UK Border Agency

John McDonnell Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Yarl’s Wood is near his constituency, so he will have dealt with these kinds of cases. It is important that we look at the cases on an individual basis. Of course they form part of a grid, table or pie chart, but they involve individual people with real problems that we need to deal with.

I will move on to students, which is an issue of great interest to the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon. The Select Committee happens to contain not only the hon. Lady, but the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), so obviously student visas are an important issue to it. Of course, the fine universities of Northampton, Leicester, De Montfort and Rhondda are also represented in the Chamber. [Interruption.] If there is not a university of Rhondda, I am sure that there will be by the end of the week.

We love seeing the Minister for Immigration before the Committee, although we do not see him often enough. He is coming before us on Tuesday. When he last came before us, we talked about student visas. There is definitely a difference of emphasis between the Foreign Office, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Home Office. The Home Office feels that it is very important to reduce the number of students, and to reduce the intake only to the brightest and the best—whatever that means.

We all want to get rid of bogus colleges. That is why the Committee has pressed the UKBA to ensure that more of its visits are unannounced. The majority of its visits to colleges are still announced. People can therefore prepare for its arrival. We believe that it is important, as we have said in successive reports, that it just turns up on a Monday morning, a Friday afternoon or a Wednesday morning to see whether the college is operating. It is quite easy to do that. The UKBA does it for enforcement purposes. I have many examples of that. Indeed, the Home Secretary has given the example of a restaurant in her constituency, which she visited regularly and liked, being raided by the UKBA. It found that some of the workers were here illegally. If it is all right to raid restaurants, it should be all right to go into colleges to see whether they are bogus.

We and the university sector want as many genuine students to come here as possible, because if they do not come here, they will go to the United States of America. There is even evidence that France is setting up courses in English to attract people who do not want to apply to come to the United Kingdom. It is therefore important that we deal with student numbers.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

There are genuine students who apply to and are accepted by a college on the UKBA’s approved list only for the college to be delisted. Those students are given no opportunity to find an alternative course and are left high and dry. They, too, are victims of this system.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is right. I have many examples of people who have come to my constituency only for the colleges to be closed down. That has happened to one or two colleges in Leicester. Where do those people go in the meantime? The colleges are bogus, but the students are not. They have paid their money in good faith. They are then in limbo if they do not have a different educational establishment to go to.

--- Later in debate ---

[John McDonnell]

Like me, my hon. Friend has prayed against the rules. Today is not the time to debate them in any detail, but does she agree that the Government should now give us the opportunity to debate the rules thoroughly on the Floor of the House?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I think it would be helpful to do so, but in a way that is not the point here. The point is that if the Minister accepts that there are errors in the draft—I know that they are errors and not deliberate—he should take the opportunity to withdraw the rules until they can be remedied, to ensure that the immigration system is properly administered. Given the problems of administration—the queues at Heathrow and other issues, and the problem with posts overseas where we have had good reports from the independent chief inspector responsible for entry clearance, highlighting that the wrong decisions have been made—perhaps the Minister could do something about them.

One thing I have learned from my long involvement in these issues is that the biggest problem is trying to get the Home Office administration to do what it says on the tin—to do what the rules say to make sure that the administration is effective and efficient. It is not, and it has not been for decades. The simplest thing to do would be to try to drive out unnecessary processes and to use the people subject to immigration control as allies in making the system more efficient. The vast majority of people who are trying to join their families here or to visit Britain are trying to do the right thing. If we can work in a way whereby the people trying to do the right thing can help to make the system more efficient, we could envisage a system in which not everyone was subject to the degradation—frankly, it is degradation—that is a product of the gross inefficiency and bureaucracy of that system.

I have made some specific proposals, and if the Minister were to say yes to them today, we could take a couple of little steps in that direction. Many more are needed.

--- Later in debate ---

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

Given that Heathrow is in my constituency, along with the two detention centres of Harmsworth and Colnbrook, dealing with these issues constitutes the daily work of my office, not just during the day but into the night and at weekends, because, like every other Member’s office, we are inundated at the moment. That was reflected in the speeches of my right hon. Friends the Members for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) and for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) and my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart).

The hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) raised the issue of compliance with rule 35. I have met representatives of people whom I would describe as constituents, because they have been detained in my constituency, who have been victims of torture and whose circumstances have been affected deleteriously by their detention. That continues. Hunger strikes are currently taking place in detention centres. People who have come here to seek asylum as a result of torture and the loss of human rights have been denied it, have been locked up, and are now refusing food. Some are in a serious condition.

The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) mentioned the detention of children. The independent monitoring board produced a report about Heathrow’s short-term holding facilities at the beginning of the year. I pay tribute to the volunteers on the board for their excellent work and the commitment that they demonstrate. The report made a range of recommendations. It said that the children’s short-term holding facilities were a disgrace. Children had to witness the detention and forced deportation of people—scenes that no child should witness. I hope that the Minister will report that many of the board’s recommendations have now been implemented.

Performing tasks such as controlling our borders and processing applications for asylum or for visas requires staff to undertake that work. When they took office, the Government decided to cut 8,500 Home Office jobs and 22% of the staff at the UKBA. That, has inevitably led to massive queues at ports and airports, weaker security, huge backlogs of casework and, in some areas, an almost non-existent Customs operation. Last year, my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), who is not in the Chamber now, asked the Government to explain the rationale of the cuts and how they had been implemented in the Department. It seems that a head count was taken and a percentage cut was made with no real management. What we are seeing now is virtual panic management, in terms of both control of the borders and the case load itself.

Let me give one stark example. I have constituents who work at Heathrow, and sometimes anonymous letters are pushed through my door. I found the latest among my correspondence last weekend. It states:

“I am writing to you anonymously as identifying myself will cause me to get into trouble with my employers.

I want to bring to your attention that over the course of the last few weeks, on at least six separate occasions, UKBA officers at Heathrow Airport have missed disembarking subjects who are of interest to the security services for terrorism matters. These subjects are commonly referred to as SX subjects. They should have been identified upon presentation of their passport to UKBA officers and then referred on to the security service and police, but this has not happened.

This comes at a time when UKBA have had to draft in officers from different areas to make up the shortfall in frontline staff, following the recent political and media pressure regarding queue times. Unfortunately they have had to use staff with little or no training (such as MOD police and office staff) and in some cases bring back people who retired many years ago and are very out of touch with modern working practices. It is inevitable that with these elastoplast measures, mistakes are going to happen.”

I receive such reports from staff regularly. When the Minister and I met representatives of the Public and Commercial Services Union last week, they made clear that morale was at rock bottom, particularly at Heathrow. Staff are being dragged in from all over the country. High-grade staff at grade 6 and grade 7 are working unlimited overtime just to plug the gaps. Where have they been brought from? Customs.

Let me give the House an example that we were given last week. For the week beginning 30 April, the Felixstowe-based team responsible for ro-ro freight control was sent to Heathrow; there was no replacement cover. The following week, the Felixstowe-based team responsible for general maritime and general aviation controls at small ports and airports was reassigned to Heathrow. That meant that one of eight detection teams, which were already understaffed by 30%, was completely absent. I think that the UKBA is in turmoil. In addition to the failure to control our borders because of lack of staff, we are putting the country at risk, just as the Olympics are about to take place and we will have the largest influx of people into the country for decades.

On the backlogs of immigration and asylum casework, the Minister will no doubt assure us that additional staff are being taken on. We now hear that Serco has offered its services free of charge for six months to tackle some of this backlog. Some of us remember that it was Serco incompetence—lost files and so forth—that caused most of the backlog that we experienced a number of years ago.

The current situation is as follows: chaotic management; staff being bussed or flown in from all over the country who are either untrained or not adequately trained to do the border control job; and a backlog of immigration and asylum casework building up at the Home Office. The Government response is to try to change the rules, which will not deter people from making applications at all. It will also not deter people from wanting to make some form of appeal, but, as Members have said, the appeal will come to MPs, rather than go through the process. We will be inundated, therefore. We will be inundated with the pleas and cries of people just for fairness, so that their families can visit them and they can live and celebrate normal family life, including weddings and other celebrations.

We have reached the stage where Public and Commercial Services Union members are balloting on industrial action because their morale is so low. They feel that they have gone through a pay freeze for a number of years and are now faced with intolerable pressures—including bullying and victimisation—from management. They feel that they are being provoked to do whatever they can to defend themselves, and what they can do is take industrial action to highlight this issue and force management and Ministers to the negotiating table to recognise the realities.

More staff are needed, and they are needed immediately—the Government are recruiting some, but not enough. A change in the industrial relations atmosphere is also needed, as is an end to the privatisation and an acceptance that people need to be rewarded for the work they do. There must be respect for those at the front line. They must be listened to; people such as my constituents who send anonymous letters, because they know no other way of whistleblowing or raising issues without being victimised by management, must be listened to.

I am fearful about what might happen over the next few months because of the Government’s mismanagement of this process. I criticised the last Government, but this mess is even bigger than the mess was back then.