TOEIC Visa Cancellations

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Wes Streeting]

I am delighted that my hon. Friend could be here before returning to the main Chamber to consider the important matter of Brexit. I strongly agree and he is absolutely correct. The injustice is grave and the numbers affected are huge. This scandal should have been plastered on the front page of every national newspaper. It is bad enough that those students have been denied access to justice through appeal. They should have been given at least some sense of justice through the disinfectant of sunlight.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing the debate and for his work on this subject. I suspect that a number of Members in the Chamber have, like me, had a series of affected constituents approach them. Given the seriousness of what has happened in the Home Office in the past—never mind that the Minister is new to the subject—does he think that this new scandal merits a proper, thorough independent inquiry?

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree. In fact, when I come to describe the Home Office’s handling of this, we will see that an independent inquiry is necessary.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Immigration (Caroline Nokes)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) on securing the debate, and all Members who have contributed. It would be remiss of me not to mention the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), who is detained elsewhere. In his absence, I thank him for his continued scrutiny of the issue, and for first raising TOEIC tests with me when I was a very new Immigration Minister indeed.

I value the contributions that have been made in the debate. I will begin by providing something of an overview, but I thank the hon. Members for Ilford North and for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) for having set the scene quite clearly regarding what was certainly a very big scandal in terms of how the tests went so horribly wrong and became open to abuse and, in some cases, organised criminality.

English language testing for certain immigration purposes was first introduced in 2008. Since reforms in 2011, it has been a requirement for all student visa applicants to prove that they can speak English at an appropriate level. A number have used the qualification provided by the secure English language testing regime, and all private colleges are required to ensure that their sponsored students have a SELT qualification. Thus, individuals who wished to come to the UK to study, or to extend their leave to study, had to submit, where required, an English language test certificate from an approved company licensed by the Government.

Test centres operated on behalf of Educational Testing Services, or ETS as we have often heard it described this afternoon, were the subject of a BBC “Panorama” programme in February 2014 that aired footage of systematic cheating in examinations for the test of English for international communication—TOEIC—at a number of its UK test centres. Facilitated by organised criminals, it typically involved invigilators supplying, or even reading out, answers to entire exam rooms, or gangs of impostors being allowed to step into the exam candidates’ places to sit the test as proxy test-takers, and sitting speaking tests for candidates.

The Government, as one would expect and welcome, took immediate, robust action, which has been measured and proportionate. So far, 21 people have received criminal convictions for their role in the deception and have been sentenced to a total of 68 years’ imprisonment. Only two further live investigations remain.

[Gareth Thomas]

Can the Minister tell the House whether ETS itself is still under criminal investigation? If not, will she take steps to ensure that ETS agrees to release any information reasonably requested by one of its student clients?

[Caroline Nokes]

Unfortunately, I cannot provide a live update on criminal investigations, but I will write to the hon. Gentleman providing him with that information.

The majority of individuals linked to the fraud were sponsored by private colleges, not universities, many of which the Home Office had significant concerns about well before “Panorama”. Indeed, 400 colleges that had sponsored students linked to ETS had already had their licences revoked prior to 2014. ETS had its own licence to provide tests within the UK suspended in February 2014. That licence expired in April of the same year and ETS was removed from the immigration rules on 1 July 2014. Approximately 20% of the tests taken in the UK were provided by ETS prior to its suspension in February 2014.

Over the course of 2014, as we have heard, ETS systematically analysed all the tests taken in the UK dating back to 2011—some 58,458 tests. Analysis of the results identified 33,725 invalid results and 22,694 questionable results. People who used invalid ETS test certificates to obtain immigration leave have had action taken against them. Those with questionable results—more than 22,000 individuals—were given the chance to resit a test or attend an interview before any action was taken.

In appeals, we have sought to provide sufficient evidence to discharge the evidential burden of establishing that fraud was used to obtain a certificate from ETS. The courts have consistently found in our favour that our evidence for invalid cases is enough to act on and creates a reasonable suspicion of fraud. It is then for individuals, through either appeals or judicial reviews, to address that.

Before addressing some of the specific points raised, I add that the issues covered in today’s debate have been looked into very thoroughly by the Home Affairs Committee, which ran an inquiry in 2016. During that inquiry, Ministers and officials from the Home Office answered well over 100 specific questions, and those answers are still detailed on the Committee’s website.

Where we have made removal decisions against those with invalid certificates, we have ensured that any appeal against the decision is properly exercised after removal from the UK. Under the appeals regime that was in place in 2014, many of those who we believed to have committed fraud were given an out-of-country appeal. That had been the position since 2003. As a result of the Immigration Act 2014, there is now a right of appeal only where claims raising asylum, humanitarian protection or human rights issues are refused.