UK Border Agency

Richard Fuller Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

rose—

[Keith Vaz]

I will give way twice more, but then I must make progress because other Members want to speak.

[Keith Vaz]

No one in this House knows more about these issues than my hon. Friend, having been the chair of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. She is right that decisions are being put off.

[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.

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[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.

[Richard Fuller]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for recounting stories that I think a number of us hear in our constituency surgeries. I am a new Member, having joined the House in 2010, but does he, like me, scratch his head at the number of constituents who have come to this country and have been waiting for many years for their cases to be resolved? What would he say, on reflection, about the attitude of the last Government in dealing with such cases as expeditiously as he is requesting this Government to do?

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I would be the first to say that it was not good enough. I remember when Charles Clarke was appointed Home Secretary. I ran into him in the Members’ Lobby, from which my office is 40 seconds away. I said, “I want you to come up to my office.” He did, and I showed him my special immigration file. I said, “I cannot lift it out of the filing cabinet. I expect, under your Home Secretaryship, to be able to lift the file.” It was not as good as it should have been. There were Ministers in that Government, including Charles Clarke and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), who were personally accessible if there was a problem I wanted to discuss with them.

However, I have to tell the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) that when I was gathering these cases to present to the House this afternoon, I had to use two files because my filing cabinet is now so full that I have to divide the cases into two, so that my secretary can lift one file or the other. I am not saying that it was paradise under the Labour Government by any means; what I am saying—I do not want to patronise the hon. Gentleman, but I do have the experience—is that things are far worse now.

Let me give one more example of a constituent whom the Home Secretary wrote to me about.

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[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to listen to the contributions to this debate from both sides of the House and to make my own. I do so as someone who has been an immigrant most of his life—I left the country in 1986, before coming back to seek to represent the good people of Bedford and Kempston in 2004—and as a son of Bedford. Bedford is probably the most ethnically diverse, multicultural town in the country, and I am extraordinarily proud to be its representative. I also speak in this debate as a full supporter of this Government’s efforts to restore confidence in our immigration system.

Mr Deputy Speaker, you rightly pointed out at the beginning of the debate that we would have the opportunity to debate not only the estimates, but the specifics of the Home Affairs Committee’s report. If I may, however, I would like to move in a slightly different direction and review the morality of the decisions we make about immigration, which have led to us spending £1 billion a year and involving 12,000 people in an apparatus to ensure that our borders are secure and that people’s confidence in immigration is restored. I say that because the situation we are now in is a consequence of the policies and actions taken over a long period, and it has grown over time. If one looks at the scale of the issue in terms of immigration control, at the longevity of its relevance and also, if I may say so, at the arrogant dismissal of the issue for so long, one can see the context in which we are evaluating the UK Border Agency, which is essentially a child of those circumstances and those facts.

It is important for us to look at the reasons why concerns about immigration reached such a high level and why we are devoting such substantial resources to immigration control. Was it a matter of purpose or a matter of incompetence over a number of years, and who is to blame? Should we blame the bureaucrats and the agents, or should we blame the political masters? I do not wish to get into the commentary by Andrew Neather from a couple of years ago about the last Government’s deliberate policy to make the UK a multicultural society or the fact that they were not straight with the British people about that, but it strikes at our understanding of the context in which we will now ask for decisions to be made by this Home Secretary and this Minister for Immigration.

My general feeling, being a new Member of Parliament, is this. How on earth did we get into this position, where so many of my constituents come to me with such heart-wrenching stories of how their lives have been eviscerated by this country’s utter incompetence, over a long period, in sorting out its immigration? It hurts me in my heart to have to look at people who have suffered torture, had to flee their own countries and had to live under the wire of suspicion having to deal with not being able to guarantee that they can make a living while the system works out what should happen with their lives. It pains me, as a member of our country, to think what that says about the United Kingdom.

In the short time I have, let me take hon. Members through a couple of those points. The term “asylum seeker” used to be a badge of honour, but now we take it to be a token of shame to be bandied about in the tabloids and used as a reason for making excuses. The UK used to be seen as a beacon of liberty for asylum seekers. We are making changes in that regard, and I am not sure that all those changes are right.

I welcome fast-track detention as a policy, but I say to the Minister that if we are going to take people through a process quickly, let us assume that each of them has a valid case. In the short period that they have, let us give them the best counsel, the best lawyers and the best psychiatric help, so that we can make that evaluation according to the highest standards that people expect from a free society such as the United Kingdom.

[Nicola Blackwood]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important to take into account the possibility that those who go through that process might have been the victims of torture, and that we should implement rule 35 effectively?

[Richard Fuller]

Absolutely. I agree with what my hon. Friend says about being aware of that. Some Members might have heard, at the meeting held to discuss a report on fast-track detention, about the refugee from Uganda who had had to stand in a queue in an open room and explain to an immigration officer how he had been raped, and why he was claiming asylum. We must bring to an end such unfair and ineffective processes if we are to restore our sense of decency.

The policy has also led to the detention of the innocent. How did we manage to set up a policy that results in children being put into prison? What on earth were the previous Government thinking when they permitted that to happen? Why do we continue to keep pregnant women in detention? The Independent Monitoring Board’s report on Yarl’s Wood stated that it wanted the policy on the detention of pregnant women to be reviewed, and that, in the interim, detention should be the last resort. However, according to information that I have received from Yarl’s Wood Befrienders, there were cases of women who were 35 weeks pregnant being removed from Yarl’s Wood last month. I point this out to the Minister not because I am ashamed of what he is doing—I am proud of what he is doing to control immigration—but to illustrate how far we have allowed our morality to be debased by losing control over the system.

Let me deal with detention without trial. This country is supposed to be the home of habeas corpus, yet to my simple way of thinking we seem to be ignoring that when dealing with people who come here for immigration purposes. Studies show that there are 52 people in our immigration detention centres who have been detained for more than a year, and 16 who have been detained for more than two years. I understand the process issues, and I am sympathetic to the Minister on those, but if I want to hold my country to the highest standards, I cannot be satisfied unless the practice of detention without trial is brought to a conclusion. Will the Minister consider introducing a maximum detention period for people being detained under the immigration rules?

Will the Minister also ensure that the Home Office implements its own policies thoroughly? The Government have rightly said that they want to introduce a better process for people who have survived torture, who, according to the rules, are not deemed suitable for fast-tracking or detention. To avoid detention, however, such people are supposed to have their evidence to hand. The problem with that policy is that it is very hard for them to have that evidence to hand when they are assessed. It takes time to get it together. The pamphlet from Medical Justice, “The Second Torture”, gives 50 examples of people who have suffered torture but who have not been permitted to follow the appropriate process because the Home Office is not fulfilling its obligations.

Many hon. Members have talked about individual constituency cases of people who have lived under these policies and been in hiding. A gentleman who came to my office had been here since 1996. He had sought an opportunity to stay in this country, and received it in 2011, but the delays meant that he had been unable to see his terminally ill grandfather. I also met two constituents who had fled Zimbabwe. It is not easy for anyone who flees from Zimbabwe to get their documents from that country, so of course their documents will be false. When the marks of torture and shackles are still clearly visible on their legs, however, that should be sufficient evidence in itself. I ask my Minister to sort out this mess on immigration, and to seek to reassert the highest principles of British justice, British fairness and British compassion.