UK Border Agency

Virendra Sharma Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Immigration (Damian Green)]

I start by thanking the Home Affairs Committee for its reports and its Chairman for his introduction, which set the tone of this debate. That tone has largely been thoughtful; oddly enough, there was more consensus that I might have expected when the debate started. Parliamentary scrutiny of Government Departments is crucial in ensuring that they are delivering Government policy properly and offering value for money.

A huge number of points have been made, and I will deal with them in a moment, but I would like to start with an overview of the UK Border Agency. The agency has changed radically in recent months. Much of the speech by the shadow Minister was devoted to the John Vine reports of last year, which were, of course, important. That is why, in February this year, the Home Secretary told the House that the UK Border Force would split from the UKBA to become a separate operational command with its own ethos of law enforcement, led by its own director general and directly accountable to Ministers.

Since then both the UK Border Force and the UKBA have done their different jobs in protecting the border and ensuring that Britain remains open for business, checking people travelling to the UK before they arrive—through visa checks, intelligence and the use of the e-borders system.

In this climate of change, we all rightly expect the agency to continue to deliver. The work of the agency is crucial in controlling migration and protecting national security. The Committee’s reports on the work of the agency have shown that, as with all organisations, there is certainly room for improvement. Of course I acknowledge that, and the Government have accepted most of the Committee’s recommendations.

I have said previously to the Committee that the agency is good in parts but needs to improve. That is why a transformation plan has been initiated by the chief executive, Rob Whiteman, to address precisely the weaknesses identified by many right hon. and hon. Members. Even if the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) does not necessarily agree with all the policies I implement, she would, as she said, like the system to work properly, and I can assure her that that is the purpose of many of the changes that Rob Whiteman is making. I am grateful for the remarks by my right hon. Friends the Members for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) and for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who said that at a constituency level their experience is of an organisation that is getting a bit better. That is clearly a step in the right direction.

The agency faces a serious challenge—to reduce net migration while ensuring that migrants who do come here are of the calibre we need to benefit the UK. As I have said from this Dispatch Box before, the immigration debate is partly about numbers, but it should not be wholly about numbers. We have always been clear that controlled, selective migration is good for the UK. Encouraging tourism is essential for the UK economy, and this will obviously be particularly true over the next few months as we welcome an unprecedented number of visitors from around the world.

Bringing down net migration and attracting the brightest and the best are not mutually exclusive objectives. We need to know that the right numbers of people are coming here and that the right people are coming here—people who will benefit Britain, not just those who will benefit from Britain. We want an immigration policy that reflects consensus about who should be able to come here and an immigration system that can actually deliver it, with a legal framework that reflects the will of Parliament while respecting our international legal obligations, and a system and a policy that make immigration work for Britain economically.

The Migration Advisory Committee recently published a study of how we calculate the costs and benefits of immigration. Its view is that the Government should focus on the impact of migration on the welfare of residents rather than on the old assumption that because immigration adds to GDP it strengthens the economy and therefore, logically, the more immigration the better. This key insight of the MAC’s work gives us the basis for a more intelligent debate and supports a more selective approach to migration. The comprehensive set of reforms that we have introduced on work, students, settlement and family have set the way forward for such a system.

At the heart of the organisation of that system—the subject of the Committee’s reports—lies our visa regime. The UKBA administers one of the most competitive and efficient visa services in the world, ensuring that tourists and other genuine visitors can travel to the UK, enjoy what our country has to offer, and then return home. I should like to put some figures on this, because it is often under-reported. In 2011, the agency processed over 2.5 million visa applications—a 3% increase on 2010 and a 7% increase on 2009. The most recent set of migration statistics—the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) should listen to this after his claim that it is impossible to bring immigration down—showed that numbers of visa grants in every category are falling, apart from those for visit visas. Student visas are down by 21%, family visas are down by 16%, work visas are down by 8%, and visit visas are up by 9%. Those are the key figures in the immigration debate. They demonstrate how the agency is delivering the reductions in long-term immigration that we expect while not preventing valuable and genuine visitors from coming to the UK. These include people from some of our key markets such as China and India, where we have twice, and in some cases three times, as many visa application centres as any of our competitors.

But of course the public have perfectly reasonable concerns about the number of migrants who continue to come here. The changes that we have already made are starting to have an impact, but we have always said that it would take the full term of this Parliament to achieve our objectives. As has been widely—I think universally—agreed in the debate, that is largely due to an ineffective system that goes back to a time way before this Government. It has taken a raft of tough new policy measures merely to stop the steady rise in net migration before we see it coming down.

The checks made by the UKBA represent the key tools in ensuring that our requirements are met and that our policies deliver what we expect. The agency now has a presence in 137 countries, and despite the considerable logistical challenges involved in running this global operation, it routinely exceeds its service standard of processing 90% of visa applications within three weeks. In 2011, it processed half the non-settlement visa applications and two thirds of the business visa applications within five days. It did so with a focus on quality decisions and excellent customer service. I say gently that the sustained good performance of the agency’s visa service has perhaps escaped the Select Committee’s otherwise all-seeing eye. However, no discussion of the work of the UKBA would be complete without acknowledging it. I hope that members of the Committee agree.

A number of issues have been raised, and I will start with students. We are dealing with migrant students who have been left without a college following the introduction of the tough new rules for institutions that wish to sponsor non-EU students. About 500 colleges have disappeared from the register and are no longer allowed to bring in foreign students. That is a distinct public policy success and, again, one that is not often acknowledged.

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)]

Although those colleges are now not functioning and have had their licences withdrawn, the British high commissions in places such as Delhi, Pakistan and Nepal have already issued the visas and received the fees, and the students have paid their college fees but are not allowed to study. Hundreds of students have lost their money because the colleges have closed, which is no fault of theirs. What are the Government doing about that?

[Damian Green]

I will say two things. First, there has been a huge amount of fraud in the past and the sweeping away of bogus colleges reduces the chances for such fraud. This point was also raised by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). Individual students have 60 days to find a new college and their visa is still operational for that period. That is the sensible first step for them to take.

Stripping away the bogus colleges is only the first point. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made a perfectly reasonable point about those who overstay or abscond. The UKBA has been working through tens of thousands of leave curtailments. It is stripping students and others of their right to remain in the UK if they have no right to be here and providing them with written notification that they should return home. In recent months, it has dealt with almost 25,000 curtailments. To ensure that such people return home, the UKBA is undertaking a summer enforcement campaign to target those who have overstayed their visa. The aim of the campaign is to galvanise intelligence-led enforcement activity against such individuals, with the intention of removing them. So far this summer, we have removed almost 1,800 overstayers. As has been said, that is probably 1,800 more overstayers than have been removed in any previous year. That is not just students, but all overstayers.

[Damian Green]

I apologise, but we are coming to the end of the debate and there are lots of points that I wish to respond to.

Foreign national offenders were mentioned by a number of Members. We now start deportation action 18 months before the end of the sentence to speed up the process. We are also chartering more flights to remove foreign offenders. Last year, we removed more than 4,500 foreign criminals—43% of them before the end of their prison sentence. Many Members raised the issue of those who are released from detention while awaiting deportation. In only 30% of those cases is the decision made by the UKBA. The courts make the other decisions.

The asylum legacy was perhaps the biggest bugbear of hon. Members from all parts of the House. I sympathise with them entirely. There are currently 80,000 cases in the asylum controlled archive. That is down 18,000 from last September. There is some confusion about this matter, but no new applications are being added to the archive. If we find cases while mopping up around the agency that belong in the archive, which is for very old cases, they are put there and processed. Nobody should be under the misapprehension—I think it was the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) who brought this up—that new applications are going into the archive; they are simply not.

As has been mentioned, we are now checking cases not just against public sector databases but against credit scoring databases and so on, to see whether people are leaving any footprint in this country. If they are not, there is clearly evidence that they have left, which allows us to concentrate on those who are here so that everyone gets a decision. As the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee said, the target is finally to clear the backlog this year.

Another big issue that many right hon. and hon. Members brought up was the changes that we are making to family visit visa appeals, which we are restricting. I should point out that no other category of visit visa attracts a full right of appeal, and it is a disproportionate use of taxpayers’ money to fund a full right of appeal for a visitor, to be heard by a tribunal in the UK. No other country does that. From 9 July, the new regulations will restrict the full right of appeal to those applying to visit a close family member with settled refugee or humanitarian status.

I repeat that it is quicker for people to reapply than to appeal, and it is not the case that every decision is simply rubber-stamped. I believe it was the hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) who brought that up. I assure him that each case is examined by a more senior member of staff, and that some decisions are changed by the entry clearance manager.

[Mr Virendra Sharma]

Will the Minister give way?

[Damian Green]

I apologise, but I do not have time to give way.

The right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) mentioned a number of individual cases, and if he wishes to grab me after the debate I will of course take them away and look at them. I strongly recommend that his office use the Members’ hotline and the case owner system, as other Members do. As the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee said, relationships can develop that may well deliver a faster service to constituents. I seek to reply to the many letters that I receive from the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton as quickly and efficiently as possible, but he might find it easier and better for his constituents if he used the systems that have been set up precisely because of the various problems that have existed over the years.

I take the points that many Members made about the use of intelligence. We have set up a special directorate to use intelligence and information from the public much better, and we are developing a central database to enable allegations to be tracked on an end-to-end basis. I listened carefully to the point that, if possible, people who have given information should get some sort of response about what has happened, but I am sure hon. Members will appreciate that that cannot always happen.

The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association has brought to our attention a few points of detail in the new appeal regulations, but they do not require us not to introduce those regulations on 9 July.

I do not believe that everything in the UKBA is perfect. It has a number of difficult jobs to do, and mistakes will be made, but the agency is now working to a clear and comprehensive set of policies to reduce net migration and is transforming its operations to perform its day-to-day business more efficiently. That is the current reality of the UKBA, and I hope that the many Members who for obvious reasons take a personal interest in its activities recognise that it is changing for the better.