UK Visa Applications (Malawi)

Debate between Tom Greatrex and Philip Hollobone

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Tom Greatrex]

I assume that the hon. Gentleman is alluding to the ongoing investigation into the misappropriation of aid funds in Malawi and more widely. He makes an important point. The examples I am talking about are individuals involved in projects, partnership arrangements or exchange visits, often with schools or Churches and other organisations. They are not part of that wealthy elite. In many cases, they struggle to secure a visa when they have a legitimate reason to visit the UK and are support the underlying Government policy on aid and development in Malawi. He makes that point very well.

A recent example, provided to me by the Scotland Malawi Partnership, is the experience of Donald Osborne, who has worked with Malawi for a number of years. He was organising a visa for a Malawian teacher to visit Scotland, and the application was rejected not once but twice, and without any notification. That speaks to the hon. Gentleman’s intervention.

Malawi is 170th out of 187 in the human development index. In Malawi, around 60% of the population live on £1 or less a day. For every 1,000 children born, 68 will die before the age of five. Only 16% of children will have the opportunity to attend secondary school. The partnerships that Malawi has with the UK, in my constituency, in Edinburgh and elsewhere across the UK, promote development to address those issues through a person-to-person model. The relationships between individuals, communities and families enhance the effectiveness of Government-to-Government relationships to tackle poverty. Some of those relationships have been under strain as a result of the events to which the hon. Gentleman alluded.

Many aspects of the visa process make it extremely difficult for Malawians to visit the UK. Lord McConnell highlighted in the other place last week how damaging the application process can be. He asked the Government whether steps could be taken to improve the system. The revised system provides a remarkably long, complex and often confusing process. The online process requires details from the applicant and the sponsor and has a detailed application form that requires an extraordinary level of supporting evidence and runs to 15 pages. That it is online is a clear difficulty for many people living in Malawi, as access to the internet is often difficult, time consuming and expensive. Power supplies and connections are unreliable and unpredictable.

I completely understand the need to be thorough—the process should be thorough—but the Government need to be aware that an online system, which seems straightforward from our perspective in the UK and in Europe, is very much more difficult for those applying from Malawi, particularly those doing so through the third-party contractor that has been running the system. I know that the operator of that system changed relatively recently. How many complaints have been made about the online system? Are the Government aware of the proportion of Malawians who have regular access to the internet? Was that taken into account prior to the changes to the system being introduced through Pretoria? Do the Minister and the Home Office have data available on the number of online applications that are started but never completed?

There is also a lengthy series of offline processes, which include posting passports to another country for assessment. At every stage, the process seems to confuse and frustrate many prospective applicants. The minimum cost for applications is £144, including the basic visa charge. It costs £59 just for an appointment. That translates to some 2,500 South African rand or some 107,000 Malawian kwacha, which is more than 30 times the weekly wage for the average Malawian and for which there is no refund if the application is unsuccessful. Indeed, I have heard of many cases in which repeat applications have been made, so how much money has been taken through unsuccessful visa applications, in particular from people from Malawi?

Furthermore, the move to a cashless system has made applying for UK visas in Malawi difficult for many people. In debates in the other place, Lord Steel explained the issues with a cashless system. International credit cards do not exist in the same way in Malawi, and it is illegal to pay in rand without the specific permission and authorisation of the national bank. The Government are therefore asking people to pay in a currency to which they have limited access. That has become a barrier to visa applications and has also worryingly led to an increasing number of industry intermediaries, who make onward electronic transfers on behalf of applicants, often involving high fees and cursory regard to the system’s robustness and whether applications are ever formally concluded. That is but one aspect of the system that causes discrimination based on wealth.

The Minister will be aware that many Malawians do not have an internationally recognised credit or bank card, but I wonder whether the Home Office took that into account when deciding how the system would work. Has any consideration been made of how much industry intermediaries make each year through charging to make electronic transfers? Are there any concerns about the quality of those transactions and the potential for fraud in the visa application process? We are told that the solution is for the UK sponsor to pay the fees, but that rarely works. The IT system regularly crashes and is unclear, making it hard for the sponsor to be able to get to the appropriate place in the application and make the payment. How many UK sponsors have been unable to pay fees for applications? What is the figure as a percentage of all applications?

The system also means that all UK visa applications from Africa are now handled in regional hubs, which causes delays as passports, birth certificates, bank details and other essential documents are sent back and forth across the continent, not always reliably. Decisions are then made by those who have almost no knowledge of the country concerned. Applicants have even had to fly across the continent to collect their passports in urgent situations. I understand that the move to regional hubs was partly about efficiency, but the Government should be concerned about reliability. How has the move to regional hubs affected the time scale involved in securing visas? What is the current backlog of the hub in Pretoria?

In last week’s debate in the other place, Baroness Northover stated:

“Poorly paid people from Malawi are not discriminated against in applying for visas. There is no income threshold.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 23 October 2014; Vol. 756, c. 858.]

While it may be correct that there is no income threshold, that is not the same as there being no disincentive based on income. For example, applicants must demonstrate that they have sufficient funds to cover the costs of their visit and to return to Malawi, meaning that more than 90% are simply not rich enough to be allowed to accept an invitation to the UK. They must also prove that there is a strong reason for them to return to Malawi, through either employment or family ties, but Malawi has a great deal of poverty and a lack of formal employment—85% of Malawians are subsistence farmers. Often, the events that people want to come over and take part in are run by organisations that are willing and able to provide any necessary assurances that the event is the reason why the applicant wants to come over and that the person will return, but that is almost impossible to prove in the application process. I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to that.

Before I conclude, I will outline one recent example. Members will be aware of the work of Mary’s Meals, which feeds many people in Malawi and across poorer parts of Africa. The head of programmes for Mary’s Meals in Malawi, which currently feeds 690,000 children, was refused a visa on the grounds that he was likely to abscond, despite letters from the charity’s UK chief operating officer, as well as the country director, providing reassurances about the work that the individual was undertaking.

In conclusion, I return to my central point about the frustration caused by the visa system, how it operates, its cashless nature, which is inadequate for many Malawians, and the implications and consequences. Thousands of people in the UK are involved in projects and community initiatives to support Malawi, often on a local, project-by-project basis involving schools, Churches and community organisations. They want to help, support and underpin the work that the UK Government’s aid programme is engaged in delivering to one of the poorest countries in the world. The Scotland Malawi Partnership is a phenomenal organisation that is helping to facilitate that. It is not an unreasonable group of people, but it has repeatedly highlighted the concerns and the scale of the problem.

We have heard the line-to-take response from Ministers in other Departments, but I hope that the Minister can commit today not only to answering my questions but to re-examining the effectiveness of the system and its processes. This is not about immigration policy so much as the way the system is applied and how it affects people in Malawi. In the short term, will the Minister consider giving the high commission in Lilongwe a front-facing officer to provide face-to-face support to those applying for a visa to visit the UK and guide them through a process that can be confusing, frustrating and incoherent in equal measure? We all understand the importance of ensuring that immigration policy is well designed and robust, but there are real concerns that it is not as effective as it could or should be and that important charitable and support work for one of the poorest countries in the world is being undermined by the system. I implore the Minister to reconsider the matter and to provide a better system in the interests of the people of Malawi and of the UK.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Before I call the Minister, I advise Members that the debate will conclude at 5.7 pm.

Co-operatives

Debate between Tom Greatrex and Philip Hollobone

Wednesday 3rd July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Tom Greatrex (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Hollobone. I declare my interest as a Labour and Co-operative Member of Parliament. As I will speak about football co-operatives and mutuals, I should put on record that I am the founding chair of the Fulham Supporters Trust.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) on securing this debate during co-operatives fortnight, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) said, and on giving a good and comprehensive summary of a range of current co-operative and mutual issues. I will not repeat the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn made, but I will touch on a couple of the issues that he raised.

First, my hon. Friend rightly highlighted what the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change said about the need for a co-operative energy revolution. It was a cause of some frustration during consideration of the Energy Bill that we were unable to convince him to turn his words into action on a community energy strategy and regarding the threshold for the feed-in tariff for community energy projects. My hon. Friend talked about the extent to which people have an interest in energy, and feel a sense of ownership towards it, as a result of community energy projects. There are a number of such projects across the country, but most are relatively small, and if we are to develop them further, we need to change the threshold.

When the Secretary of State was asked about that during the Bill’s pre-legislative scrutiny, he said, “There aren’t any community energy projects above 5 MW.” Well, that is because that is the threshold, so his argument is self-defeating. Earlier in the debate, I was looking at the amendments that the Government have tabled to the Energy Bill in the House of Lords—obviously, I was listening intently to what everybody was saying, but I was multitasking—and I am pleased to say that there is one that will increase the threshold for community energy projects from 5 MW to 10 MW. Those of us who sought to persuade them can reflect on the fact that our argument was well made and will have an impact, unless the Government decide to vote against their own amendment. The change will be a significant step towards helping to meet the challenge that was rightly identified earlier in the debate.

I also want to touch briefly on housing and housing co-operatives. I am pleased and proud to have the West Whitlawburn housing co-operative in my constituency. Obviously the Minister is familiar with Rochdale, but I would not necessarily expect him to be familiar with parts of Cambuslang, in my constituency. On all the neighbourhood statistics available, Whitlawburn is among the most economically deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. Figures on health conditions, educational attainment, employment and income are collected slightly differently in England—and, I presume, in Wales—but Whitlawburn would probably also come pretty high up any list measuring those things across the UK.

Several years ago, the West Whitlawburn bit of the housing estate in Whitlawburn became a co-operative, and there is a striking contrast between the standard of the housing in that co-operative, given the capital and energy-efficiency improvements that have been made, and the standard of the other housing, which is literally across the road. That is partly because of the real impetus that has come from those who came together to form the co-operative, which is about not only the mechanisms involved in driving investment but, just as importantly, the attitude and ethos that have become apparent. Just last week, along with a colleague from the Scottish Parliament, the local MSP James Kelly, I was pleased to be able to talk to the members of the very engaged management committee, who are all tenants and members of the co-operative. They take their work very seriously, and their attitude is all about what they can do to improve housing in their co-operative and to maintain that improvement, as opposed to expecting somebody else to do things for them. That makes an important point about the ethos of co-operatives.

The area is relatively small, however, and the co-operative is not immune from the impact of Government policies. The bedroom tax or the spare room subsidy—whatever label the Minister uses—is having a considerable impact in West Whitlawburn, where 67% of tenants are on housing benefit. The housing association has found—it has been able to do so because it is relatively small— that 30% of its tenants, or 200 people, are affected by that measure. Its housing stock consists mostly of accommodation with two or three bedrooms, and there is a problem of people needing to move from three bedrooms to two, or from two bedrooms to one. People of pensionable age are not impacted, however, so we have the bizarre situation of the housing association almost considering seeing whether people who are in receipt of state pension and live in one or two-bedroom accommodation will swap with working-age tenants living three or two-bedroom accommodation. The policy will have a significant impact on the housing co-operative as a result of rent arrears. The co-operative does not want to evict its members—nobody wants that—but the financial effects of the policy could have a significant impact on what it is trying to do.

The third issue I want to touch on is football supporters’ trusts, which are an important form of mutual activity. People will be aware that the trusts were born out of the co-operative movement with the support of Supporters Direct. There are now several supporters’ trusts throughout the country, and there are good examples of trusts that are completely or partly in control of running clubs in Wimbledon, Portsmouth, Swansea and Manchester. In other cases, football supporters’ trusts are trying to take a role in running clubs, including Heart of Midlothian in Scotland. In every case, supporters’ trusts have tried to take a role in the ownership and running of clubs when those clubs have been in crisis and everyone else has walked away.

However, I want to draw the Minister’s attention to the example of the trust in Swansea, given its economic impact. Swansea was basically a bankrupt club, and it was sold on for £1. The supporters’ trust was formed and took a role in the club’s ownership, and it has been an integral part of the club since then. Over a couple of seasons, the club has gone from 90th out of 92 in the league to being an established premiership club. It has won the league cup, and it will be playing in Europe next season. All that involved a role for supporter ownership and supporter control, which is a form of co-op.

There have been many debates about football governance—I have spoken in most of them—so I do not want to repeat any points about that, but I do want to talk about clubs’ economic impact. Football clubs have a significant local economic impact—directly and indirectly. When Hull was first promoted to the premiership, people there would have talked about the impact on the city of visiting supporters and the attention that comes with having a top-level club. The same happened when Blackpool was in the premiership, and the same has happened with Swansea. However, when clubs are driven and run by people who are involved in the local community, they are more inclined to ensure that some of their spending power and economic activity benefits that community. Trusts reinforce local economic activity, so they should be encouraged, treasured and nurtured.

Although this is not part of the Economic Secretary’s brief, he will know that the coalition agreement included a commitment to encourage and foster fan involvement in, and ownership of, football clubs. The Minister for Sport, the right hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Hugh Robertson), has mentioned that commitment a number of times, and he has tried to persuade football authorities to act on it, although I think we are getting towards the end of that road, given the intransigence of the authorities. If the coalition wants that commitment to come to fruition, it might have to take action by forcing the football authorities to do what they seem not to want to do. The coalition should encourage fan involvement for the good reason that it will not only sustain football clubs, but encourage the economic activity that happens when trusts are involved in the management structure, as we can see from the examples I cited. I hope that the Economic Secretary will reflect on that, even though it is not his direct responsibility.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Our next speaker might be dangerously overqualified because he comes from Desborough, one of the famous co-operative towns in Northamptonshire, which now lies in the Kettering constituency.