between their application and their arrival the college has been shut down—for perfectly legitimate reasons—and has taken their money but will not give them what they wanted, and those who are not students but have colluded to come here for purposes other than study. It would be helpful to be able to distinguish such people from students who fall foul of the rules through no fault of their own.