Examination of Witnesses (Questions 817-819)
BEVERLEY HUGHES
MP, MR BILL
JEFFREY AND
MR KEN
SUTTON
19 NOVEMBER 2003
Q817 Chairman: Could I thank you
very much for coming, Minister. The Committee has noted that this
is the sixth time you have come in front of this Committee in
the current calendar year. We did discuss making you an honorary
member of the Committee as you come here so often! We are grateful
to you. Could you, for the record, introduce yourself and your
colleagues.
Beverley Hughes: Yes. I think
these gentlemen have been here almost as many times as I have!
On my left is Bill Jeffrey, the Director-General and on my right
Ken Sutton, the Deputy Director-General.
Q818 Chairman: Obviously, we are
particularly interested in the new legislative proposals that
were announced by the Government just after the last time you
came to the Committee as part of this inquiry. Can I start by
asking you about the consultation around the proposals? The response
we received from the Immigration Guidance Service is not untypical;
they say, "The consultation document is so lacking in detail
that it is impossible to respond to many of the proposals in an
intelligent way." A number of consultees that we contacted
when the proposals were published suggested that the short consultation
period is well short of Cabinet Office guidance. I wonder, Minister,
if you could justify both the alleged lack of information in the
consultation proposals and also the very short period of time
for consultation on them.
Beverley Hughes: I do appreciate
the situation that places consultees in, and I would like to make
clear that any responses we receive up to and around the deadline,
and indeed even just past the deadline if they can get to us quickly,
we would certainly want to consider. The situation was, though,
that the Home Secretary announced in May that he was asking for
further policy work to be done on some of these very difficult
and very technical areas, which have involved a lot of consultation
anyway, both within government and with the judiciary, and it
is simply the case that we were not in a position, certainly on
some of the main planks of the proposal, to give sufficient detail
until that point in time.
Q819 Chairman: But the response that
we have had from consultees is that there is still insufficient
detail, for example, on the operation of the single-tier appeal
system, or what might happen to judicial review for expert organisations
like the Immigration Advisory Service, to, as they put it, "respond
to the proposals in an intelligent way." Do you accept that
there are some real difficulties for agencies in responding to
the proposals that you have put forward?
Beverley Hughes: What I accept
is that there are real difficulties in making sure that we develop
in detail a system that is workable operationally and actually
achieves the policy objectives here, and indeed, we are still
discussing some of that detail with colleagues in the Department
of Constitutional Affairs, and indeed, they are discussing the
detail with some of their stakeholders. So we have not finalised
the detail of that. There are some very technical issues to be
considered, and we will receive gratefully any ideas people send
back to us of how they think the policy objectives that we are
trying to achieve can be achieved in practice, without building
in the kind of loopholes that it is all too easy to build in unless
you pay real attention to that detail.
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