HC Deb 20 March 2000 vol 346 cc829-36

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Touhig.]

10.43 pm
Mr. Barry Gardiner (Brent, North)

For almost 1.5 million people every year, their first contact with Britain and the British Government is the experience of submitting to the entry clearance operation at a consulate or high commission overseas. Submitting to an interview about one's income and intentions can be an intimidating process at the best of times, and when an important visit abroad to meet family, perhaps for a wedding reception or to see grandchildren for the first time, depends on it, that process can prove extremely stressful.

It is important therefore that this first impression of Britain is a good one, and that entry clearance procedures are perceived to be transparent, fair and just. I want to detain the House this evening because I believe that in some cases our entry clearance operation falls short of that standard, and I am concerned by the proposals to introduce a visa bond pilot scheme, which will in my view further impair our entry clearance procedures.

First, let me say that entry clearance officers do an extremely professional job on the whole, often in the most difficult circumstances. Their duty is to be the first step in the control of illegal immigration into the United Kingdom. They must satisfy themselves principally of three things: first, that the applicant's trip can be properly financed; secondly, that there is suitable accommodation for the applicant in the UK; and thirdly, that the applicant will return home before, or at the end of, the visa period.

Ninety-four per cent. of non-settlement visas are granted through the good offices of entry clearance officers. I accept that, as Members of Parliament, we invariably see more of the 6 per cent. of cases that, from the applicant's and sponsor's point of view, go wrong rather than the 94 per cent. of satisfied customers. None the less, there is cause for concern.

I remind my good and hon. Friend the Minister of the words of the independent monitor for asylum and immigration, Dame Elizabeth Anson, in her report of July last year, when she writes of the concern I have expressed in my last three reports on the fairness of some refusals of late, middle aged and elderly parents seeking to visit families in the UK. She goes on to say: it is felt that insufficient consideration is given to many real reasons that endorse their claims that they only intend a short visit and will return home. In one case that I have been dealing with, a relative had been invited by grateful constituents of mine to visit them in the UK. They wanted to return the care and hospitality that the lady had given them when they had visited her in Sri Lanka—she had, in fact, nursed their two sick children during that visit—and sent her the flight to the UK as a gift.

The entry clearance officer in Sri Lanka based the decision to refuse the application on her answer to one specific question. The entry clearance officer had asked her, "And if it were possible, would you like to stay longer?" to which the lady had innocently replied, "Oh yes, of course." Such trick questions are on a par with the old Vaudeville gag of "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Mr. Stephen Pound (Ealing, North)

Is my hon. Friend surprised to hear that many relatives of my constituents who wish to visit this country are asked questions about the cities, towns and culture of the United Kingdom? When they cannot provide answers to those questions, they are told that they are clearly not bona fide visitors and the visa is refused, yet the whole purpose of applying for the visit is to see those very sites on which they are quizzed in Mumbai or Kalkata.

Mr. Gardiner

My hon. Friend makes a characteristically perceptive point. Which resident of the United Kingdom could speak with authority on Ahmedabad or Chandigarh as applicants at consulates overseas are sometimes requested to do for places in the UK?

The case that I mentioned was topped by a family from Goa—an area in which I know my hon. Friend the Minister has a particular interest. The mother and father are my constituents and they have been visited by their daughter, who is a nun, on many occasions without any immigration problems. Her brother has a good job in Dubai. It is not very highly paid, but it pays significantly above his previous earnings in India. He was refused a visa not because he did not earn enough to provide him with an incentive to return to Dubai, but on the ground that he was likely to overstay because he admitted that he missed his family. It might appear obvious that any family visa application could be turned down on that basis. People do not apply to visit their families unless they miss them and want to see them.

I accept that entry clearance officers must properly consider whether an applicant will return, but the House, I am sure, will be appalled to hear that applicants already accepted for student nurse training under the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting scheme are regularly refused student visas on the ground that all good nurses are encouraged to stay in the UK because of the national shortage of nurses.

Slightly more than 12 months ago, the Department for Education and Employment agreed that a number of qualified nurses from Manila and Accra would be given work permits. Unfortunately, nobody informed the entry clearance officers in Manila and Accra of the decision to allow in those nurses outside the immigration rules, because of the national shortage of nurses. Those nurses were refused. That is hardly joined-up government.

I come to the specific question of family visits by elderly relatives. Often, parents have previously visited and returned without incident, but, especially if the mother is widowed, entry clearance officers often assume that an application to visit will be abused to enable the elderly mother to settle with the family in the United Kingdom. In my experience, refusals often ignore the existence of family in the country of origin, who provide an equally strong motive for the mother to return. Such cases are extremely distressing.

I am concerned that entry clearance officers sometimes demand documentation and detailed answers to complex financial questions about income, family support and relatives' business affairs, without taking adequate account of the fact that some widows have never had to take any responsibility for financial dealings because tradition made them the preserve of their deceased husbands. That, added to the fact that many elderly people become genuinely muddled under sustained questioning about financial affairs, makes the case for a far more sympathetic approach to family visits by elderly people.

Dame Elizabeth, discussing family visits in her report, makes the point that Sponsors often offer to provide a bond to guarantee a relative will leave. That is borne out by my experience: sponsors have on many occasions come to my surgery and made such an offer. Dame Elizabeth believes that these would be very suitable for elderly relatives. On that point, I disagree with her.

Mr. Gareth R. Thomas (Harrow, West)

I support tight enforcement of our entry clearance rules, but does my hon. Friend share my view that Foreign and Commonwealth Office procedures used in considering such applications need to be applied with sympathy and sense? They should recognise the distress caused to citizens of this country when their elderly relatives are denied access.

Mr. Gardiner

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He is a doughty champion of his constituents and has made many representations on behalf of sponsoring families in his constituency.

I have deep reservations about the proposed visa bond pilot scheme, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will give those reservations serious consideration. He will know that I recently visited the deputy high commission in Mumbai, where I spoke at length with entry clearance officers about the proposed scheme. I believe that my reservations are shared by a number of the oficers with whom I spoke.

The discussion took place on 20 February. The officers reported a dramatic drop in applications following the publicity that the pilot scheme received after what I can only describe as a mendacious piece of journalism published in The Sunday Telegraph on 30 January. That report caused extreme anxiety in the Asian community in this country and throughout India. My hon. Friend the Minister will be able to testify to that because he was on an official visit to the country at the time. During my visit, more than a week later, the repercussions of that article were still being felt in entry clearance operations throughout the country.

The perception reported by officers in Mumbai has now been confirmed by official Foreign and Commonwealth Office statistics, which show a drop of more than 10 per cent. in applications from Mumbai, month on month, from February 1999 to February 2000.

Let me say immediately that I understand that the pilot scheme proposal came out of a genuine desire by the Government to respond to the representations that they had received from sponsors in the UK. The scheme is supposed to operate on the basis that entry clearance officers will assess an application in the usual way and confirm whether an applicant can show the necessary financial resources and accommodation in the UK to make the visit.

Being satisfied on those points, the entry clearance officers must then consider whether, on balance, the applicant will return to the country of origin after the stay. If they consider that the applicant will do so, the visa should be granted. If they consider that, on balance, there is doubt that the applicant will return to the country of origin, under the provisions of the pilot scheme they are supposed to consider the application of a bond.

It is at this point that my reservations about the proposal come into play. There are fundamentally two reasons to doubt whether the desired effect of the pilot scheme will be borne out in practice. The first was made plain to me by the entry clearance officers at Mumbai. They pointed out that it would be an extremely complex and time-consuming procedure for them to go that extra stage.

If a bond were applied to an applicant who the entry clearance officers had not been satisfied would return to the country of origin, it would take considerable resources on their part to administer and put in place the bond scheme. That is time that they would not be spending administering the usual run-of-the-mill applications. Therefore, unless substantial extra resources were put into the entry clearance operation, one must assume that the time that the entry clearance officers spent processing the bond application, for an applicant who would otherwise have been rejected, would not be spent processing the greater number of applications that would have proceeded in the usual way.

My second concern is that pilot schemes are all very well; practice is another matter. It might be possible for a pilot scheme along the lines set out to operate and be seen to operate quite properly. However, once the constraints of the pilot scheme were lifted, when it was no longer a case of separating those who had not managed to persuade the entry clearance officer of their bona fides to return from those who had, and when that area of discretion was no longer the norm, it is likely that entry clearance officers would simply say, "Well, I am not sure whether this person will return or not, therefore I will apply the bond."

I believe that over time, even the best-intentioned scheme would become misapplied by the entry clearance officers, to the detriment of genuine applicants. When constituents come to us as Members of Parliament and make representations about their relatives who wish to come and visit them in this country, it is important that they can be advised clearly about the immigration regulations in the United Kingdom.

I have always been able to say to my constituents, whey they come to me and propose a bond, "In this country, whether or not you can come in is not a matter of money. It is a simply a matter of whether you meet the regulations. If you can show that there is financial support and accommodation for you such as to make the trip possible, and if you can show that there is good reason why you will return to the country of origin afterwards, you are admitted. If you cannot show any of those things, the application is refused."

That seems eminently clear. It would be befuddled by giving the entry clearance officers discretion in a case where they have already reached the conclusion that, on the balance of probabilities, the applicant would not return to the country of origin. To say that if that applicant were to lodge a financial bond—the very applicant who has not managed to persuade the entry clearance officers of his bona fides—and that he should then be allowed to come in, is in my view to mix finances with the clear immigration procedures of this country in a most unfortunate way.

11 pm

The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Keith Vaz)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North (Mr. Gardiner) for the opportunity to debate our entry clearance services. I know that he takes a close interest in those matters and, as he said, he recently visited our operations in India. I, too, have always taken a close interest in visa and immigration matters, and I was delighted when my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary invited me to take on the responsibility for entry clearance as part of my portfolio at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

A clear priority for me in the job was to ascertain what I could do to improve the service that we provide, not only to visa applicants overseas, but to Members of Parliament and sponsors in this country. There is always room for improvement. My hon. Friend has made helpful points, which I shall consider carefully. Room for improvement exists because our operation is large and global. However, in most cases the visa operation works well to facilitate visits and travel to this country.

Overall we provide a good service. In 1999, we processed more than 1.5 million visa applications. Of those, fewer than 7 per cent. were refused. A very high percentage—more than 90 per cent.—of applicants for non-settlement visas were granted visas in 24 hours. That is a good service by any standard.

I do not suggest that entry clearance officers get it right every time—they do not. However, we should keep that in perspective. The number of cases that go wrong represent only a small percentage of the overall number of applications. We aim to correct any wrong decisions quickly, and to tackle the root cause or causes of any poor quality decisions. Our aim is for all entry clearance sections to operate to the standards of the very best.

Entry clearance officers have a duty to apply the immigration rules approved by Parliament. Some applicants—again, only a minority—seek to abuse the system. Our visa sections rightly watch out for that.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Home Office work together closely on all those matters. We are fortunate to have as Home Secretary my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw). He has worked tirelessly to ensure that we have an immigration system that is firm but fair. As the House knows, he is the Home Secretary who abolished the infamous primary purpose rule.

I mentioned the service that we provide to Members of Parliament and sponsors in this country. Since I took over, I have tried to improve those services. First, we have established regular visa surgeries for hon. Members to come to talk to me about difficult constituency cases. Hon. Members know that my door is always open and that my telephone number is readily available to those who believe that they have urgent or important cases.

Secondly, we have tried to improve communications between Members of Parliament and constituents by publishing a Visa News bulletin. It aims to highlight changes and advise hon. Members about how best to make representations. We arranged a meeting on 12 January between hon. Members with an interest in the subject and my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary. That was the first time a Foreign Secretary had ever attended such a meeting. His attendance demonstrates the commitment in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to providing high quality visa services.

Delay in responding to hon. Members' letters has been a problem for some time. I know that from my case load. By the end of last year, a backlog of almost 1,000 letters from hon. Members had built up in our visa correspondence unit. Some hon. Members will know that, on 24 January, we established an outstanding casework unit to tackle the backlog. I am pleased to inform the House that the backlog is now substantially reduced. My officials are considering ways of maintaining the improved standards of service on a long-term basis.

We are also in the process of restructuring the visa correspondence unit to make the overall operation of the system more effective. I want my office to respond to MPs quickly, especially on urgent and exceptional cases.

In considering ways to improve the service to visa applicants, my priority was to pay an early visit to the Indian subcontinent, where seven of our visa offices account for some 18 per cent. of all visa applications worldwide. I was therefore delighted to have been able, as my hon. Friend said, to visit India and Bangladesh earlier this month. I wanted to examine our operations there and see what we could do to improve our services. I was impressed by the dedication and commitment of our staff in those countries. I also had the opportunity to meet visa applicants, who seemed happy with the service that they were getting.

Let me describe the figures. Last year, our high commission in New Delhi handled 67,000 visa applications. Fewer than 17 per cent. were refused and more than 70 per cent. of non-settlement visas granted were available for collection within 24 hours of the application being lodged. The figures for Dhaka were 19,700 applications received and 25 per cent. refused. All non-settlement visas were processed within 24 hours.

I concentrated on considering ways in which we might improve the service to those living in rural areas, who have to travel long distances to the visa issuing centres. During my visit, I launched feasibility studies in three subcontinent cities—Chandigarh and Ahmedabad in India and Sylhet in Bangladesh—into how that might best be achieved. Those studies are now under way and we are examining a wide range of options, including the possibility of issuing visas in those centres. I shall look at the results very carefully before making any decisions.

My visit to the subcontinent also coincided with some rather inaccurate and misleading press reports of the Government's plans to pilot a financial bond scheme for certain visa applicants. I am glad that my hon. Friend identified The Sunday Telegraph as the newspaper that started those inaccurate reports. They fuelled misunderstandings about the proposed scheme that are still current, despite all our efforts to set the record straight. The subject is of course one for my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, but it may be helpful if I briefly explain the background.

The Government's commitment to exploring the possibility of introducing a bond scheme through a pilot study was set out in the immigration and asylum White Paper published in 1998. The Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 provides the powers to run such a study. We followed that with a consultation paper on the design of the pilot study, offering interested parties—particularly the ethnic minority groups—the opportunity to comment. One of the specific issues addressed in the consultation paper was the location of the pilot study. We explained that, as the scheme is all about facilitating family visits to the UK, it would be desirable to choose posts that receive a large number of visit visa applications in countries whose people have already settled in the UK and make up well-established ethnic minority communities.

I want to make three points. First, the Government are committed to carrying out a pilot project to test the scheme—nothing more. The initiative is a response to requests from communities in this country with an interest in those matters and from many Members of Parliament. Secondly, the bond scheme would not apply to all applicants for family visits, but to only a small number of borderline cases in which the applicant's intention to leave the UK was in doubt. The scheme could therefore increase the number of visitors eligible to come here. Finally, the next step is to analyse the results of the consultation exercise and decide where the pilot should operate and at what level the bond should be set. No final decisions have been taken on those issues.

I should add that if the pilot scheme is successful and if the scheme is eventually introduced worldwide, it would apply to all visa nationals and is therefore not, as some have said, discriminatory. We shall take all views into account in the consultation process, particularly when deciding on the location of the pilot project. I must repeat that no final decisions have been taken. However, I am very pleased to announce to the House that the pilot will not be undertaken at any of our posts in the Indian subcontinent—not in India, Bangladesh or Pakistan. I am certain that hon. Members will be very pleased about that. The decision was taken by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and is fully supported by my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary. I am extremely grateful to the Indian high commissioner, Mr. Naresh Dayal; the Bangladeshi high commissioner, Mr. Mahmood Ali; and many organisations for their representations.

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Brent, North, for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty), for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas), for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound), for Erith and Thamesmead (Mr. Austin) and for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), among others, for their helpful representations on this matter.

I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Harrow, West and for Harrow, East for the points that they have made about elderly relatives. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East is unable to speak for obvious reasons, but he and my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, West have led a successful campaign to highlight the plight of elderly relatives. That campaign has been echoed eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North. As a direct result of what they have said tonight, I have decided to have a special meeting to discuss elderly relatives with my hon. Friends and any other hon. Members who wish to come and see me. I and my officials believe that such a meeting would help us to consider this sensitive and important area.

The Government's White Paper on immigration and asylum and the resulting 1999 Act bring other challenges to the entry clearance service. For example, our manifesto commitment to restore appeal rights for those applying to visit family members in this country will be implemented in October 2000. I warmly welcome that, because it will mean that refusal decisions can be examined by an independent adjudicator. That is surely in the interests of all concerned. Introduction of this appeal system will be a big challenge for our posts and for the other Departments involved—the Home Office and the Lord Chancellor's Department. We are doing everything we can to ensure a smooth introduction.

Another significant step has been the establishment of a joint entry clearance unit. The unit has recently begun its work under its new head, Robert Brinkley. The establishment of that unit is the clearest example of joined-up Government in this area of work. We may soon have joint reference numbers to make it easier for cases to be tracked.

It is inevitable that an operation such as the entry clearance service, which processes more than 1.5 million applications each year, will make some mistakes. I pay tribute to the excellent work of entry clearance officers, often in difficult and trying circumstances. Where there are problems, we shall seek to address them quickly. We are working hard to reduce waiting times and have had some successes, particularly in Bombay and New Delhi.

I was not able to visit Islamabad during my recent trip to the Indian subcontinent. I plan to do so at the earliest opportunity. I know that our visa operation there is the source of much concern to hon. Members, and rightly so. I have made it clear to the managers in Islamabad, whom I called to London recently, and to my officials here, that the service in Islamabad must improve greatly. I have set them the target of reducing waiting times by half by June, and we have already made progress on that.

Our record is good: 1.24 million visas were issued in 1998 from 164 visa issuing posts. A record 1,025 person-years were spent on entry clearance work—15 per cent. of the Foreign Office staff—in the same year.

Working with my excellent officials in London and the hard-working ECOs abroad—

The motion having been made after Ten o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, MADAM SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at thirteen minutes past Eleven o'clock.