Immigration

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank my noble friend for that question. I am referring, and the Statement referred, purely to the immigration system. He is absolutely right that biometrics cover a number of areas, as he said, including fingerprints and iris recognition—but in this context DNA presentation should be entirely voluntary.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister may know that I have been looking at the problems which British universities are now having with visas for their staff and students, and the families of their staff. In the last two weeks I have spoken to a number of university teams about this, and on Monday a senior officer of one of our most effective and renowned universities said to me, “We pay £25,000 for a premium service because that’s the only way one gets a basic service these days”.

My strong impression is that what we have just heard is one indication of a severely overloaded system. As we approach a peak of applications coming towards March 2019, with people wanting to clarify what position they have within Britain, that system is coming close to breakdown. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, mentioned the cuts in staffing, and it is clearly understaffed. Telephone lines are frequently impossible to get through to; passports are taken away and do not come back for eight to 10 weeks.

A lawyer friend of mine who, as a dual national, was asked to supply both her passports when trying to change to her new married name could not find anything in the regulations that required her to send her French as well as her British passport away for eight weeks. Can this review therefore take a rather wider survey of whether the current visa system is able to cope with the weight of applications coming to it? The series of stories that I have been hearing from university staff and university HR departments suggests that it is not coping at present.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord very nicely gives us a taste of his Question on Monday, which will be asked in a different context—that of borders. This Statement is not quite about preparations for Brexit or the sheer number of applications; it is about a specific cohort of people for whom guidance was incorrectly written. But I take the noble Lord’s point that we need the capacity and the capability to process visas which come into UKBI. Of course, we keep our capacity needs under review, but I do not deny in any way that it is a busy system. We expect that the EU citizens’ application service, which has already gone out to private beta trial, will be rolled out further. We have not experienced any problems with that so far, but the noble Lord was absolutely right to point out that preparedness, particularly towards March, will be absolutely crucial.