Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
HOME OFFICE
AND THE
DEPARTMENT FOR
CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS
30 JUNE 2004
Q40 Mr Allan: Any chance of you meeting
it? You are hovering around 20% and it does not seem to be declining.
Any chance you will meet it in 2005-06?
Mr Jeffrey: I hope we can and
we are certainly doing work which would take us in that direction.
Q41 Mr Allan: What happens if you do
not?
Mr Jeffrey: It will be a setback
because we take these targets seriously.
Q42 Mr Allan: Your performance related
pay does not depend on it.
Mr Jeffrey: No, it does not.
Q43 Mr Allan: May I move on to the substantive
issues which the Chairman raised at the beginning around the money.
I have sat here since being elected in 1997. I have sat through
hours and hours of immigration and asylum legislation, I have
dealt with not as many as cases as other colleagues round the
table but a steady stream of cases going through. All the time
it has looked to me like the problem has been in the administration
rather than anything else; not the legislation but the administration
has been failing. I want to go back to this critical 1997-99 phase.
Mr Gieve, you said that in that period you were putting this new
Siemens business computer system in IND, so you were doing that
in that 1997-99 phase. Is that correct?
Mr Gieve: Yes. Actually it turns
out none of us was there at the time, but yes, Home Office was
putting it in then.
Q44 Mr Allan: You were also moving offices
in Croydon. I remember ringing up to ask about a case file and
being told that it could not be accessed because it was in a multi-storey
car park for storage and everyone was banned from going in to
retrieve the case files during the day because of the exhaust
fumes. It just seemed like the whole place was in meltdown and
this was across the whole field of immigration and nationality.
Would it be fair to say that 1997-99 was a rotten time for the
department? You were not performing.
Mr Jeffrey: I too was among those
not present, but that is a very accurate description. What clearly
happened over that period was that the combination of the failed
computer system, the fact that in anticipation of the computer
system staffing reductions had been assumed and the massive increase
in the asylum intake which has been remarked on earlier in this
hearing, together drove the directorate into crisis. In many respects,
the story of the period since then has been of a climb gradually,
but I believe quite successfully, out of that crisis. Your Committee
had a hearing on an NAO Report on the Siemens Business Systems
system and the case working programme, as it was known. At that
time John Gieve's predecessor was unable, on being asked by the
Chairman, to predict when we would have removed the backlog of
asylum claims and indeed any other kind of case work. As a matter
of fact we have removed that backlog of initial asylum applications
and it is down to an enormous amount of hard work by the staff
that we have done so.
Q45 Mr Allan: Was not the other typical
factor there that the Home Office could not have got any more
money anyway, because the government had taken a decision in 1997-99
not to increase spending and certainly you at the Home Office
were going to be at the back of the queue, behind Health and Education
and everyone else. It seems to me that penny wise, pound foolish
decisions were being made that investment was not being put in
in 1997-99. What the evidence of the Report shows is that if that
investment had gone in, far more would have been saved for the
public purse.
Mr Gieve: I must say that I have
not been right over the papers for 1997-99 and actually I was
in the Treasury at the time, so I am caught either way. The position
was, you are right, that the Siemens system was not just about
asylum, it was about all case work and the concept behind it was
that we moved to multi-skilled groups working on all forms of
case and, planned as part of that, was a reduction in staff and
as the reduction in staff started, the system did not work and
then they were hit by this particularly difficult surge in asylum
claims. The special feature of asylum claims is that the law is
extremely generous in many ways about the rights of people claiming
asylum and it has taken us some years to get out of what was definitely
a crisis. You are now saying we should not have got into the crisis.
I can agree with that, it would have been much better not to,
but that was where we were.
Q46 Mr Allan: This Committee is all about
learning from past mistakes and this was not unique. When the
former Republic of Yugoslavia blew up, we had exactly the same
problem. As constituency MPs we were dealing with claims in 1997
from people who had come from the earlier conflicts in the 1990s
in the former Republic of Yugoslavia. It just seems that you were
institutionally incapable of responding to increased demand.
Mr Gieve: No, I do not think that
is fair. Although there were problems with asylum, as you can
see from Figure 14, from the previous Yugoslav problems, at that
time the balance of applications around Europe was very different.
Germany in particular was taking the bulk of the asylum applicants.
There was a real change in 1999 and you are right, we did not
anticipate that.
Q47 Mr Allan: Do you get predictive figures
from the Foreign Office now on where is going to blow up and future
indicators of where asylum claimants are going to come from? Or
do you do that yourselves?
Mr Gieve: We work with the Foreign
Office and one of the features of what we have been trying to
do is to work more closely with Foreign Office and DCA on risk
analysis in a wide range of countries. We are taking asylum applications
from people from about 150 countries overall and we do not do
a full risk analysis for all of them. For the bigger countries
and the ones where the risk are greatest, yes, we do.
Q48 Mr Allan: Having offered you something
of a pat on the back for now having got your determinations a
lot faster, is the issue of what then happens moving up your agenda?
We have this wonderful flow chart which is great for telling us
how it all works. At the end it says "Applicant now removable".
I think most of us are seeing an increase in people coming to
us saying they have been through all the process and they are
now getting no support whatsoever, they are being evicted, told
to live on the street—I know this is our fault, we passed
the legislation—but they are not being removed. I wrote
to the Immigration Service this week and they said they have no
plans to remove this individual, but there is no support available
for him. How do your priorities move now? You can quickly get
people to the stage where they are on the streets, but you do
not seem to be as quick to get them to the stage where they are
on the plane to go home again.
Mr Gieve: We have been increasing
removals year by year, as this Report shows. You are absolutely
right, though, that they are still at a low level compared with
the number of applications. That is for a number of reasons. There
are some countries where it is very difficult to remove to and
we are working with the Foreign Office again to try to open up
routes to those countries. There are some countries which have
very exacting requirements for documentation. China is an example
of that where they are reluctant to take people back unless we
can prove absolutely that they are Chinese citizens. When people
are not co-operating that can be extremely difficult. The other
reason is that very often people do not want to go and especially
they do not want to go if they have a livelihood here. The decision
that we end support at the end of the process, when you have gone
through all the appeals, not for families but for single applicants,
is intended to provide some of the incentives which will encourage
people to leave.
Q49 Mr Allan: Starve them out.
Mr Gieve: There has to be an end
point, does there not, otherwise the process is seen to be ineffective?
Q50 Jon Cruddas: May I ask a few questions
about short-term protections and refer you to Figure 6 on page
15? Under the old system, before 2002-03, you had a system of
four-year exceptional leave to remain, which was often translated
into indefinite leave automatically. That is how I understand
the system. Is that correct?
Mr Jeffrey: Yes.
Q51 Jon Cruddas: After the 2002-03 legislation
we now have a system of humanitarian protection or time limited
leave to remain.
Mr Jeffrey: That is right.
Q52 Jon Cruddas: I want to look at the
purple bit of Figure 6. If you put a line down at 2002, does that
not mean that a lot of those in the purple group, which is pretty
significant, from about 20% up to about 30% through that period,
in effect were granted short-term protection which meant that
the exceptional leave was transferred into indefinite leave to
remain?
Mr Jeffrey: Yes.
Q53 Jon Cruddas: Therefore people did
not come back into the system.
Mr Jeffrey: To the extent that
they applied for indefinite leave to remain, it was generally
granted.
Q54 Jon Cruddas: Do you recognise a problem
then with the possible implications of the changes into this short-term
protection in that thousands and thousands of people will be re-entering
the system much more quickly?
Mr Jeffrey: They will in the sense
that their case will be considered more actively than it would
have been in the past. The thinking behind the change which ministers
made at that point was, first of all, apart from those who are
judged to be refugees, that we should only grant other forms of
status to people who are covered by other international conventions
and notably by Article—
Q55 Jon Cruddas: I understand the policy
reasons. A conflict might be resolved and a community stabilised
so therefore it becomes a four-year period. So the policy of creating
a system of automatic indefinite leave to remain was changed.
My point is administratively whether that change, which is rational
policy-wise, is actually going to create another big backlog in
future. To the left of 2002, and somewhere there is reference
to some 67,000 cases being in this sort of grouping which do not
actually come into the administrative system again, these are
now going to be coming back into the system administratively after
a year.
Mr Jeffrey: I take the point that
there will definitely be more work involved in considering these
cases than there might have been in the past. The thinking behind
the policy was that there should be an active review at that point
and that we should consider whether circumstances have changed,
either in the applicant's life or in their home country.
Q56 Jon Cruddas: I take the point about
the policy.
Mr Jeffrey: We now have three
teams of case workers engaged on these active review cases. We
are doubling that to six teams during the summer. You are right
that it will be another demand on our resources, but in the somewhat
easier circumstances we are in now, it is one we believe we can
manage.
Q57 Jon Cruddas: I raise the point because
I deal with a lot of asylum and immigration cases in East London
and I am already beginning to see signs of these time limited
cases coming back onto my desk and then they go back in the system.
If they are refused after another application, they then have
rights to appeal and the whole approach to this is to try to anticipate
blockages, learning from past experience. But you accept that
this could be something which is ticking which you need to keep
your eye on.
Mr Jeffrey: Absolutely; yes.
Q58 Jon Cruddas: All of this Report,
which is a very good Report, suggests the need to frontload the
system in terms of the early application systems and the like.
The point has been made to me that one of the ideas being looked
at in the Home Office is to remove legal aid in the initial application
period and have it available at the appeal process. Is that something
which has been actively considered?
Mr Jeffrey: There has been some
consideration of that and it is certainly the case that as of
several months ago legal aid is not automatically available for
the initial interview. Legal aid is still available, however,
for appeals and for other stages in the process. Our DCA colleagues
might want to say something about this.
Q59 Jon Cruddas: I was going to ask Mr
John what likely savings this would generate. You must have modelled
the possible savings.
Mr John: It is difficult to say.
In terms of the expected savings from the modelling of this and
other measures, they are in the order of £30 million, but
it has to be said that we need to monitor the implementation closely
to see whether or not that will actually turn out.
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