Examination of witnesses (Questions 109
- 119)
THURSDAY 12 FEBRUARY 1998
PROFESSOR PETER
SCOTT, MR
TONY LOCKHART,
MS HELEN
POWELL and REV
TOM BRUCH
Chairman
109. Welcome to the Foreign Affairs Committee
Entry Clearance Sub-Committee. Once again let me apologise for
the delay this morning. Could I begin our questioning by asking
you how the level of refusals of student visas in Delhi and Islamabad
compared with the average figures or compares with other areas?
Do you see higher refusal rates and can you tell us where those
higher refusal rates might be? Rev Bruch?
(Rev Bruch) My understanding is that the refusal
rate for student visas in Islamabad has been 30 per cent. This
is according to a letter the High Commission distributed to British
education institutions last November. I am not sure how that compares
to Delhi. I believe it is higher but I am not certain how high
the figure is for Delhi. 30 per cent, I believe, globally is probably
amongst the highest.
Chairman: I am going
to bring in David Wilshire.
Mr Wilshire
110. Can I apologise for having to go by
half past 11 but I cannot wriggle out of something else. I do
not need to repeat myself because you heard the thinking behind
my questions in the last session. Can I ask you first of all,
the British Council I have got to know and respect over the years,
do you consider it would be helpful to touch base with the British
Council in Islamabad and New Delhi on our own?
(Mr Lockhart) Yes I think this would be a very
useful gesture and an important discussion topic. We have been
in contact with our people in both posts and I think they would
have things to add themselves to the discussion.
Mr Wilshire: Fine,
I hope we can arrange that. The part of your memorandum it will
come as no surprise to you I want to talk about is paragraph 2
where you set out in effect your basic concerns and that is what
I and others will want to pursue at some length when we get there.
Can you provide us with hard evidence, proper case studies that
we can take up and also statistics? The Chairman asked you for
some figures. We got an answer about one place and a comment,
"I do not know about New Delhi", so some serious statistics
for us to use.
Ms Abbott: Can I just
intervene there. Possibly the Committee should write to the different
posts and ask for the figures in the same way you wrote since
we are doing the investigation.
Mr Wilshire: I am
only trying to save our Clerk some work! If somebody has got the
figures I would love them; if they have not, we will have to get
them ourselves.
Chairman: On the question
of obtaining the figures I think we can deal with that in private
session.
Mr Wilshire
111. This is why I say can you supply them
rather than bring it into a public domain.
(Mr Lockhart) Figures for Islamabad and New Delhi?
112. Any figures you have got would be helpful
and again privately out of this public session some firm evidence
and firm case studies so we do not have to bandy names about in
public session. The only other question, it is paragraphs 10 and
11 where my eye falls that I would like to know more about. In
10 you say that you were unable to deliver training for ECOs in
Islamabad. Are you able to tell us why you are unable to deliver?
(Rev Bruch) The training that we were intending
to deliver in Islamabad was modelled on the training that we had
in fact delivered in Delhi that our memorandum refers to. We had
been expecting, this had been co-ordinated between the local British
Council Office and the High Commission, to attend student interviews
in the morning of an agreed date in Islamabad and then in the
afternoon to be able to deliver a three or four hour training
session involving local entry clearance staff and local British
Council staff. We were rather surprised when we arrived to find
out that we were not able to sit in on student interviews but
we were in the end able to sit in on other interviews and the
intended training session, which initially was to include virtually
all entry clearance officers, later about half of them, was for
reasons I do not think we fully understand reduced in time to
half an hour, to 30 minutes, and involved two entry clearance
managers, the First and Second Secretary, and three entry clearance
officers. Given the very very short time which we were surprised
with when we arrived and indeed the almost complete lack of training
facilities, the room was inappropriate, none of the equipment
we were expecting was there, we were simply unable to do this.
There were members of the British Council staff there as well.
The idea, the pretext behind this training, as in the case of
Delhi, was to see whether closer co-operation could not be established
between the services offered by the British Council in respect
of advice to students and entry clearance operations dealing with
applications. This has worked very well in Delhi. It has not been
established in Islamabad and I think one of the key preliminaries
in establishing this was this type of training. I am afraid I
really cannot answer why it was that the High Commission there
was unable to give us the facilities and the time that we had
been led to believe would be available to us.
Chairman
113. Which was granted to you in New Delhi—the
facilities and the training?
(Rev Bruch) Absolutely, yes.
Ms Abbott
114. How long did the training take in New
Delhi?
(Rev Bruch) We had a group of probably about a
dozen entry clearance officers and managers and six or eight British
Council staff for two to three hours.
Mr Wilshire
115. One other question, which I must preface
by saying I simply do not want the answer to now, it would be
helpful if you could speak to our clerk afterwards because in
paragraph 10 you say "one of the entry clearance officers
was confrontational and aggressive", and it would be quite
helpful to know who but not now please.
(Rev Bruch) Yes, fine.
Mr Heath
116. I would like to ask about the evidence
you give in paragraph 13 where you make some very clear recommendations
to us. Have you made those recommendations to the Home Office
or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at any stage in the last
few months?
(Mr Lockhart) We have not done so far. The issue
of the Sub-Committee has brought ahead our thinking on this and
they are issues we would be happy to, and would expect in the
normal run of events, deal with directly bilaterally.
117. No representations were made after
the somewhat disastrous visit to Islamabad, for instance?
(Ms Powell) No. That took place in October, and
to write the report takes a while.
118. You did not unpack your bags and think,
"That was a disaster, I am going to write to somebody about
it"?
(Ms Powell) Yes, we did, we wrote to the British
Council. Then we heard about this in December, a few weeks after.
Mr Heath: Okay.
Ms Abbott
119. I have been an MP for ten years and
I do a lot of immigration cases and nothing you have said or the
JCWI have said has come as a surprise to me, and I do not intend
to question you on it because it reflects my experience and the
experience of many colleagues. I do not think it is just Islamabad
either. On the general issue of immigration and nationality I
hold quite hawkish views which I will not go into now, but precisely
because I see so many immigration cases I see people all the time
who came in as students at some point in the dim and distant past
and are still here, and in that sense—a limited sense—the
entry clearance people have a point. What I am trying to think
about is some structural way of getting round this problem. There
are two things. One sometimes gets the impression that some entry
clearance officers treat every student the same, whether they
are going to the London School of Economics or to the Outer Space
College of Astronomy on the Holloway Road. Is there a case for
a certified list of colleges or further education institutions
where there would be a presumption that these were bona fide students?
The second point is, is there a case—and it is something
colleagues are looking at on visa control in general—for
making it easier for people to get visas to come and study but
there will be an absolute bar on extending that period of time?
That as long as you apply to come to a proper, certified college—and
not some bogus college in the Holloway Road of which I know a
great deal—and your documents are in order, you can almost
certainly get your visa but when that time is up you have to go,
you cannot say your granny is sick, you cannot say you got married,
you cannot say you have decided to be a refugee, you just go.
It would produce some hard cases but at least it would have the
benefit of clarity and people would know where they stood?
(Professor Scott) On the first point you raise,
I do not think there is any difficulty in identifying bona fide
institutions, either public institutions (where there is no problem
at all) or private ones. There are accredited English language
schools and there are clear mechanisms. So I do not think an entry
clearance officer would have any difficulty in identifying this
was a bona fide institution that the student was planning to go
to.
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