Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
THURSDAY 8 MAY 2003
BEVERLEY HUGHES
MP, MR BILL
JEFFREY AND
MR KEN
SUTTON
Q20 Mr Singh: I am happy to leave
you in that answer, Minister, I am not sure how many people outside
of this room will be. Moving on to, let us say, a good news story
for the Home Office. There is now a current backlog of only 40,800
cases?
Beverley Hughes: That is the last
published figure; obviously it has gone down since then.
Q21 Mr Singh: That is even better
news. What has been responsible for reducing the backlog to those
figures, and do we have any further targets in mind?
Beverley Hughes: You asked about
additional action that was taken around the time of that crisis,
and, although it takes time, more people were employed and trained
specifically to do the caseworking decisions, specifically to
deal with the backlog as well as the intake, and I think the peak
of staff went back up to about 720. So we employed more staff,
we have tried to improve the systems out of all recognition, and
bringing into the equation the objective of reducing the intake
not only has the benefit of making the numbers more manageable,
that releases capacity from initial decisions on new cases to
enable us, in addition to the additional resources we have put
in, actually to deploy more of those resources on reducing the
backlog down. And we have to reduce the backlog; as I see it,
it is an albatross round the organisation's neck, and I am quite
determined that we will get to a steady state within the foreseeable
future by reducing that down simply to fractional levels.
Mr Jeffrey: And just to add a
word, if I may, Mr Singh. I have been in my present post for eight
months, so I am not familiar with the details of what happened
in 1996-98, but the history of the organisation since that collapse,
clearly, has been one of recovery. It was a very low point, and
in the years since then systems have been improved, resources
have been increased, the law has changed in a number of respects,
as a result of legislation introduced by the present Government,
and there has been the recent focus on reducing the intake, which
in some measure has been successful. A second point to make is
that the backlog is probably more accurately described as the
number of cases still in progress. It was 40,800 at the end of
December. I would say, between 10,000 and 20,000 of these are
cases that one would expect to be at some stage in their consideration,
in any event. The total figure is falling, because, as we get
the intake down, since we now have the capacity to decide between
7,000 and 8,000 cases every month, to the extent that our monthly
intake is less than that, we are gaining ground on the backlog.
So I think we can look towards a future in which the whole phenomenon
is a good deal more under control, at the decision-making end
anyway, than it was several years ago.
Q22 Mr Singh: What proportion of
this backlog are long-standing applications which we have not
got round to yet, in any shape or form? As a constituency MP,
I get many people, asylum seekers, who have been waiting for something
like two years and they have not been called for interview yet.
What are we doing about that; are we improving them?
Mr Jeffrey: I think we could try
to put an estimated figure on that. It is certainly the case at
the moment that there are still too many cases of that kind that
go back a year, two years, sometimes more, I see them myself when
I sign off letters in response to approaches from Members of Parliament.
What we are certainly doing is hitting our targets in relation
to the percentage of cases that we decide within two months, (and,
as the Minister said, over the period towards the end of last
year we were managing to decide 78% of all new cases within two
months), and simultaneously, to the extent the capacity allows,
to clear out the inheritance of several years ago. But I would
be the first to admit that we have not completed that yet, by
any means.
Q23 Chairman: When would you expect,
I do not want to tie you down to any too hard targets, in the
light of our remarks on that subject, but when might you expect
to have dealt with the backlog?
Beverley Hughes: I do not want
to put a target on the backlog, as well as all the other targets
that we have got, and, for precisely the reason that we have just
tried to explain, it is important that we have some flexibility
in the system with the resources that we have got. And, depending
on how the intake falls, and some other issues, some other aspects
of the work that need caseworkers, we will deploy as many of the
resources we can that are left over from those priorities on the
backlog, and, obviously, as the intake comes down there will be
more capacity available to deploy on the backlog. Also, I think
we have got to try to change the language a bit, Chair, to some
extent, because, as the Director General made clear, we ourselves
have got into the language of failure; not all of that, less than
40,000 now, is backlog, that is everything that is on somebody's
desk, being worked on, including new cases that have not yet been
decided, but may well be decided within the two-month target.
So I want the organisation to benchmark what is a reasonable work
in progress figure, what we would normally expect to be worked
on to meet the two-month target; it is numbers over and above
that that is actually a backlog, and that will be substantially
less than the 37,000 we have got already.
Q24 Chairman: What do you estimate
it is, if it is not 37,000?
Beverley Hughes: I think, legitimately,
as the Director General just said, something between 10,000 and
20,000; again, it depends on the intake, does it not, because
if the intake is falling then the numbers that are coming in are
falling, so your work in progress is falling. But I would say,
at the moment, something between 10,000 and 20,000 is legitimately
work in progress.
Q25 Chairman: As Mr Singh just said,
we all get asylum seekers coming to our office who say they have
been here several years and have not heard, and, when we write
off, very often an interview is arranged, but sometimes they cannot
even hold out a prospect of an interview, in the replies we get?
Beverley Hughes: Yes; well, as
I say, we are increasingly reducing down the number of people
in that situation. That is another priority. I do not want to
put a target date, but I am hoping that within the next reasonable
period of time, not years but within a reasonable period of time,
we will have reduced that number down to normal work in progress.
Chairman: Thank you. Mr Singh, I am sorry
to have interrupted you.
Q26 Mr Singh: Thank you, Chairman.
Minister, what do you think of the criticism that is levelled,
that a lot of the initial decision-making is of an extremely poor
quality; is that true, and, if so, what is the Home Office doing
to improve that?
Beverley Hughes: When I gave evidence
to the Committee last time, I did say that we had some internal
targets of making sure, firstly, that we can assess people's decisions
internally and the quality of the letters that they put out. Building
on that, we have instituted two targets for this year and beyond,
on the back of the Spending Review, firstly around an internal
quality assurance process, and the target is that 80% of decisions,
of both grants and refusals, sampled at random over the year,
will be found to be fully effective, or better. And that, secondly,
an external quality assurance process involving review by Treasury
solicitors, and, again, that 80% of those decisions reviewed randomly
by assessors over the year will be found to be fully effective
or better. I would make two points here, and then I will ask Ken
Sutton to give you some of the operational detail, if I may. I
agree with the point being made by organisations, not only from
the moral point of view really and the obligation on us in terms
of the people claiming asylum, to get those decisions made as
well as possible, to have high-quality decisions. Secondly, there
is a very important reason, from our point of view, because I
do not want cases going to appeal if actually they can be stopped
earlier in the system, it is a waste of resources as well as the
human consequences of that. So I fully accept that getting the
quality of decisions to as high a standard as we can is a very
important objective. I think that as the intake comes down and
we get more order into the system, as we were doing, I can give
more attention to the detail of how we do that and to the detail
of performance. When you have got an organisation that is trying
to cope with very, very large numbers, that is very important,
because it is an important issue, but it is very hard actually
to deal with it thoroughly. And I think the priority has to be
to get order into the system and to get the numbers down; as we
do so, I want to be looking in detail at what we are doing at
the moment, which I am not unhappy about, I think it is satisfactory,
but I want to see actually if we can make sure that we can say,
hand on heart, that the decisions are all as high-quality as we
would like them to be. But Ken will outline some of the mechanisms
that we have got at the moment.
Mr Sutton: If I could just add
a bit of detail to that for the Committee. As the Minister has
explained, we have got now two systems for checking that we are
maintaining the quality of decisions while still getting through
this high quantity of decisions. We have a random sampling of
cases, of decisions, which are looked at before those decisions
actually are communicated. So there is an opportunity there to
step in, which is clearly what we do, and, although it is a random
selection of cases, we do make sure that every caseworker has
their decisions sampled in that way. So we do have the mechanism
there to step in before decisions are communicated, to change
those decisions if they are wrong, to improve the presentation
if the issue is more one of expression of the decision, before
those cases are pursued. We have also an independent check on
that now, after those decisions have been taken and communicated,
by the Treasury Solicitors. So we are looking in these ways and
have these mechanisms now in place to make sure that we are not
simply talking about getting through the cases to the very important
targets we have on timeliness, but that we are maintaining the
quality as we do that. Perhaps just one other dimension to this
which may be of interest to the Committee. The Minister has explained
how, from the very low numbers of staff that we got into some
years ago, connected with the circumstances with the IT system,
we have built up the numbers, that now we have, broadly speaking,
around 500 staff who are, as their job, taking asylum decisions.
But what we have done, as part of that, is develop a very careful
programme of training and of sharing of expertise, to make sure
that the caseworkers, as they become part of that system, have
thorough initial training, which is an initial period of 11 days,
but then have specific mentoring through the care of staff who
have themselves worked as caseworkers, mentoring within the team
to which they are then allocated, specific interviewing training,
and also, and this I think is very important, ready access to
senior caseworkers who are very experienced in that country's
casework. So we have got a collection there, I think, which, on
the one hand, is about mechanisms for checking the quality of
cases, but also is about making sure that those people whom we
are asking to take these decisions are as well prepared as they
need to be for this work.
Q27 Mr Singh: I understand that the
IND used to work in a way in which workers specialised in particular
areas, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and that that system has
been dismantled now and people are taking cases across the board.
Is not that a recipe for making wrong decisions, if you do not
know about the circumstances of a particular area, you are likely
to make a wrong decision on an application?
Beverley Hughes: This is something
that I asked about particularly, because I started from the point
of view that you are expressing, Marsha. There is still a degree
of specialisation in the system and I think the view is that it
is quite important that we do have that, but also it is important
that we have the flexibility, for two reasons really. It is important
from a caseworker's point of view that they are not tied solely,
all the time, for a long time, to dealing with one kind of case;
that has advantages in some aspects, but also it atomises, if
you like, their job to such a degree that it has implications,
I think, for the way in which caseworkers can work. Having said
that, there is some specialisation within the way the teams are
organised; and certainly the senior caseworkers, at two levels
above the initial decision-makers, do have a specialist focus
that they can bring to bear when caseworkers consult them. Ken,
have you got some figures?
Mr Sutton: Perhaps I could add
just a few points of detail to that. It is true that we have moved
away from a system of total fixation, if I can put it like that,
on one country's casework, because we did find that, while that
produced a clear specialism, there was a downside to that, in
terms of the inflexibility with which we were able to respond
to changes in the pattern of casework, and we would find caseworkers
who were very confident in one country's casework but who felt
reluctant, or unable, to switch to another country at short notice.
What we have got now, as the Minister has explained, is more of
a hybrid system. It does not throw out the baby with that particular
bath water, in terms of specialism, because we do have a system
by which we spread cases from specific countries into planned
caseworking units. The picture which I would ask the Committee
to have in mind is that we have around 33 caseworking units, and,
if I could give you one or two examples, each of those has 13
caseworking decision-takers. If you take one of those 33 groups,
they concentrate on applications from Somalia and Zimbabwe; if
you take another, they concentrate on cases from Pakistan, Afghanistan
and Palestinian applications, but also deal with a range of other
countries as well. What this does, I think, is give us the opportunity
to allocate to caseworkers in the knowledge that those caseworkers
will have some experience in those cases, but retain a core of
staff who are dealing with a variety of casework and whom we can
then use flexibly, in the way the Minister has described.
Q28 Mr Singh: Finally, in terms of
backlog, a number of those cases must be Iraqis or Kurds. I understand
their cases have all been suspended. Is it the intention, at some
stage, to issue a notice to those people that they must all leave
the UK at some stage?
Beverley Hughes: You are right
that decisions at the moment are suspended on Iraqi cases where
a decision has not been concluded; those decisions will have to
be concluded. But, yes, if the conclusion from those individual
cases is that they are not given asylum and they go through the
system then they will be returned, and we are actively now preparing
to be able to return people to Iraq when conditions allow.
Q29 Mr Singh: You are still making
decisions on an individual basis?
Beverley Hughes: Yes; we will
have to, yes.
Q30 David Winnick: Minister, everyone
will be pleased that, according to Mr Sutton and yourself, improvements
have taken place at the Home Office. But would you accept that,
for some period of time, there was a perception, which seems quite
justified, that there was chaos at the Home Office, that files
were scattered all over the place, it was difficult to link up,
endless delays, and the rest of it; that, to say the least, was
extremely unfortunate, and obviously helped to produce the backlog?
Beverley Hughes: I do accept that
that was the situation, and indeed we have not yet finally cleared
that all out; because I still get evidence now and am having to
respond to colleagues who write to me, to say, "I'm sorry
we have not concluded this case. I'm sorry, we can't, at the moment,
find the file." We still have the legacy of some of that.
Q31 David Winnick: For how long did
all this chaos last then?
Beverley Hughes: I am sorry, Mr
Winnick, I was not there at the time; and I am not abdicating
responsibility for that.
Q32 David Winnick: I accept that;
we cannot hold you totally responsible, Minister.
Beverley Hughes: All I can say
is that I think the way in which the system at that time, for
the reasons that I have outlined already, has been described is
one of catastrophe, there was total incapacity to respond to the
increasing numbers of cases coming in, even to log them properly
and to store them properly, and we are reaping still, to some
extent, the last vestiges of the legacy of that, it is not quite
all cleared out. But what I can say to you is that the situation
has improved out of all recognition from that very, very disastrously
low point, and I am working very hard to make sure that we clear
away the last vestiges and that we have an organisation which
is administratively excellent and high quality. Because, actually,
some of the big-picture things that we want to try to do, that
no doubt the Committee will get on to talking about, are predicated
on the assumption that we have got an organisation that can deal
with the core business, routinely, effectively, efficiently and
to a high standard; that is not a kind of optional extra, that
is the foundation upon which the higher-level strategies, the
bigger-picture objectives we want to achieve have to be based.
Q33 David Winnick: Does the Home
Secretary, and yourself, go to see from time to time what is actually
happening at Croydon?
Beverley Hughes: Yes.
Q34 David Winnick: No doubt we shall
be visiting Croydon ourselves, but you do visit and see?
Beverley Hughes: I do visits all
over the estate of IND.
Q35 David Winnick: Not a planned
visit, and all the rest of it, you just go?
Beverley Hughes: It depends; sometimes
I just turn up, particularly if it is somewhere like a removal
centre, I just turn up. Sometimes it is a planned visit; but even
on planned visits Ministers can duck out and go somewhere that
is not planned. My very first visit to Croydon was a planned visit
but I arrived an hour before I told them I was going to come,
because I wanted to see the Public Enquiry Office, and all of
that, for myself, I am sure not that it would have been managed
in any way, but I turned up an hour before anyone was expecting
me. Because it is important, and it is important you can just
talk informally to staff and hear what it is like for them on
the ground. And, actually, whenever I do visits, I do insist on
sitting in a room with just more basic grade staff, not with managers,
and just hearing how it is, I have done that with decision-makers,
with presenting officers at appeal, with people running removal
centres; as I say, it is very important that we see and hear that.
Q36 David Winnick: The last time
I visited with the Committee was some time ago, quite likely before
1997, but files were virtually up to the ceiling, one got the
impression that certainly there were not enough people doing the
work, which Mr Sutton tells us has now changed, and the staff
were simply overwhelmed—overwhelmed—up to the ceiling
with files, and all the rest of it, it took about half a day sometimes
to find the appropriate file, we were told. So it did not give
us much confidence about the clerical system and the lack of technology
in dealing with what obviously should be all on computers, and
all the rest of it; but if it has changed now I am sure we will
be pleased to see it when we make our visit.
Beverley Hughes: It has changed
substantially, and it is still changing. One of the big things
is the technology. People have to understand, this is a very complicated
process, people come into the country and claim asylum through
all sorts of different avenues, through the airports, sea-ports,
some are in country already, we do not know how they have come
in, and claim asylum in many, many different places, then they
go through what is a complex system. We have to keep track of
all of that, and, because of the problems with IT, we have not
had a system until now, in which, before, although each part of
the system had its own IT they could not speak to each other.
So you will have noticed, I am sure, as a constituency MP, people
will have a port reference, they will have a Home Office reference,
they will have a NASS reference, they are all different, and the
systems were not able to speak to each other; that was what we
had to cope with. We have worked to change that, and I am pleased
to say that from the start of this year, over this six months,
completed in June, we will have a computer system that is throughout
the organisation and will enable us to start to develop the kind
of end-to-end statistics that we need, and which I talked about
at the last Committee, so that we know, of X number of people
who came in, how many were granted, how many were refused, what
happened at appeal and how many of those have been removed at
the end. It is essential we have that data, and we are getting
there.
Q37 Chairman: Just in case any of
our free press present are inclined to make mischief with those
most recent exchanges, perhaps I should just place on the record
that the big rise in the number of outstanding applications began
in 1990, according to the figure I have in front of me, and there
were three peaks, one at around 70,000 in 1991, one at around
70,000 in 1996, and then the much higher one of around 100,000
in 1999. I say that just in case anybody wants to pretend it all
happened after 1997.
Beverley Hughes: Yes; and all
of those three peaks can be linked back directly to external events
that were causing people to move. It is then another issue about
how they were handled; but they were all initiated through situations
of extreme conflict and change in countries outside of the UK.
Chairman: Yes; and perhaps I could just
add, for the benefit of further clarification, that the present
figures appear to be around the 1990 level now and going down.
I mention that just for the historical record.
David Winnick: Surely no-one would want
to make mischief, Chair, over an asylum case.
Q38 Mrs Dean: Has the concentration
on the asylum cases, to reduce the backlog and all that you have
described, impacted on non-asylum cases, on the ordinary, if you
like, family reunion side of the Immigration Service?
Beverley Hughes: I cannot give
you here today any definitive figures, in terms of any impact
on the length of time being taken to process those, but we will
happily try to do that for you after this meeting.[1]
Certainly, I have to say, I think, for all of the reasons that
we are all talking about today, the priority has been to increase
the total number of resources very dramatically in the system,
both in terms of numbers of staff and finance, in order to be
able to get on top of this; but, secondly, within that, to prioritise
asylum cases, because that was clearly where the priority lay.
Q39 Mrs Dean: You will be able to
let us have some details on that?
Beverley Hughes: Yes.
Mr Jeffrey: If I could just add
to that. I think it is undoubtedly the case that the focus on
asylum in the last few years has impacted on the rest of the business;
certainly, in the last six months or so, since last autumn, we
are not hitting our targets for dealing with the ordinary cases,
and I think many of the complaints that you encounter in your
constituency surgeries are more about these cases, in some ways,
than about asylum cases. We are moving in the right direction
there as well, by virtue of having added a significant number
of new staff in the last few months; and also we have plans for
improving, through a rebuild which is going on now, the Public
Enquiry Office in Croydon, which deals with these non-asylum applicants.
I think by the summer we should have a rather better story to
tell there.
1 See Ev 176. Back
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