Keith Vaz
Main Page: Keith Vaz (Labour - Leicester East)Department Debates - View all Keith Vaz's debates with the Home Office
(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to open this important debate about not only the Home Office estimates but the Home Affairs Committee’s reports into the UK Border Agency. I am pleased to see the Minister and shadow Minister and so many right hon. and hon. Members who have direct experience of dealing with the UK Border Agency.
I particularly welcome members of the Home Affairs Committee who are here today. My hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) and the hon. Members for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) and for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) have made enormous contributions to the reports that the Select Committee has published in the past few years. The main feature of our reports is that they have been unanimous. Another feature has been our hope that with a succession of very carefully worded but carefully thought out reports we will be able to improve the quality of the UK Border Agency.
Right at the start, I want to make something clear. I have chaired the Home Affairs Committee for five years. We have produced our reports about the administration of the UKBA on a regular basis under the previous Government and the current Government, and we have been as critical in the former case as in the latter. There is no party political point in this; it is about trying to get the best possible service that can be provided to those who use the UKBA. We decided at the start of the Parliament to look regularly at how the UKBA operates, so every three months we revisit our report to see whether there has been any improvement in the system. We also decided to put up a number of key indicators by which we judge how the UKBA operates. It is not the usual kind of Select Committee report that has big and long recommendations; rather, we make specific suggestions that we want the UKBA to follow.
As the estimates indicate, the UKBA’s budget for 2012-13 is £1 billion, and it has a staff of 12,835, while the UK Border Force’s budget is £509 million, and it has a staff of 7,333. A number of ongoing issues arose under the previous Labour Government, and I shall touch on some of those. The first issue is foreign national offenders. There are 3,900 foreign national criminals living in the community who are subject to deportation, 57 of whom are part of the famous 2006 cohort who are still unable to be traced. In 2006, 1,013 foreign prisoners were released without any attempt being made to deport them. Of those, 844 people’s cases have been concluded, 399 people have been deported, 445 have not been deported, 93 are still in the process of being deported, 19 are serving another sentence, and 57 are untraceable. That situation has been ongoing for the past six years or so, and we will continue to monitor it until every one of those foreign national criminals has been found.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
Did my right hon. Friend’s Committee consider why, when someone is found guilty of a criminal offence in this country and sentenced to prison, we cannot find a way of sending them back to serve their sentence in the country that they came from, instead of having them serve it in our prisons so that we have problems years later in trying to send them back? My constituents are always asking me about this.
Keith Vaz
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. These options need to be considered, as they were under the previous Labour Government in respect of Nigeria. Last Thursday, I was in her constituency with members of the Select Committee and we went to Brixton prison, where the governor told us that a third of the prisoners were foreign nationals and that he could not remember a single occasion when such a prisoner was removed at the end of their sentence; they were either taken into the community or made to report to a detention centre.
The Government need to be given credit for the fact that the average time taken to deport has been reduced from 131 days in 2008 to 74 days in 2011, but that is still far too long. There is still a lack of cohesion between the National Offender Management Service and the Home Office. UKBA staff are stationed at Brixton prison, but the problem is that the UKBA is not informed about cases involving foreign national criminals right at the beginning of the process, at the time of sentencing. We have recommended in successive reports that that should happen in order to shorten the period between the release of the prisoner and their being removed to his or her country.
In all the years I have been in this House, the main issue that has dogged the border forces has been the continual delays and backlogs that have gone on under successive Governments. We only recently discovered as part of our inquiry that a number of new, almost virtual reality, filing systems exist at the UKBA. There is the controlled archive which dates back to 2006; I prefer to call it the Tardis, because files go in there and seem never to come out. The controlled archive is the place where files are dumped in cases where the UKBA does not know where the people are.
Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)
Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that one of the most significant reasons for the difficulty in returning people to their countries of origin is the fact that those countries, including some with which this nation has very good relations, often do not want them back and therefore obfuscate and create delay, making it much harder for us to deport them efficiently?
Keith Vaz
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that that is a problem, but that does not mean that we do not have to try to make sure that such deportations happen, because that would be a huge saving to the taxpayer and help us to meet the targets that the Government clearly want us to reach.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend referred to the TARDIS, as he calls it, but there are other cases in which people who have not yet been deported are simply categorised as “unknown issues”, so we have the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. That is a bizarre way of dealing with people, is it not?
Keith Vaz
It is indeed. There seems to be a paralysis on the part of senior officials of the UKBA, who just create more of these archives and move the backlog into different areas without trying to solve the problem.
The archive has now been reduced from 98,000 to 93,000, and from January to March 2012 it fell to 80,000. When Mr Whiteman, the chief executive of the UKBA, who has been brought in as a new broom to try to make sure that these matters are sorted out, last appeared before the Committee, he promised us that the archive will, in effect, be closed by 31 December 2012, and we will hold him to that promise. His predecessor, Lin Homer, who because of the fabulous work that she did at the UKBA has been promoted and is now one of the permanent secretaries at the Treasury, gave us a promise when she said, in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick), who had requested that the legacy cases be concluded by the end of last summer, that every single legacy case would be concluded by the end of last year. [Interruption.]As can be seen from the reaction of right hon. and hon. Members here today, that has not happened. The UKBA has probably just created another of the filing systems where it puts various files when it does not know what has happened to the people involved.
Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that one of the key areas in which we need to hold the UKBA to account is data management? It is almost impossible to understand what is going on and who is going where if we do not have clarity and transparency about the numbers.
Keith Vaz
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. She makes that point every time the head of the UKBA appears before us; I do not know whether she is an expert on data management. It is a big problem because, in the end, the immigration debate is about statistics. If the statistics are not right and we are unable to get the proper data, we cannot have an effective debate about what is happening.
Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)
To go back to the controlled archive and the removal of old cases, is the right hon. Gentleman aware that new cases are still being added to it? It is very much like filling up a Jaguar car with petrol while leaving the engine on, so more petrol is needed at the pump.
Keith Vaz
As the hon. Gentleman will know from his case load, it is a continuing process. He will hear about more of these cases on Friday when he holds his surgery. The Select Committee is saying that the backlog must be cleared, not just put in a different part of the UKBA. It cannot just move the files from Croydon to Liverpool and expect the situation to be sorted out. It must clear the backlog once and for all. With the willingness to do so and the £1 billion of resources that are available each year, that should be possible.
Fiona Mactaggart
I concur with what my right hon. Friend has said about clearing the backlog once and for all. One of my concerns is that, in the present exercise of dealing with legacy cases and the backlog, instead of making a final decision on cases—people used to be given indefinite leave to remain or were returned—lots of people are being given three years’ discretionary leave, which means that a new backlog is being created for three years’ time.
Richard Fuller
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned that immigration is an issue of statistics. It may not be popular to say so, but does he agree that it is also an issue about the lives of individual people? In managing the statistics, we should not lose sight—no matter what the tabloids say—of the fact that we are talking about people who may have made a commitment to come here and who may have gone through extremely difficult circumstances to get here. How we treat such people should have just as much emphasis in our consideration as dealing with the statistics.
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.
Nicola Blackwood
As always, the right hon. Gentleman’s generosity is extraordinary. Does he agree that it is vital to get the message right on student visas? It must be clear that, although we are clamping down on illegal student immigration, we are still open to genuine student immigration, because it is vital to our higher education sector. We still need the brightest and best students to come to our fantastic universities, such as Oxford university and Oxford Brookes university.
Keith Vaz
I agree with the hon. Lady, but that is true not only of the elite, which includes Oxford and Oxford Brookes universities, but of all the other language schools and higher education colleges that provide such a wonderful service.
I will turn to family migration, which I know the Minister for Immigration will be asked about when he comes before the Select Committee on Tuesday. The new migration changes will come into effect on Monday. That, in my view, will be a disaster for the settled British Asian community. We are dealing not with people who come here illegally, but with the settled community, which the Prime Minister rightly praised recently at a big meeting of the Conservative Friends of India. Some 1,000 members of the diaspora turned up and listened to the Prime Minister’s speech. They liked what he said, but they will not like what the Minister and the Home Office are going to do on family visitor visas.
Last week, I was presented with a case involving a wedding that will take place in Leicester in three weeks’ time. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) and I will go along, as we do with every wedding in Leicester. Two sisters of the bride had applied to come over from Toronto. One sister had been allowed to come, but the other had been refused. I wrote a letter, because there was no time for an appeal. The appeals system is so awful and takes so long, as the Minister keeps telling us and the UKBA, that there was no point in appealing, because the appeal would have come up next year, well after the wedding. I therefore wrote to ask for a review. I wrote to my account manager, Saleah Ahmed, who is very efficient. He is a post box—he does not make the decisions, but sent my letter to New York, which is the hub for north America. The letter that I got back said, “Sorry, the second sister’s case cannot be looked at because we only look at cases where there is a death or serious injury.” The first sister will be able to get into the country for the wedding, but the second sister will not be allowed in, despite the additional evidence that I have sent in, which will not even be considered. If the bridegroom or the bride died, the decision might be reconsidered, but otherwise, the second sister will not be allowed into the country and will miss her sister’s wedding.
That situation will be repeated thousands and thousands of times when the right of appeal is removed and there is no effective system to deal with such problems. We have asked the Minister for meeting. I hope that he will meet Members from all parts of the House who have an interest in this matter. The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), members of whose community I have met, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who must have a huge immigration case load, the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) and the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller)—I could go round the whole Chamber—will not like a system which means that they can no longer tell their constituents that there is a right of appeal. They will not like a system in which there is no review or in which the review will take longer than the period that is left before such a wedding. We will be inundated with cases and the system will collapse.
When I and other members of the Home Affairs Committee went to meet Jonathan Sedgwick, who heads the international section of the UKBA, he did not have a plan, because there was no ministerial plan in place. It is very important that we get such a plan in place before the changes take place. I do not like those changes, of course, but I will look at the plan that is on offer.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
I am sure my right hon. Friend is aware that the last Conservative Government abolished the right of appeal. As he said, when constituents who are sponsors write to us, we then write to the UKBA or the Minister and receive the predictable reply that the case was examined by the appropriate official, who took into consideration all the details and came to a decision. Writing to the Minister or the UKBA will get us no response other than one reaffirming the refusal. That is a denial of justice and means that the entry clearance officer is judge and jury, which is totally wrong and inappropriate. I hope the Minister will reconsider it.
Keith Vaz
I agree with my hon. Friend’s comments, although I have not made those points with quite the same passion and eloquence. This issue will simply not go away.
I hope that we will also consider the quality of refusal notices. I pay tribute to John Vine, who is doing a superb job as the independent inspector. He came before the Home Affairs Committee a few years ago, just after he was appointed, and I was worried that he would not be able to do a good job, but he has done a superb job. He makes the point that the process starts with the refusal notice. If that is not clear, we cannot make progress.
I do not know whether the Minister or other Members had the chance to see the Prime Minister’s appearance before the Liaison Committee yesterday. In his answer to my question about the UKBA, he was very clear that he did not believe bonuses should be paid if the job was not being done. The £3.5 million given to senior officials of the UKBA last year, in defiance of the Home Affairs Committee’s recommendation and the views of the Prime Minister and senior Ministers, who have no control over those bonuses, was wrong. Some 25% of the senior officials at the UKBA got a bonus of up to £7,000 each last year.
The Minister knows the problems of the UKBA. He knows about the queues at Heathrow airport and is well aware of what happened with the Brodie Clark saga. It is not an organisation whose senior officials are worthy of being given bonuses. When they do a good job, as Mr Whiteman has promised to do in the end, we can consider bonuses, but certainly not at the moment.
I hope that the Minister will assure us that the 7,000 people in the Border Force will be enough to deal with the inflow of the 5 million to 11 million people who it is estimated will come to the UK in the three-week period of the Olympics. I hope that the number of people that he promised would be at the airports to check people getting in will be forthcoming.
The Home Affairs Committee does not divide on its reports if it can help it, although on points of great principle my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) does his best to encourage us to be much more challenging—I was going to say divisive—in how we present our reports. We will continue to monitor the UKBA every three months, and we will continue to give it key indicators, of which there are 47 at the moment.
The one thing that really irritates the Committee is the fact that the UKBA delays in sending us information. I put that point to the Prime Minister in the Liaison Committee yesterday. That was a problem under the Labour Government and, I am sorry to say, there is still a problem under the current Government. We are dealing by and large with the same officials—Ministers have changed, but the officials and the culture remain the same. When we write to the UKBA and ask for information, we want a reply by a deadline, because when it writes to our constituents it expects a reply by a deadline. We want to ensure that the data that we ask for are put forward and that our requests are not left on a Minister’s desk waiting to be replied to. We shall continue to hold the organisation to account in a rigorous and robust way, and we hope that that will be of benefit to Members.
Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) not only on the report of the Home Affairs Select Committee, which he chairs, but on what he said today, particularly how he ended his speech—on the abolition of appeal rights for visitors who are turned down.
If only because of the effluxion of time, as Winston Churchill called it, I have undoubtedly dealt with more immigration cases than any other Member ever has. At present, I have 71 cases on my “active” files, and as some are completed—occasionally positively but sometimes ending in despair—new ones flow in. When I hold my constituency advice bureaux, as I have done on the past two Saturdays, a preponderance of the cases I receive are immigration cases, and a substantial proportion of those who come to me are constituents of Pakistani or Bengali origin—although they do not all come from there; others are of African origin and so on. However, when I read in the newspapers, as I have done in the past few days, about a survey showing that people of Pakistani origin feel more British than anybody else in the country, I wonder how long it will last, given that the immigration service treats them as heartlessly, ineffectively, ineffectually and inefficiently as it does today.
I have dealt with Home Secretaries ever since I entered the House in 1970, but I do not deal with this Home Secretary because she is so arrogant that, unlike any other Home Secretary with whom I have corresponded, she will not touch an individual immigration case. For example, Douglas Hurd, among many other Tory Home Secretaries with whom I have had dealings, would not only deal with cases himself but, if I asked to see him about a case, which I rarely did, would immediately agree to see me. On one occasion, a man under a deportation notice said to me, “Let me see the Home Secretary so that he can tell me to my face why he is deporting me.” Douglas Hurd saw him, considered the case and reversed the decision, and that man is now living happily in Manchester with his family, who are now considerably grown-up. That was what Tory Home Secretaries such as Douglas Hurd, William Whitelaw, even Leon Brittan, were like. This Home Secretary believes she is too important to do what Douglas Hurd, Willie Whitelaw, Leon Brittan—and David Waddington and others—did.
Keith Vaz
In fact, given the abolition of the right of appeal, Members will want to go to Ministers much more often—that will delay Ministers and take up an enormous amount of their time—because there is nowhere else for them to go. They will be unable to go to the appeals system; they will have to go to Ministers.
Sir Gerald Kaufman
I accept that completely, but if my right hon. Friend will forgive me for apparently being patronising, he should not hope for too much from that process—in so far as it is a process.
It is not simply that the policy is a hard, harsh policy; individual cases are dealt with with a level of incompetence that would not be tolerated in pretty well any other area of activity. For example, last week the Minister for Immigration sent me a telephone number for a constituent to use when his DNA test had been completed—and it was completed successfully, I might say. The telephone number was wrong. That came from the Minister’s office, and with his signature. The Minister sometimes wonders why I insist on having my cases dealt with by a Minister. The answer is that the UK Border Agency is an agency, and a Minister’s signature on a letter is what a Member of Parliament has the right to have. We have only two rights: freedom of speech, within procedure, in this House; and access to Ministers. If we do not have those, we might as well not be here.
Let me give the House just a few examples of the botching that has gone on in cases I have dealt with. On 17 May, the Minister for Immigration wrote to me about a particular person, saying that a decision will be made on his application within the next four weeks. He came to me on Saturday, six weeks after that promise was made—no decision. Another constituent was told in a letter from the Minister that her application would be concluded within three months, yet it was not. What on earth is the point of him giving these specific commitments if they are to be broken?
Here is another one. The Minister wrote to me on 12 December 2011, saying that the case in question would be decided by the end of that month. By my calculation, we are into July 2012: no decision on that, after a promise by the Minister.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
UKBA—the United Kingdom Borders Agency—might have a UK-wide remit, but it does not particularly serve Scotland. In Scotland, we have a different range of issues, challenges and priorities and the UKBA cannot even start to deal with our priorities.
We have issues to do with immigration and population, particularly concerning demography, and when I get to my feet I always try to set out why things are different in Scotland. I shall try to do it once again so that the House can more clearly understand. We occupy just over a third of the landmass of the UK but we have 8.4% of the population. We are one of the least densely populated parts of western Europe. Of course we need a different approach to immigration and our border agency, but will this Government consider any sort of policy that is regional or international within the UK? Not a bit of it. We have to experience the same decisions and policy as the rest of the UK and that is utter and total madness.
Our population reached 5.2 million in the course of last month, which is the highest population that Scotland has ever had. The Scottish Government issued a press release to welcome that fact. Could hon. Members imagine the UK Minister for Immigration ever putting out a press release welcoming the fact that the UK population was at an all-time high? That, more than anything, demonstrates the difference between Scotland and the UK.
What do we want from the UKBA? We want it to go away, basically. We need a specific Scottish agency which could serve our immigration priorities, our population necessities and our demographic needs. We have big problems. Our population is going up, but we do not know the medium to long-term prospects. There was a fear only a few months ago that Scotland’s population might dip below the iconic 5 million mark for the first time since the mid-20th century. That would have been a disaster for us. We have an ageing population and a shrinking working population and we need people to come to Scotland with specific skills and to meet specific requirements.
What the Government are doing to our universities is chaotic and disastrous and I want them to stop. We have more people coming to our universities from overseas than the rest of the UK; 19% of the students at Scottish universities come from overseas, as do 10% of the teaching staff. The competition for international students—the brightest and the best—is sensitive and fragile. The Government’s policies are deterring students from coming here and that is causing chaos for our universities. The Minister for Immigration has heard that from Universities Scotland, the CBI, the National Union of Students in Scotland and practically everybody who takes an interest. I ask him just to stop it. Leave our universities alone. Allow us to continue to attract the brightest and the best.
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?
Chris Bryant
And wisdom is slowly descending upon her.
The right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who is not in his seat but who, I am sure, will be back in a moment, referred to the fact that a large part of the casework of many hon. Members relates to the UKBA, and we heard the voice of those Members in the Chamber this afternoon. It was noticeable that only one Back-Bench Conservative Member made a speech in the debate, which is different from previous occasions. The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) spoke on behalf of the Liberal Democrats.
The role of the UKBA is to provide an immigration system that is efficient, effective, humane and as watertight as possible, and it must surely be an own goal if people can come in and out of our country or overstay, willy-nilly or, if the system is so complex that it is easy to circumvent or utterly impossible for an ordinary sane person to understand, or if the queues are so lengthy at our airports or ports that the UK’s reputation as a place to do business or as a place to come as a tourist is harmed, or if it costs too much money to run.
In the motion that we are discussing, we are spending £11,034,371,000. That is a significant amount of money and our constituents would want to make sure that it was being spent well.
As the various reports referred to in the debate—two of which are by the Home Affairs Committee—have made clear, the UKBA has not had an easy time. Last summer’s experiments by the Home Secretary meant that warnings index checks were suspended 354 times. They were suspended on European economic area school groups of under-16s travelling by coach at juxtaposed controls, originally with the permission of Ministers. The policy was then extended to sea ports and the Eurostar, which Ministers were notified of, but from February 2011 the age restriction was completely lifted without any degree of permission. The agency’s records on the suspension of warnings index checks were extremely poor, as Mr John Vine has testified. The secure ID was suspended 482 times between June 2010 and November 2011, 463 of which were at Heathrow, the country’s busiest airport.
We understand that this was all supposedly because the UKBA interpreted the Immigration Minister’s letter of 27 January 2011 as approval to lift the secure ID. He believes that that was not his intention whatsoever. The Home Secretary made clear her opposition to the moves being mooted on 13 April, yet it continued. This is obviously a sign of an organisation in chaos. Indeed, the independent chief inspector’s report states that
‘the language used in both the “Summer pressures” submission to Ministers and the response provided’—
in other words, by Ministers—
“was not clear and as a result was open to misinterpretation… there was confusion amongst staff”
not least because the Home Secretary’s office note did not clearly define any of the terms being used.
I would like to refer to another report by the independent chief inspector, on border control operations at Heathrow terminal 3 from August to November 2011, the same period covered by the Home Affairs Committee’s report. The inspector identified even more worrying signs, first of an
“inconsistent application of border security checks”,
and secondly of “completely inadequate” record keeping in two thirds of the cases examined. That matters, because all the references we have heard in the debate to paperwork further down the system being inadequate, poorly looked after, incomplete or disappearing into the black hole, or the Tardis, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East referred to it, stem from inadequate record keeping at the beginning. However, the report found such inadequate record keeping not only at terminal 3, but at Gatwick’s north terminal.
In addition, the inspector found:
“The introduction of team based working in July 2011, coupled with a new shift working system and the amalgamation of immigration and detection roles at Heathrow was far too much organisational change during the busiest time of the year at Heathrow.”
That goes to the heart of the point my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington made on how staff morale can be kept up so that they do an effective and efficient job if they are trying to cope with so much change at the same time. Perhaps we are demanding too much of them. The inspector also found that all this was
“complicated by staff reductions of 15% at Terminal 3”.
We want secure borders, but it is difficult to provide them if we do not provide enough resources to allow the job to be done properly. When I visited Stansted on Monday to see the operation there, staff working for the UKBA made it clear to me that all the new staff who have been drafted in to help in the run-up to the Olympics and through the games receive only three days of training. They are unable to do the full job that is necessary and, consequently, there is a real security problem. In addition, the fact that they are suddenly recruiting back from retirement people who were made redundant only last year makes it look as if they do not really know what they are doing.
The report also found that:
“The Agency was failing proactively to deal with absconders,”
and I really want to raise that issue with the Minister, because there is a serious problem with absconders, and it is not just at terminal 3—although the report found that it had increased there
“by 62% between 2009 and 2011.”
Indeed, not only did the figure for those absconding go up, but the figure for people who were captured having absconded went down, falling from 40% to 16%, meaning that during that period alone some 150 people absconded—and have not been found.
I raise the matter because I worry that the general level of absconders is rising throughout the country, so, first, I should be grateful if the Minister said how many people who have been told that they are no longer able to stay in this country are still in this country. Can he pitch a figure? Is it 100,000, 150,000, 250,000? I suspect that it is about 150,000.
Secondly, the Government and the UKBA have absolutely no idea where many of those people may be, or whether they have left the country, and that must surely be a concern, so can the Minister confirm whether all absconders are added to the national police computer, either as wanted or with a local trace mark, so that when somebody pops up in another area it is possible to track them down? If they are not, the UKBA is failing in its task.
I raise one other problem in relation to the independent inspector’s report, namely that of measuring queues. I noticed at Stansted that the UKBA starts measuring the length of a queue only from the moment at which someone enters the terminal building, but the queues often start long before the terminal building, and the time from the moment someone enters the terminal to their passport being dealt with is normally only 20 minutes, because the vast majority of the queue is backed up way down a series of tunnels, on trains and, sometimes, on aeroplanes, so I am distrustful of the figures for queuing times at Stansted.
Keith Vaz
I, too, went to Stansted, albeit at a different time from my hon. Friend, and the problem is that, when British citizens return to their own country, they are held by airline officials just before they join the escalators, all the way back to the plane, and that, when they reach the immigration hall, half the kiosks are un-personned.
Chris Bryant
Yes, “un-personned”: very correct of my right hon. Friend.
In addition, one of the biggest problems, which applies not only to Stansted but elsewhere, is that many staff who have been brought in to help in the run-up to the Olympics, a known problem that is coming along the track, are not able to work with non-EU passengers, and consequently the moment any arrive there is an enormous back-up. Further, when I was there on Monday morning not a single e-gate was working, and I understand that they were not working at any point at all on Monday.
The fact that e-gates are not working effectively is a significant problem across the estate and at several different ports. When IRIS finally goes in September, the real problem will be whether we have any automated system on which we can rely, so I should be grateful if the Minister commented on the future of automation.
I have one final complaint in relation to the inspector’s report, because at Heathrow terminal 3 there was a 58% drop in the issuing of IS81 forms, on which a passenger is told that they will be subject to further interrogation. That is important, as all too often in a simple desire to cut queues, we are cutting back on security, because staff are not able to do their job properly.
There is a further problem in relation to foreign national prisoners. Of the 5,012 who completed their sentences in 2010-11, 3,248 were removed, 471 were allowed to remain but the cases of 1,300—a staggering figure—are still outstanding. Only 500 of those are detained. There are other unspecified issues with 20 of them and, as I said earlier, 27% of them—some 350—are just categorised as unknown issues. In other words, the UKBA has next to no idea about what is happening with those people or about the likelihood of moving forward in a way that makes their lives easier or our country more secure.
In addition, immigration tribunals overturn UKBA decisions a dramatic number of times—41% of appeals are lost by the UKBA. That is a significant problem. Obviously, it delays people’s ability to get on with their lives and it is a significant additional expense for the UKBA. How will the Minister tackle the problem of so many appeals being lost at tribunal?
I have a minor comment to make about the common travel area, also at Stansted. It was pretty clear that it would be easy for someone to negotiate their way around without going through proper border controls, having printed off a boarding pass pretending that they had flown in from Ireland when in fact they had flown in from somewhere else. I hope that the Minister will be able to close that loophole.
My final point is that the Government are planning to cut staff at the UKBA by 5,300. I believe that that will make it phenomenally difficult for the agency to do its job effectively. In particular, in the run-up to the Olympics, which everybody knew were coming along, we have already seen how difficult it has been to maintain strong security and a decently short length of queue.
Lots of people have been flown in from different parts of the country as emergency measures in the run-up to the Olympics, and the relevant people have been prevented from taking holidays during the Olympics and Paralympics. My concern is that the moment that is over, it will be phenomenally difficult for the UKBA, without those resources, to get anywhere near doing its job properly. We can complain about the UKBA, but if we do not give it the resources to do its job properly, our complaints are worth nothing.
Keith Vaz
I will speak only very briefly because the Home Affairs Committee does not want to intrude on the time available for the Foreign Affairs Committee’s debate, which is about to begin.
I thank all Members who have taken part in the debate. They have all talked about their strong local relationships, and I want to pay tribute to my own caseworker, which I forgot to do earlier. Everyone else has paid tribute to theirs, so I should thank Diana Cank for her work.
The Home Affairs Committee will continue to scrutinise the UKBA in a robust way. We look forward to seeing the Minister before the Committee on Tuesday, and we will publish our next report in about three weeks.
Question deferred (Standing Order No. 54).
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I have now to announce the result of the Division deferred on the Question relating to the draft Police and Crime Commissioner Elections Order 2012. The Ayes were 304 and the Noes were 209, so the Question was agreed to.
I have now to announce the result of the Division deferred on the Question relating to the draft order on the amendment of curriculum requirements. The Ayes were 317 and the Noes were 199, so the Question is agreed to.
[The Division lists are published at the end of today’s debates.]
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