Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
HOME OFFICE
AND THE
DEPARTMENT FOR
CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS
30 JUNE 2004
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon, welcome
to the Committee of Public Accounts, where today we are looking
at the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report on improving the
speed and quality of asylum decisions. We are joined once again
by Mr John Gieve, who is the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office,
Mr Magee, Chief Executive (Operations) at the Department for Constitutional
Affairs and Mr Jeffrey, Director General of the Immigration and
Nationality Directorate. We are also joined by Mr Martin John,
who is Director of Tribunal Operations at the Department for Constitutional
Affairs. Could I please start by asking you, Mr Jeffery, to turn
to page 23 of the Report, Figure 10 and paragraph 2.11? If you
scan through paragraph 2.11, which I am sure you have read, you
will see in the second bullet point that it only involves about
nine hours' work by case workers for an initial decision to be
made. Is that right?
Mr Jeffrey: Yes, that is correct.
Q2 Chairman: If that is true, why do
you need to allow two months for an initial decision to be made?
If you look back to Figure 10 you will see the blue colour. It
takes about two months, does it not, for an initial decision to
be made. We are talking about nine hours' case work, so why so
long?
Mr Jeffrey: It has to be remembered
that the applicant has to be screened first to gather some basic
information. There then has to be a more detailed interview with
the applicant which can take an hour and a half or sometimes more.
It is also fair to say that you have to remember where all this
has come from, with very large volumes of outstanding cases from
the late 1990s. The decision which was taken around 2000-01 was
to set as a target the completion initially of 70% to 75% of these
cases within two months. That was significantly better than we
had ever achieved in the past. We are achieving that and, as the
NAO's Report points out, we can significantly improve on it.
Q3 Chairman: You can significantly improve
on this.
Mr Jeffrey: Yes, we believe so.
Q4 Chairman: What sort of timescale are
we looking at? What sort of improvement are we looking at? We
are basically talking about two months from an initial decision
being made and we are talking apparently, according to the Report
to which you signed up, about nine hours of case work. So I should
like to know from you just how much further improvement you can
make.
Mr Jeffrey: What we are doing,
and what we introduced at Harmondsworth last summer, is piloting
a much faster process in which the applicant is detained at Harmondsworth
removal centre. The initial interview takes place within a day
or so of the application being made. The decision is then taken
within a few days of that and any appeal is dealt with, consistent
with the statutory time limits which are laid down for appeals,
in a matter of weeks.
Q5 Chairman: Less than a month?
Mr Jeffrey: Less than a month.
We are doing that for approaching 10% and if one takes into account
the Oakington fast track as well, which the Report describes,
we are doing that for approaching 10% of the intake. In relation
to the Harmondsworth experiment, we are removing just over 50%
of all those whom we take into that fast track within around a
month of their applications being received. We believe we can
build that up, not indefinitely, because there are some very complicated
cases which may take longer. We can cover more of the applicant
population with a fast track process which really does turn the
cases around more quickly than we have done in the past.
Q6 Chairman: Mr Gieve, can we look at
an international comparison? Can we look at Appendix 6 on page
56 and what happens in the Netherlands, for instance, where 40%
of applications are decided within 48 working hours? Why can we
not achieve this level of performance? Why have we not achieved
this level of performance?
Mr Gieve: The 48 working hours
is about five or six working days, so that is not dissimilar from
Harmondsworth.
Q7 Chairman: Which is in the future.
Mr Gieve: It is in the present
now, but which we can expand in future. You will see also that
a large proportion of asylum seekers remains in government accommodation
throughout. As you know, we are planning to introduce accommodation
centres of asylum applicants at the moment, but outside Harmondsworth
and Oakington we have not been able to detain people in specialised
accommodation centres. So a good deal of the time you talked about,
the two months, is time for them to fill in a written form, take
advice on that and arrange an interview, coming from wherever
they are living to the right centre.
Q8 Chairman: Anyway, you agree that what
we see happening in the Netherlands and indeed Germany is something
to aim for, is it not?
Mr Gieve: The systems are very
different. I was looking at some figures recently which showed
that the Germans' backlog of initial decisions is bigger than
ours. I am not going to say their system works better in all respects,
but certainly the accommodation centres' proposal which we are
working on has been based on experience from the Netherlands and
some other countries.
Q9 Chairman: Mr Magee, will you please
look at paragraphs 2.13 and 2.16 which you can find on page 24?
I want to ask you about the decisions and appeals process. Is
this target you have to complete—the decisions and appeals
process for 60% of applications in six months—right? Is
that your target?
Mr Magee: That is an overall target,
because we are increasingly looking at this as an end to end process.
Q10 Chairman: So that is your target
but is that target sufficiently challenging? If you look at paragraph
2.13, you will see that almost half the applications do not lodge
an appeal. I am really putting to you that the target which you
set yourself is not very challenging.
Mr Magee: On the contrary, it
is actually quite challenging. We are just meeting it, but I am
always ready to be challenged by more stretching targets.
Q11 Chairman: So what sort of target
would you like us to put in this report?
Mr Magee: The obvious corollary
of what you said in your first question is that more than half
the cases do go to appeal. The appeal process is complex, it is
judicially influenced, it requires that both parties have time
to prepare and there are statutory time limits which govern the
appeal process. As Mr Gieve was implying, we are always ready
to learn from experience elsewhere. I would be unwise to commit
today to any foreshortening of the target without thinking about
the aspects which would impinge on the targets.
Q12 Chairman: Right. We can come back
to that. Mr Gieve, could you please look at paragraph 13 on page
6? You will see there that the National Audit Office has put to
us and to you that if you had not moved case workers into removals
you could have saved £200 million. Are you happy with this
figure?
Mr Gieve: I understand how it
has been calculated as a matter of arithmetic. No, I do not agree
that we could have saved £200 million by keeping our removals
case workers on initial applications.
Q13 Chairman: I shall ask the National
Audit Office for their view in a moment. They tell me also, in
paragraph 3.8 on page 31 and Appendix 5, that if you had got a
grip on this earlier and you had anticipated the problem you could
have saved upwards of £500 million. I presume you cavil at
that figure as well.
Mr Gieve: Again, as a matter of
arithmetic as set out in Appendix 5, I can see how they have arrived
at those figures. I do not believe that there were practical options
open to us over the last three years which would have saved that
sum of money.
Q14 Chairman: Why not? You are in charge
of your department. You could have employed the extra case workers
to deal with this backlog, could you not, instead of transferring
people to removals work? The only effect of doing that was to
allow backlog to happen. Do you accept that is precisely what
happened?
Mr Gieve: No, I do not. There
are two different numbers here: one is £500 million and the
other is £200 million. On the £500 million, the calculation
is that had we had the capacity to reduce very much more quickly
than we did the backlog of initial decisions from 120,000 to the
levels of work in progress and had we had the capacity in the
appeals mechanism to deal with the appeals from those decisions
and had we had removals capacity then either to cease support
or remove the people who failed the appeals—we have reduced
all that but if we had done it much faster—we could have
saved some money. The truth of the matter is that we got into
real difficulties at the end of 1999. We did not have the capacity
in any part of the system to do that. We have been building it
up as quickly as we can and in that sense theoretically, if we
had been able to do it three times as quickly, life would have
been better, but actually we have gone as fast as we can. On the
£200 million, which is about what happened in 2001, the priority
at that stage, seen from my angle, was to stem the flow of unfounded
asylum applications, which was running at an extremely high level.
We considered that having a credible threat of removal at the
end of the process was a key part of discouraging the flow of
unfounded asylum applications. We therefore thought it important
to build up our removals capacity. In any event, the £200
million only makes sense if we had kept them working on initial
applications, then found extra staff to deal with the appeals
and also found extra staff on the removals side.
Q15 Chairman: Are you saying you could
not have found these staff? Did you, for instance, draw on the
resources of other government departments?
Mr Gieve: Yes, we built up our
staff extremely quickly, apart from the DCA obviously. We have
taken many people on transfers from other departments. I am not
going to pretend we did everything perfectly; I am sure we made
mistakes along the way. I do think this is a theoretical calculation
of what would have happened if we had had on standby sufficient
capacity to deal with 120,000 cases, plus the continuing inflow,
more or less instantly.
Q16 Chairman: I think this is an absolutely
central point. Could I ask the National Audit Office to comment
on that and to back up the figures which are in this Report about
the savings of £200 million and £500 million and comment
on this apparent inability to save this money because there was
not sufficient capacity in the system?
Sir John Bourn: The origin of
these figures lies in the request made to me by the Committee
to include more financial analysis in value for money reports.
When we came to look at it, this was an area where it did seem
that it was worth bringing out the cost of a backlog. You can
put it like that. As Mr Gieve has been kind enough to say that
he accepts my arithmetic, I accept that he does not live in an
easy world. What I hope our calculations have done for the Committee
is to underline the very substantial resource costs of the way
in which the Home Office reacted to this issue and the way in
which the public purse had to bear them. While absolutely acknowledging
the difficulties to which Mr Gieve has drawn attention, I hope
that our calculations, as the external auditor, our analysis of
possibilities and, above all, in a sense, the general lesson that
if you let backlogs develop you are really going to pay for them,
which is what these figures illustrate above all, sound a warning
note, not only in relation to the Home Office but in relation
to responding to sudden increases in demand for services in public
administration generally.
Q17 Chairman: I must let Mr Gieve reply
to that point. I must put to you that you failed to anticipate
that demand was rising, as surely would have happened in the private
sector. Because of your failure to anticipate demand rising you
have had to muddle through and you may argue whether it is £200
million or £150 million, but the fact of the matter is that
many more people were kept in this country who should not have
been, dependants were arriving, the backlog built up because you
had failed to anticipate demand.
Mr Gieve: First, in relation to
the private sector, an increase in demand is generally a positive
thing. In this case, absolutely, we failed to anticipate the very
rapid rise in numbers of asylum applications in 1999 and 2000
and we did not have on standby the trained personnel needed to
deal with them as they came in. That is absolutely true. If we
had had, we would obviously have had much higher costs for some
years before then, when we had people standing by with not very
much to do, but we would have been able to deal with the surge
of applications faster. All I would point out is that if you look
at Figure 14, which is on page 30, you will see that we did deal
with the backlog and have dealt with the backlog rapidly since
then by building up our capacity.
Q18 Mr Steinberg: Figure 4 on page 13.
Clearly the UK had the largest number of asylum seekers between
1999 and 2003, about 450,000. Why do they prefer to come to this
country rather than, say, Italy or Spain? Why does nobody want
to go to Portugal? We have a situation where half the population
of Britain is trying to buy properties in Spain and no refugee
wants to go there. Why is that?
Mr Gieve: First of all, as you
will see, Italy does not count its asylum seekers in quite the
same way as the rest. We have been attractive. I think there is
a number of factors in that. Firstly, our economy has been doing
extremely well, so there has been the prospect of work, especially
in the South of England, which has not been true in many European
countries. Secondly, there is the English language. Thirdly, we
are a highly diverse international community.
Q19 Mr Steinberg: Benefits?
Mr Gieve: Possibly, lastly, because
our asylum system has been a slow system. It is a very generous
system and people have used it to stay during the process. I should
say that since then, we have seen the biggest reduction of anywhere
in Europe in the number of asylum claims, that is in the last
year between 2003 and 2004.
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