UK Border Agency: Visas and Passports

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, the noble Baroness’s interest in all matters Latin American is well known. Today, with remarkable timing, she has asked us to consider the work of the UKBA at the very moment when the Home Affairs Committee in another place has published a report on the subject this morning, echoing some of the criticisms the noble Baroness has made.

This is also the first time we have looked at Latin America—I think—since the Foreign Secretary delivered the Canning Lecture outlining a policy of greater engagement with the region, halting the decline of Britain’s diplomatic presence there and giving it much enhanced ministerial attention. He said that at present, we are lagging behind Germany, France and Italy in our exports to Latin America and that was partly due to the transition from authoritarianism to democracy which had deterred investment and close political relations. He went on to say that now that most of the countries in the region were stable democracies, we would support ambitious free-trade agreements with the sub-regions of Latin America. In addition, we would broker a strategic alliance between Latin America and Europe on climate change, and work closely with our partners in the region on tackling drugs and violence, supporting sustainable development and addressing energy security.

These are indeed ambitious goals, and no doubt UKBA and UK Visas have a walk-on part to play in making it as easy as possible to travel between Britain and Latin America. There was a review of the services provided by UKBA, starting three years ago, with the announcement of the visa waiver tests in 2007. It was decided that Bolivia and Venezuela posed a sufficiently high level of risk to justify a requirement that short-term visitors from those countries would be required to obtain visas. In the case of Venezuela, there was an exemption for travellers using the new biometric machine-readable passports, because our main concern related to the ease with which old style Venezuelan passports could be forged or fraudulently obtained. Apparently there was some resentment in Bolivia about the way that it had been singled out by the visa waiver tests. Has our embassy posted an explanation for the requirement on its website, and is there an opportunity to revisit the decision to require visas if the values that go into the visa waiver tests alter as time passes?

As the Foreign Secretary pointed out, we have closed our embassies in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Paraguay over the past decade. A citizen of one of those countries wanting to come here for business, marriage, studies or medical treatment has to apply to a visa section of a British embassy in some other specified country, which must be something of a deterrent. A citizen of Paraguay, for example, must fly to Buenos Aires twice: first to have his digital photograph and fingerprints taken, and then to collect the document he has submitted in support of his application including his passport. At least, that was the impression that I got from the website, and I hope the Minister will correct me if that is not right.

Passports, however, are issued by the Identity and Passport Office, an executive arm of the Home Office. I can well believe that when a British traveller’s passport is lost or stolen, it does cause enormous problems. The IPO website deals only with passports lost or stolen in the UK. When I rang the IPO this afternoon to ask what the traveller should do if his passport is stolen, for example, in Asuncion, it was suggested that the traveller should telephone the FCO.

It cannot be said that the issuing of visas and passports would come high up on the agenda in the Foreign Secretary’s programme for enhancing our relations with Latin America. It did not figure in the Canning Lecture and there is no mention of it on the FCO’s website; nor does it come up in discussions with leading politicians in the region.

I had several meetings at the end of last year with people from Peru and Colombia where the main subject was the EU free-trade agreement with those two countries and its possible side effects. NGOs were concerned that the agreement would facilitate even more investment by EU-based companies in mineral extraction and oil and gas development without adequate consultation, particularly where the interests of indigenous people were concerned. There was no complaint about the procedures for issuing visas, which of course theoretically are the same in Latin America as in the rest of the world. There is, I saw, a variation between the visa centres in the time it took them to process applications, but at a quick glance the average processing time is no slower in Latin America than in the rest of the world.

The biometric information that has to be submitted with an application—10-digit fingerprints and a digital photograph—has to be generated at a specified visa centre, which may be in another country. If you live in Paraguay, for instance, where the embassy was closed in April 2005, you have to travel to Buenos Aires to apply there in person and collect your passport from the embassy in Buenos Aires when it has finished processing the application. It seems that an applicant from Asuncion would have to make two trips to Buenos Aires on top of the £220 application fee. I wonder whether it would be possible to come to an arrangement with France or Germany, for example, for their embassies to collect biometric information on our behalf.