UK Border Agency

Simon Hughes Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

I start by being somewhat self-indulgent and paying tribute to my office staff. As Members may imagine, they have an enormous burden of immigration work in a Bradford constituency. I also pay tribute to the Home Affairs Committee, which has raised many of the relevant issues so well that I can speak for a much shorter time than I normally would on such an important topic for my constituency.

I also pay tribute to the staff of the UKBA, because although at times there appear to be systemically dysfunctional areas in the service, that should not lead to criticism of the individual officers with whom we work. In particular, I pay tribute to the account managers. Our own, Chris Taylor, has been excellent. I believe that structural changes to the service are planned, and I urge the Minister to retain the local connection. If that were taken away, it would be greatly to the detriment of the service that is provided. Is it intended to keep that local connection, which is so important to us?

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is really important to get a good relationship between the person at the UKBA and the constituency office team? The UKBA does a far better job when it is willing to listen to MPs and their staff and respond positively. If it puts us at arm’s length and tries to run away from us, it delivers far less good a service.

[Mr Ward]

Absolutely. We often systematise things to try to improve them when they are really about personal relationships. We need to build close understandings and partnerships, which in our case have been to the benefit of clients with whom we have dealt.

We were told that the UKBA’s legacy of cases would be cleared, with the vast majority being fully concluded. As we now know, that meant the transferring of a big chunk of legacy cases into the controlled archive. Rightly or wrongly, the impression was given that the archive was a dumping ground and that the files were being transferred because the UKBA had given up on those cases. Dozens of people have walked into my constituency office and we have been able to find no trace of their case, because it has already been put in the controlled archive. It is then difficult to get it out again. I am sorry if this seems unfair, but it seems like our office is doing the work that the UKBA should have done, at the cost of the time that it takes away from other matters.

Will the Minister confirm or deny that cases are still being added to the controlled archive? My understanding is that if people do not turn up to report to the UKBA three times, their cases are transferred to the archive. If that is not true, a clear message needs to be put out to that effect, because that is what we are told.

Another issue that has cropped up regularly is cases being transferred into the controlled archive in error. That is not so bad if they are then retrieved and dealt with properly, but the evidence suggests that such cases go to the back of the queue when they are retrieved. That is patently unfair on people whose cases should never have been transferred in the first place. I understand that work is now taking place, with credit agencies and other means being utilised to deal with cases in the controlled archive. As I said, however, it is difficult to understand why those cases ever went there in the first place, given that other methods and techniques were available to deal with them first time around.

My final point concerns intelligence. I understand that my constituency office—one single office—accounts for 70% of the intelligence provided in the whole of the west-Yorkshire region, which indicates the number of cases we deal with and the confidence people have that they will be dealt with by my office. When I was a councillor, we were encouraged to dob in the dealers, and local residents would bring cases to us to take to the police. Those people did not hand in that information with disinterest, but wanted to know what would happen; they wanted feedback and to know whether the people dealing drugs in the phone box on the opposite side of the road had been dealt with.

We all think it important that residents support the police, but constituents want to know that something is actually happening. Yet that intelligence appears to disappear without them ever knowing what has happened, which is patently unfair, not only on my office, through which the information goes, but on the people who have provided it. Feedback is important because the people who provide the intelligence often do so at risk to themselves: they might be acting extremely bravely—they might be family members in marriages, some of them sham marriages—and under threat for having provided that evidence. Feedback, then, is not only good practice but humane. They need to know what happens to these people. Especially when there is a slow response in terms of removal, they have a right to know what is happening, because their personal safety might be at risk.

--- Later in debate ---

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

The issue we are debating is very important, and I thank the Home Affairs Committee for its continuing work on it. I encourage it to continue monitoring the work of the UK Border Agency. I am also grateful to the Minister for his active engagement with this issue, and with me as a constituency MP when I have brought cases to his attention or to the attention of his staff.

My general analysis is somewhat different from that of the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman), as I do not think that under the last Government we were anywhere near nirvana in respect of immigration and asylum cases. The situation is considerably better now than it was under the last Labour Government. This has been a huge and intractable issue for the Home Office over many years. I am grateful for the progress that has been made, but that does not mean that I in any way think the UKBA or the Government have fully addressed all the problems.

Although we are talking about the UKBA, what we are actually talking about is people. I shall therefore refer to some people. First, I shall mention the two people in my office who every day try to unravel the knots of other people’s family lives when dealing with asylum and immigration cases. Magali Tang and James Harper are wonderful public servants—working for me as an MP—and they are hugely valued by our constituents. When I last checked a year or two ago, I was either first or second in the league table of Members who brought Home Office-related immigration and asylum constituency issues to the authorities. I have no idea where I am in the league table now, and that does not matter, but I do know that a large volume of such work gets done. Some 40% of the work that comes before my constituency office is Home Office-related, and we try to give a good service.

Achieving that depends on the individuals at the other end of the process as well—on the personality of the account manager. I pay tribute to Claire Shacklock who previously did the job for us in Southwark, when Southwark was an area on its own, and I pay tribute to her successor, Helen O’Brien, who is the account manager in Lambeth, Bexley, Greenwich and Southwark. After the handover, it took a little while for us to get the communication established and working well. It is now working well, and her staff are beginning to understand what we expect and are beginning to deliver. That required us to be quite gruff with them, however. We had to tell them what they needed to do and make them understand the urgency of some of the cases.

I asked my constituency team to tell me the three key issues. The first of them was post-study work visas. This is what my team said:

“This route is being closed and so everyone has applied at once, and this has thrown the system into chaos. We have had between 15-20 cases in the last month of people who have been waiting around 3 months, when the published waiting time is 1 month. They are stuck as they can’t work and some people are losing accommodation/job offers because of the delay. Why did the UKBA not see this coming and what are they doing to make sure the backlog is cleared quickly?”

The second issue was reconsideration requests, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) mentioned. My team said:

“Currently, when people make ‘in country’ applications for leave to remain and these are refused without a right of appeal, applicants can ask the UKBA to ‘reconsider’ the decision. This was always an informal process but it was accepted that in general the UKBA would reconsider a case once. It seems that a backlog of reconsideration requests has built up and now the UKBA are saying they are reviewing how they deal with these requests. What does this mean? Are they going to stop reconsidering cases”—

or define what a “reconsideration” is?

“If so, they need to say so to people clearly. In one case we had recently, a woman who had been told her reconsideration request had been received later received a letter from Serco saying that according to the UKBA, she had no basis of stay and should leave immediately.”

The left hand and the right hand were clearly not co-ordinated, which was very “confusing” as the Serco letter

“didn’t refer to her reconsideration request, which she felt was still outstanding. If the UKBA are going to stop reconsidering, they must surely explain this clearly to people, not just get Serco to send them letters telling them to go home.”

I hope it does not stop reconsidering; I hope there is a reconsideration process, and we know what it is and how it works.

The third issue my team raised was the UKBA website, which

“despite recent re-modelling, is still not well organised or user friendly, and constituents regularly report this to us. It needs to use clearer, non-technical English wherever possible and be better laid out. The DirectGov website is a good example of how a website can be user friendly, as is NHS Direct (medical advice online). There are always links saying ‘do you need help with x....if so click here…’, ‘was this what you were looking for?’…that sort of thing, and the English is very good and accessible. The UKBA website lags a long way behind these websites.”

It surely cannot be beyond the wit of Government, with all their technical advisers and expertise, to get that sorted out. Please can it be sorted out soon?

I would now like to make a few points of my own. As has been said, there are still a huge number of really rubbish legal advisers and solicitors. I am weekly, if not daily, rescuing people from having to pay considerable sums that they do not have for so-called advice, often bad, telling them to take action they do not need to take and that will not produce any positive results. That gives them false hope. They are also often asked to pay for a service that is never given because the case in question is either not dealt with at all or not soon enough to be of any use. Please can the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner get a grip and do its job properly? It is still not effective. It does not clamp down on bad advice; it tackles only crime and maladministration. That is not good enough. I should not have to be perpetually writing to these so-called solicitors or so-called advisers saying, “I want the money to be given back to my constituent because you haven’t done anything.” That is a scandal and it needs to be addressed.

The problem of so-called bogus colleges is not as bad as it was but I am not persuaded that there are not still some that do not produce the service they advertise. I encourage the Government to continue to be relentless in such cases. I want to encourage more students to come to this country and I think the Government understand the benefits of that—the universities and colleges certainly do—but that cause will not be helped if bogus colleges continue.

My penultimate point is to ask whether we can please not send people back to places such as Sri Lanka if they are Tamils whose life and liberty are likely to be at risk? I still think that the Home Office is not sensitive enough in such cases and I want a review of cases where there are historic and current conflicts.

Finally, I would like to help people to see the good side of some of the work done by those people with us. On Saturday, I went to the wedding of Sheku Jalloh and Raphaëlle de Joffrey. Sheku came to see me when he was in his teens as a Liberian asylum seeker and refugee. He has now married a Swiss graduate whom he met here, they have settled down and they are a good news story. There are lots of good news stories—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order.