UK Border Agency

Lord Bishop of Newcastle Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Newcastle]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for securing this debate today. I would like to pick up on some of his points about the UKBA’s faulty decision-making and then go on to highlight a number of areas of concern about the role and performance of UKBA.

On 19 June, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich raised in a supplementary question a concern from the churches about African Christians responding to invitations to enter this country on short visits. It seems that a new economic test was being applied to them. Able well-qualified African clergy were being invited to conferences in this country, or to visit dioceses for short periods endorsed by bishops, and were being turned down simply because their personal income was low. We all know that African clergy do not get paid very much, they are not often paid regularly, and they may not have bank accounts. In his response that day, the Minister said that he could not believe that someone who was being endorsed by a bishop could be turned away. He said:

“Certainly, we would not want that to be the case”.—[Official Report, 19/6/12; col. 1658.]

I am grateful to him for arranging a meeting of officials from the border agency with some of my colleagues from the Church of England.

I am not here to make special pleading on behalf of the church or to argue for any kind of special treatment at all, but that case illustrates some of the failings in the system and in the role and performance of the UKBA. When the right reverend Prelate sent the details of the case to the Minister, the response seemed to show a change in tenor. We were told that the applicants’ intentions and their personal circumstances, including their financial circumstances, are paramount. While the UKBA’s visa sections are able to take into account the support for an applicant’s case, they are unable to accept assurances or guarantees made by the sponsor on the applicant’s behalf. That is because such assurances and guarantees are legal unenforceable, yet the UKBA has insisted in the past that, while the economic circumstances of the individual are considered, they should not be the only deciding factor.

We appear to be in a situation where the decision-making process is at best a muddle. A report published in December last year by the independent chief inspector on entry clearance decision-making touched on that very issue. He commented that in 16% of all sampled cases there was evidence of an application being refused for failing to provide information which had not been set out in the published guidance in the first place as being required. Some applicants were refused entry as a result of failing to demonstrate a subsisting relationship with a UK sponsor despite that being neither a requirement under the rules for general visitors nor cited in the visitor guidance provided by the agency. Applicants have not always been informed of the requirement before they apply, and at the time of the publication of the report, they were not given an opportunity to provide the extra evidence once they were informed.

We appear to be in a double bind. On the one hand, people are refused entry despite having ample evidence of a strong relationship with a UK sponsor, and yet the Minister says that the UKBA cannot accept assurances or guarantees made by the sponsor on the applicant’s behalf. On the other hand, in cases cited by the chief inspector, people have been refused entry because they did not have evidence of such a relationship. As I say, this is a process and a system which is at best muddled and confused, and at worst misleading. Either it is the case that the UKBA is not applying the rules sensibly or that the rules themselves are unable to cope with the actual situations of a number of those applying for short-term entry into the UK for valid reasons, such as to further mutually enriching relationships between dioceses here and overseas.

I understand that a number of UKBA border posts have been amalgamated into larger regional centres with fewer face-to-face interviews and more reliance on documentation. Yet if the rules on which forms of documentation are acceptable are as unclear as they appear to be, then the situation does not inspire confidence in the UKBA’s ability to make accurate judgments.

Nor do such cases appear to be the only areas of concern in relation to the performance of the UKBA. In his report last December, the chief inspector found evidence of poor decision-making, with errors being found in over a third of the cases sampled, alongside a failure to consider relevant positive evidence, misinterpretation of supporting evidence, misleading information about an applicant’s right to appeal, concerns about internal reviews and insufficient retention of supporting documentation by the UKBA. In a later report, the inspector spoke of poor communication, poor managerial oversight and lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities, together with poor communication between the agency, Ministers, managers and operational staff.

There are other areas of concern as well, the first of which is the practice of dawn raids. We believed that dawn raids made by the staff of the UKBA were a thing of the past, but last week another case of a dawn raid being undertaken by UKBA officers was reported. A family of four, including children aged 10 and two, together with their mother who was 31 weeks pregnant, were forcibly removed from their home. The result was that the pregnant mother was hospitalised while the husband and children were removed to the Cedars detention centre in Sussex. That is not an isolated case. In April, another family was subjected to a dawn raid, resulting in another pregnant mother being restrained by four officials and the family’s removal to a detention centre. Other examples can be given. A representative of the Scottish Refugee Council expressed grave concern about these matters:

“After the UK Government promised to end child detention in 2010, the Home Office undertook to improve the way in which children and families were treated in the asylum process. The new Family Returns Processes (FRP) that they have put in place was intended to treat families with children more humanely if their case had been refused. We have grave concerns about how this process is being rolled out in practice”.

It is absolutely vital that UKBA staff working on the ground treat families with respect and care at all stages, particularly at the end of the process when families may be at their most vulnerable. Indeed, that April dawn raid took place within days of the director of asylum at the UKBA telling a conference in the same city that the agency was “more compassionate” with a process that was fair.

A second further area of concern is the administration of the legacy programme for those whose asylum cases have taken several years to be heard. In my own city of Newcastle I know that asylum seekers in that scheme were told by letter that they would hear the outcome of their cases by the summer of 2011, and they are still waiting. A number of those people have been threatened with deportation despite their cases remaining unresolved. In the few cases where solicitors have been able to follow them through and press for a resolution, some were granted leave to remain on the basis that it would be for a period of only three years, while those whose cases were dealt with before the summer of 2011 were in nearly every instance given indefinite leave to remain.

There are other areas of concern, including the disparity between the published timescales for interviews and decisions, and what is actually happening. People are being detained for far longer than the stated timescale —for 13 days as opposed to the three to four-day period the UKBA aims to meet. The detained fast track system also appears to have insufficient safeguards to prevent people being incorrectly allocated to it. I look forward to hearing how the eight recommendations of the chief inspector are being implemented.

I could say more about the evidence that there is still child detention and about the real concerns of our universities, but in conclusion I acknowledge that this is a difficult and even fraught area for officials on the front line, as it were, and I acknowledge that some things are better than they once were. But when we add up the catalogue of errors, misjudgments, muddle and confusion, we are left with a system and an agency that is problematic. I long to see real evidence of the more compassionate and fair agency that the director claimed was the case a couple of months ago. It certainly does not look like it at present.