Visitor Visas: Sub-Saharan Africa

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Patrick Grady]

Yes, exactly. I will touch on some of those issues, and I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend, who represents Blantyre in Scotland, which was the hometown of David Livingstone and is commemorated in Blantyre, the commercial capital of Malawi. The situation she describes is a problem not just in Malawi. The all-party group on Africa’s experience is that the situation in Malawi is symptomatic of challenges experienced across the region. It is a region where, as my hon. Friend alluded to, very small proportions of the population have access to electricity, let alone the internet, yet prospective visitors to the UK are expected to apply online for a visa. It is a region where public transport as we know it in the UK is practically non-existent, yet people are sometimes required to travel hundreds of miles to a visa application centre—sometimes on numerous occasions to progress the same application. It is a region where trade is mostly conducted in cash, yet payment for a visa can only be made online by credit card.

Those points on their own should be enough to give the Government pause for thought and cause them to ask whether their visa application system is genuinely fit for purpose in the region. Those are often only the first hurdles that applicants face, and they are sometimes high enough to prevent an application from being made in the first place. The Scotland Malawi Partnership reports that many of its member organisations—those are often churches, schools or small community groups—that consider the possibility of bringing partners to Scotland and the UK for a visit simply give up at their first browse of the visa application requirements. I understand from the SMP that NHS Lothian, NHS Tayside, Kingussie High School and Aberdeen presbytery have all recently had to cancel visits because of visa complications. They all have their own powerful stories to tell, which I am sure we could make known to the Minister.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

This weekend, my wife is holding a fundraiser in Stafford, the aim of which is to provide funds for medical students at the Kilimanjaro Christian medical centre. Two medical students from Tanzania were invited on our behalf some time ago, but they are not able to come, precisely because of the bureaucratic hurdles. All that they wanted to do was attend, visit, give their stories and go back.

[Patrick Grady]

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his long-standing work on international development. I suspect that many local charities that want to bring visitors over encounter exactly those hurdles.

Before coming back to the challenges of the process and the concerns about it, I want to deal briefly with why it is important that people from countries such as Malawi should be allowed to visit the UK. I stress that the debate is about visitor visas. The debate on immigration, asylum and settlement is aired often enough in this Chamber and elsewhere. However, the issues are perhaps connected, because there is a strong sense among those who go through the visa application process that the system is based above all on a concern that people who arrive on a visitor visa may abscond or refuse to return to their country of origin.

I plan to table written questions after the debate to establish what figures the Government hold on the rate of absconding or non-returning, especially among holders of short-term sponsored visitor visas, to see whether that concern is real or imagined. There will undoubtedly be individual chancers who make it to the UK on visitor visas and never quite make it home, although frankly, in my time in Malawi I met plenty of UK and European travellers who ended up on the beach at Lake Malawi and never quite made it home, because they were quite happy to spend their days in the travel lodges or set up their own. There is reciprocity there, but on the whole, people who come here for a short time—especially those who are sponsored or invited by charities and community organisations—come for a specific purpose and are supported and accompanied throughout their visit, often from the moment they arrive at the airport to the moment they are dropped off there at the end.

Visits for school or cultural exchanges, or for speaking or campaigning tours, are designed to have a lasting impact beyond the visitor’s short presence. A school exchange might promote better global citizenship among young people or provide an invaluable training opportunity for teachers from both countries. Visiting artists or musicians might help to inspire new kinds of creativity and collaboration or provide some social focus for the legitimately established diaspora community here in the UK.