UK Border Agency

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

Quite right—why are students considered immigrants? They are here for only a few years.

We face particular issues with students at university, and I hope that the House will bear with me, as I should like to try to explain what they are. We need to continue to be a centre of excellence in Scotland. We have three universities in the top 100 in ratings around the world. Today, we have heard about the Higgs boson, whose existence was proposed by Peter Higgs, an Edinburgh university professor, which shows the excellence of Scottish universities. Those places are centres of excellence because we can attract the best and brightest, and we need to continue to be able to do so. However, we cannot do so if the new immigration rules and UKBA policies are implemented—and for what end? Students do not have recourse to public funds. They pay fees and maintenance, and have minimal impact on public services.

The benefits that we see in Scotland are not just financial, significant as they are—international students contribute £500 million to our economy. We gain so much by working with and learning from students from hundreds of countries who enhance our education system, our distinctive culture and Scottish society. We want to be at the forefront of the international marketplace for ideas and imagination. We want to continue to attract the brightest and best overseas academic talent to help build a smarter, wealthier and fairer Scotland. We want to welcome talented people to live, learn, work and remain here, but the proposals by the UK Government send out entirely the wrong message. They are already being perceived negatively overseas, deterring prospective students from applying to study across the UK, and that is particularly so in Scotland.

UKBA is simply doing its job: making tougher rules and enforcing them ever more rigidly. Perhaps the Minister for Immigration will confirm this, but I think that it is looking for a reduction of around 80,000 students across the UK—that is the target—and by heck it is going to achieve it regardless of the collateral damage to our universities. If it is bad for universities, tough luck. If we lose out on attracting the students we need for our economy and our institutions, too bad—UKBA has a job to do, and it is going to do it.

If it bad for students who now have to be relatively prosperous to come to the UK, for goodness’ sake they should not be poor and destitute if they are fleeing oppression, because in that condition they will undoubtedly remain. Our treatment of failed asylum seekers who cannot return to their country of origin because of fear of persecution or oppression should shame all in this House. There is almost positively a policy of destitution.

How is the UKBA dealing with people who are here legally?

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the vast number of people in this country feel strongly about the question of failed asylum seekers and destitution, and provide food, support and somewhere to live in churches, mosques and other places? I agree that it is an absolute disgrace that we expect people to live in complete destitution until they have got through the relevant number of years, which the Government propose to extend, before they can get residence in this country. We need to be humane about it.

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman is spot on. I see those efforts in Scotland, particularly Glasgow, where we have a number of failed asylum seekers. We cannot return them to countries such as Iran, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe—it would be absurd to do so—and the policy of destitution that the Government have imposed on them is a disgrace. We in the House are rightly appalled about the way in which we deal with them.

The people with whom we come into contact are those we have heard about from Members across the Chamber, and a feature of the debate has been the ultimate frustration experienced by ordinary Members of Parliament who have to deal with the UKBA. A couple of weeks ago, we had a debate on article 8 of the European convention on human rights, and several Members who attended that debate are here today. The House indulged in the usual kickabout stuff about marauding foreign rapists and murderers on every street corner who go home to their state-funded apartment and get all their swanky lawyers to invent reasons for them to stay in the UK. However, we deal with the real, mundane issues that are brought to our offices by people who suffer as a result of trying to ensure that they can stay here.

The UKBA’s job is quite simple: to stop people coming to the UK who want to come to our shores—people who should not be here should be kicked out—and to frustrate as much as possible those who are trying to go up the citizenship or immigration ladder. I have only a few minutes, but I want to mention two cases that I have dealt with. One is quite a celebrated case that the Immigration Minister may remember and shows the type of case we have to deal with. It concerns a lovely guy called Swarthwick Salins, who lived in my constituency. The UKBA, which was doing its job, looked into his bank account, and found that instead of £800, there was £740 there. There was no phone call to Swarthwick to say, “Listen, Mr Salins, there is an issue with your bank account. You’re £80 below the necessary level—this is a warning that you are £80 short.” The one and only course of action by the UKBA was to boot him out. That is the way it officiously applies the rules.

Let me explain who Swarthwick Salins is. He is a PhD student from St Andrews university, he has three Scottish children, he is a strong member of his church and a loyal member of the community. A community campaign was launched to ensure that Swarthwick Salins could remain in Perth and it was backed by practically everybody there. I would have paid the £80, and I would have put money on with the Minister, because I know that I would win the bet that he will never reduce immigration to the numbers that he wants.

The Government want to reduce immigration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. It ain’t going to happen. We live in an interconnected globalised world. We are here in London. One third of the people who live and work in London come from outwith the UK. That is the type of world we live in. It is like King Canute trying to hold back the tide to imagine for a minute that we are going to be able to deal with these issues. What has immigration done for London, as Monty Python would say? London is the most successful, dynamic city in the world. Let us hear a little more about the positive sides of immigration. Let us talk it up. Let us see what we can do to try to encourage a good feeling about it, because the Minister is not going to reach his targets. Regardless of an immigration-obsessed Conservative Government giving massive resources to the UKBA, the issue will never be effectively addressed.

Thankfully, in a few years, we will have control over and responsibility for our immigration policy in Scotland. We will do it differently. We will work in partnership with the rest of the UK, but we will not kick people out for £80, we will not harass overseas students who want to come and study in our universities, and we will deal with immigration damn well better than the UKBA is doing just now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Green]

I will say two things. First, there has been a huge amount of fraud in the past and the sweeping away of bogus colleges reduces the chances for such fraud. This point was also raised by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). Individual students have 60 days to find a new college and their visa is still operational for that period. That is the sensible first step for them to take.

Stripping away the bogus colleges is only the first point. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made a perfectly reasonable point about those who overstay or abscond. The UKBA has been working through tens of thousands of leave curtailments. It is stripping students and others of their right to remain in the UK if they have no right to be here and providing them with written notification that they should return home. In recent months, it has dealt with almost 25,000 curtailments. To ensure that such people return home, the UKBA is undertaking a summer enforcement campaign to target those who have overstayed their visa. The aim of the campaign is to galvanise intelligence-led enforcement activity against such individuals, with the intention of removing them. So far this summer, we have removed almost 1,800 overstayers. As has been said, that is probably 1,800 more overstayers than have been removed in any previous year. That is not just students, but all overstayers.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Will the Minister give way?

[Damian Green]

I apologise, but we are coming to the end of the debate and there are lots of points that I wish to respond to.

Foreign national offenders were mentioned by a number of Members. We now start deportation action 18 months before the end of the sentence to speed up the process. We are also chartering more flights to remove foreign offenders. Last year, we removed more than 4,500 foreign criminals—43% of them before the end of their prison sentence. Many Members raised the issue of those who are released from detention while awaiting deportation. In only 30% of those cases is the decision made by the UKBA. The courts make the other decisions.

The asylum legacy was perhaps the biggest bugbear of hon. Members from all parts of the House. I sympathise with them entirely. There are currently 80,000 cases in the asylum controlled archive. That is down 18,000 from last September. There is some confusion about this matter, but no new applications are being added to the archive. If we find cases while mopping up around the agency that belong in the archive, which is for very old cases, they are put there and processed. Nobody should be under the misapprehension—I think it was the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) who brought this up—that new applications are going into the archive; they are simply not.

As has been mentioned, we are now checking cases not just against public sector databases but against credit scoring databases and so on, to see whether people are leaving any footprint in this country. If they are not, there is clearly evidence that they have left, which allows us to concentrate on those who are here so that everyone gets a decision. As the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee said, the target is finally to clear the backlog this year.

Another big issue that many right hon. and hon. Members brought up was the changes that we are making to family visit visa appeals, which we are restricting. I should point out that no other category of visit visa attracts a full right of appeal, and it is a disproportionate use of taxpayers’ money to fund a full right of appeal for a visitor, to be heard by a tribunal in the UK. No other country does that. From 9 July, the new regulations will restrict the full right of appeal to those applying to visit a close family member with settled refugee or humanitarian status.

I repeat that it is quicker for people to reapply than to appeal, and it is not the case that every decision is simply rubber-stamped. I believe it was the hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) who brought that up. I assure him that each case is examined by a more senior member of staff, and that some decisions are changed by the entry clearance manager.