Immigration and Asylum Bill (Sixteenth sitting)

Joe Robertson Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Blake Stephenson]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

New clause 63 concerns English language testing, a topic on which I have tabled many questions to the Home Office, as the Minister will be aware. It would stop the immigration rules allowing fully remote English language tests unless Parliament authorised them in legislation.

This Government have made much of raising English language requirements. Only yesterday, the Home Secretary confirmed that settlement will require English to A-level standard. She said that it is unacceptable for migrants to come here without learning our language. I agree with every word of that, but at the very moment the Government seem to be raising the standards, they are lowering the guard on testing. The Home Office plans to move its English test online or make it “digital by default” without in-person invigilation from late 2027, under a contract worth up to £816 million. In answer to my written questions, Ministers acknowledged the “challenges” posed by AI-assisted cheating. They also confirmed that they intend to pursue remote testing for the “Life in the UK” test as well.

The warnings could not be clearer. In March, the IELTS partnership, the world’s largest provider, withdrew from the tender process, warning that a fully remote test

“would rely on unproven technologies and practices.”

Research by Cambridge University Press has shown that remote testing creates more opportunity for identify fraud, proxy test taking and organised criminal exploitation. The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants has moved away from remote exams because of cheating.

The body that runs America’s law school admissions test is ending remote testing over widespread AI-enabled cheating. In Mexico, the country’s leading university ordered 58,000 students to resit their entrance exams in person, after a remote round was riddled with cheating. Australia and Canada have both rejected remote language testing for visa purposes.

However, we need not look abroad. We remember the 2014 scandal, when organised cheating in supervised centres invalidated tens of thousands of results. If fraud on that scale was possible with an invigilator in the room, what does the Minister think will happen when there is no room at all?

Consider the absurdity of where this leads us. A teenager sitting a GCSE is supervised, and a learner driver sitting a theory test must attend a test centre and prove their identity, yet a test that can unlock a visa and, in time, permanent settlement here in the UK would be undertaken sitting at home, in front of a laptop, with nobody checking who is really answering the questions.

[Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)]

Listening to the shadow Minister throughout the day, it is revealing just how deficient the Bill is in tackling the fundamental problems with immigration and asylum policy. Even if the Government do not agree with our new clauses, I invite the Minister—perhaps I should have intervened on her at some point—to address a wider point the shadow Minister is making: how do we deal with all these issues that are simply not addressed in this legislation or anywhere else where the Government say they are acting?

[Blake Stephenson]

I thank my hon. Friend for that helpful intervention. If the Minister cannot answer today, we need to widen the debate on Report and think about the cumulative impact of the holes in the legislation.

The stakes are rising. As English requirements for settlement go up, so does the value of a fraudulent pass. Criminal gangs follow value. A Government who promise to smash the gangs should not be opening a new market for them, which is what moving to English online testing will do. Ministers say that the change will deliver a net benefit to the public purse, but any short-term saving will be swallowed many times over by the cost of fraud, enforcement and, eventually, rebuilding a system that should never have been weakened in the first place.

Early proposals for this contract included physical test centres. Somewhere along the way, they disappeared. Parliament deserves to know why, and it deserves a say before a control this important is quietly dismantled by the Government. Integrity in testing is integrity in the immigration system. I ask the Minister, do the Government still intend to allow fully remote testing and will they publish their assessment of the fraud risk before they do so?