Family Visitor Visas

Helen Jones Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petitions 206568, 210497 and 201416 relating to family visitor visas.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Cheryl. I congratulate you on the honour you received in the recent honours list; it was well-deserved.

All the e-petitions we are considering deal with visitor visas for families, and we have grouped them together for that reason. There seem to be particular problems with families getting visitor visas for their relatives. Before I move on to that, I want to state the obvious for the record: every state has the right to control its borders. No one is asking for a free-for-all or for those who abuse the system to get away with it. However, people overwhelmingly want a system that is fair to people already in this country and to their visitors and that is fairly administered, with some compassion and common sense. From the public engagement we have done—I will refer to that later—that often seems not to be the case.

I must confess that I came to this issue as a bit of a novice; depending on the point of view, it is either an advantage or a drawback of the Petitions Committee that we often have to learn a new subject very quickly. I do not represent a constituency where many people have relatives abroad, so I thought that the few cases I had seen where people could not get someone in for a wedding or funeral represented blips in the system. However, having looked at the matter in some detail and talked to our petitioners—I am very grateful to them—and to others we have engaged with, I am convinced that there are serious problems with family visitor visas when it comes to the quality of decision making and how it is communicated to applicants.

We all accept that clearance officers have a difficult job to do. There are a number of things they need to consider when deciding whether to grant a visa, including people’s previous immigration history, their financial position, their economic and personal ties to their own country and whether they have been here so often that it constitutes de facto residence. Some of those things are clearly factual, while others require the exercise of judgment.

For example, when someone is applying from a country that is unstable or in a conflict zone, officers can look at the statistics for immigration compliance in that region. However, they are also told that if someone is applying from a country in conflict or where part of the country is in conflict, that

“can be sufficient reason for you not to be satisfied that the applicant is a genuine visitor”,

unless the applicant can produce evidence to show that that is not the case. One of the things cited as an example is where they have right of residence in a third country, which does not apply to many people. It is very difficult for an applicant to rebut that presumption, and we are in danger of judging people on where they come from, rather than their personal circumstances.

Officers can look at someone’s previous history to see whether they or their sponsor have attempted to deceive the immigration authorities in the past, and that is perfectly right, but they can also refuse an application when:

“It has not been possible to verify information provided by the applicant despite attempts to do so”.

I would have no problem with that if I was convinced that we were getting the quality of the decision making right in the first instance, but I do not think that is always the case.

In 2011, the chief inspector of borders and immigration looked at the New York visa section. One would not think that was a particularly difficult area, but he found that 26% of the cases did not meet the quality markers for decision making. Officers were often misinterpreting documents and were making inconsistent decisions. Although his 2012 report showed some improvement, he said there was a long way to go. In his 2014 report, he looked at various visa sections and found that 30% of decisions did not meet the quality markers. Again, officers were making very inconsistent decisions.

It is not surprising, then, that a number of cases have been raised of late in the press and by Members of this House. In May, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) said in a debate that she had lost count of the number of times people had been refused visas to attend a wedding or funeral. She highlighted a rather disturbing case where a constituent of hers was waiting for a stem cell transplant, but his brother in Nigeria, who was the donor, had been refused a visa to come here.

Another case—it is not a family one, but it illustrates the problems in the system—was highlighted by The Guardian. A person who runs a charity he set up in Malawi wanted to come to meet donors and speak at the Hay festival. He was refused a visa. He applied again with support from people in the other place and the head of an international charity. He had a full programme of what he was doing, and he was still turned down. He cannot get in for a perfectly reasonable thing, even with the support of a national newspaper. I worry about the people who have not had that support.

The Hertfordshire Mercury reported the case of a father from Morocco who was unable to attend the birth of his child, despite showing evidence of flights booked into and out of the country. The most bizarre recent case I came across was that of a grandmother in Jamaica—she is a retired nurse—who had been consistently refused a visa to come here to see her children and grandchildren, despite the fact she had worked for 30 years for the NHS and was entitled to both a state pension and an NHS pension. I do not believe that anyone would think that the system was set up to stop Jamaican grannies with 30 years’ service in this country from visiting their grandchildren.

The problem is that since the Crime and Courts Act 2013, there are no appeals, except in very limited cases on grounds of racial discrimination or human rights. The Government justified that by saying that appeals were costly. They were, but a third of appeals were succeeding, which shows that the decision making was bad in the first place. Some 63% of the appeals that succeeded had introduced new information, leaving 37% where there was no new information and the appeal still succeeded. To me, that says there is poor decision making. Worse than that, new information is often introduced on appeal because the grounds for refusal are so vague that people do not know what information they have to provide until they get to appeal.

The chief inspector has commented on cases where appeals are refused because the applicant did not provide particular information, had no way of knowing they needed to provide it and were not asked to provide it. He said that was unfair. He looked at recent cases. He pointed out that in 13% of cases where visas were turned down and 56% of cases where visas were allowed, there was not enough information on file for a proper audit of those decisions to be made. If that is the case, something is going very wrong. One of our petitions asks for appeals to be reinstated precisely because of that poor decision making.

I have talked to some of our petitioners. They have clearly said that in every other public authority, there is a way of appealing decisions if the authority does something wrong. That does not exist with these cases. If a local council makes a bad decision, someone can go to the ombudsman, but that is not possible in these cases. Others think they are being denied the opportunity to, as they see it, clear their name and prove that they have not given wrong information or tried to manipulate the system. If an appeal is not a possibility, people are caught on a merry-go-round of making applications and not always knowing why they have been turned down or what information they have to provide, and often being turned down again for a different reason.

Sometimes people are caught in a trap. I want to talk about a case that was given to me by a member of staff in the House. It is the case of a British citizen who teaches in South America, who has been married to a citizen of the country where he works for six years. Five years ago they came to visit his family—no problem at all. Recently they applied again and were turned down. The only reason anyone can see is that since then they have had a baby and his wife had given up work, as many people do, to care for her child while the baby was small. They were refused, even though they provided evidence of his contract for work and the contract for their rental accommodation. The result of that was heartbroken grandparents in this country, who find it difficult to travel and who had arranged a baptism and a family holiday to get to know their grandchild, and a British family—British born and bred—who feel that the system does not work for them. It is the lack of faith in the system that has prompted the petitions.

I do not think—I have said this to the petitioners—we can grant people an automatic right to come here. There are always a few people who want to manipulate the system, but the evidence that we have indicates that that is not a particular problem with visitor visas. The Library’s information on exit checks for last year show that 96.7% of people who came here on visitor visas left at the right time. That is a slightly higher percentage than for those who come on work visas, so there does not appear to be a particular problem.

Another petition asked for a system like the Canadian super visas, whereby people are allowed to visit their families for up to two years. I think that slightly misunderstands what the Canadian system was brought in for. It was actually introduced to reduce settlement in Canada under the parents and grandparents settlement scheme, because people settling were deemed to be a bit of a strain on the Canadian medical system. I do not know whether that is true, but I do know that people have to provide £100,000 worth of health insurance, which is fine if someone is wealthy and healthy enough to be accepted, but not much help to people such as our granny in Jamaica or a young couple from South America. The petitions might not have the solutions to the problem, but they, including the one asking for the right of appeal to be reinstated, highlight issues that the Home Office needs to look at.

We conducted some public engagement with surveys of people who had signed petitions about visas. We got more than 2,000 responses and we heard the same stories again and again: mothers unable to come to a daughter’s wedding; nieces not able to come and be bridesmaids; and parents who could not come to help with a new baby—sometimes even a premature baby. Some of the stories we heard verged on the bizarre and seemed to indicate to me that the more honest people were, the more likely they were to be rejected. My general view is that villains know how to manipulate the system.

We had a grandmother, for example, who had said that she would be looking after her grandchild while the parents were at work—she was going to get to know the grandchild—and she was turned down on the grounds that that was paid work. Anyone who knows anything about grandparents knows that, far from having to pay them to look after their grandchildren, someone is more likely to be trampled in the rush to look after them. It is nonsense. We also had the case of someone in the British forces, whose mother was denied a visa to attend his passing out parade. Yet another military family, who had had their second child, were keen to get the husband’s niece over for a couple of months to help out. She had finished one set of exams, but was going back to school. She was refused a visa. The family were desperate for some help because the husband, who had served nine years in the forces, was about to deploy, leaving his wife on her own. Unless the British forces are running a concentrated visa scam, which is unlikely, I can see no reason at all for such decisions.

The people who responded to our survey understand that decisions are difficult to make. In fact, I was surprised at the number who said they would even be prepared to deposit a sum of money to be returned to them when their visitor left as evidence of good faith. They know it is difficult, but they find the whole process they are expected to go through excruciating. Some of them told us that their relatives had been so traumatised by the process, they did not want to apply again. Others used words such as, “demeaning”, “devastating”, “inhumane” and even “shameful”. Those are the words of British citizens living in this country and paying taxes here.

A family whose mother had been refused a visa twice, although she had been here before without any problem, said,

“What else can we actually do to prove that the visitor will return?”

That is a fair question. Another family, whose mother-in-law was refused a visa a couple of times—even though, again, she had been here before with no problem and left on time—said:

“I do understand that they have concerns about people coming and staying, but for genuine, hard-working taxpayers like us it seems very unfair that we are punished for immigration issues which we have no control over.”

That hits the spot. Immigration issues are being confused with issues about visitors, particularly family visitors. Because there is seldom an appeals process now, people feel they have no redress. That was highlighted for us by one of our respondents, a senior NHS doctor, who said that some time ago his mother applied to come over for the birth of his daughter. She was refused a visa, although it was granted on appeal, albeit when the child was two months old. Now his father would like to come and visit, but he has been turned down and was told that he does not have the financial resources to sustain him if he becomes ill, even though he has shown that he has health insurance. There is no appeal and the family, having shown they have got health insurance, are left wondering what else they have to show to get a visa for the father.

We heard from a businessman who employs 15 people in this country and is perfectly solvent. He could not get his mother-in-law a visa, even though she had been here before, again with no problem, and left on time. Such cases recur again and again. They cannot be seen any longer, as I admit I used to see them, as isolated incidents. They are flagging up systemic problems in the system.

Perhaps we should look at reinstating a category of family visas, as has been suggested by some of our petitioners. We should certainly look at the method of appeal, even if it is not like the old system. We need a proper method of review, but it depends on getting the decision making right in the first place and keeping the files up to date so that things can be properly reviewed.

People are not asking for anything unreasonable. All they ask for is a fair system that makes consistent decisions and tells people properly why they have been rejected; that allows them to know, when they apply again, what evidence they should produce to prove that they are genuine visitors; and that does not stigmatise people simply because of where they come from. That does not seem to be an unreasonable thing for British citizens to ask for—it seems entirely reasonable. We should not leave them as they are at the moment: feeling let down by the system and stigmatised because of issues beyond their control, when all they want to do is see their family—often to let a grandparent see her grandchildren. Surely all our children deserve that right.

As has been pointed out to me, given that we live in an increasingly global world, with people moving to work abroad—often marrying people whom they meet there—this problem will not go away; in fact, it will get worse. I urge the Minister to look seriously at how the system is operating at the moment and what we can do to make it better. Our people deserve no less.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Jones]

I thank all those who have spoken today, for despite what the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) kindly said, I am not an expert on the subject of the debate. In fact, the only family in my constituency that I can think of, currently, who have someone abroad are called Lingard—but I think we will let Jesse back in.

It is important that Members have spoken about individual cases. We have heard a record of poor and inconsistent decision making and failure to read documents properly. I am sorry that the Minister is not taking that on board as she should. It is not possible always to get things right in any visa system, but there are systemic problems that affect British residents, taxpayers and citizens.

We have raised the individual cases not in the expectation that the Minister will comment on them—of course she cannot—but to illustrate the problems. In her response, she confused visitors to this country with those who need visas. They are not the same thing, as we all know. She needs to take the problems with visas for families more seriously. The mistakes are not occasional. They happen frequently, as we have heard, and cause distress to people in this country who are denied contact with their families. The vast majority of people the Committee has heard from are respectable, decent British citizens who simply want to have contact with their families. That is not a big ask.

I am sorry that the Minister does not seem to see the problems, and that she does not see that there is a problem in having no appeal system. That reduces the incentive to get things right first time. It means people do not learn from mistakes because, as has been said, there is no feedback loop. I am sure that we shall return to this problem, because it affects many citizens of this country and causes them anxiety. I hope that, in time, the Home Office will recognise that and separate the issue of immigration from that of visitor visas. That is not happening now but it needs to happen fairly urgently.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petitions 206568, 210497 and 201416 relating to family visitor visas.