Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
HOME OFFICE
AND THE
DEPARTMENT FOR
CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS
30 JUNE 2004
Q80 Jim Sheridan: Is that 10% figure
significantly low or too high or in between? You mentioned a figure
of 17,000; 17,000 out of a total of what?
Mr Jeffrey: Seventeen thousand
removals in a particular year. Some of these people will have
been in the country for several years, will have had their asylum
claims considered and rejected in an earlier year and have disappeared
from sight. We catch up with them and they are then removed. Likewise,
some of those who were refused last year may well have lost touch
with us deliberately and if we catch up with them at a later stage
they will be removed. So it is hard to make the direct correlation
you are making and say that there is a figure and it is 10%. I
certainly would not deny for a moment that over a period of time
the proportion removed is quite significantly lower than the proportion
refused and we are trying to do something about that.
Q81 Mr Jenkins: When the Chairman asked
you earlier about paragraph 13 on page 6 and the £200 million
you said that it was only arithmetic. This Committee quite likes
arithmetic, we quite like figures and we like to evaluate figures.
Our title gives a clue I suppose: Committee of Public Accounts.
When you read this Report were you surprised or delighted by it?
Mr Gieve: Neither surprised nor
delighted by it. Coming back to this figure, I did not say that
it was just arithmetic, I said that I understood how it had been
calculated, but that in my view it did not represent a practical
saving which we could have made.
Q82 Mr Jenkins: There is a qualification
there as to how you allocated resources and it says quite simply
that you decided to switch resources to increase removals, which
might have a deterrent effect on potential asylum applicants.
So by how many did you increase the removals? How much did it
save on accommodation, benefits, etcetera? What was the evaluation
of the deterrent effect in pounds, so I can judge it against the
evaluation of £200 million? If it is greater than £200
million, I think you did the right thing.
Mr Gieve: You are asking me to
make a number of speculative judgments there but perhaps I could
say first of all that what happened here was that we decided to
build up our removals capacity and we trained our removals case
workers on initial applications for a while, because we thought
that would give them an understanding of the case work. Then at
this point we removed them on to removals. One reason why the
£200 million is not valid in my view—
Q83 Mr Jenkins: I am sorry, but you signed
off this Report, did you not?
Mr Gieve: I did not agree that
this was a figure which represented a real saving.
Q84 Mr Jenkins: You did not agree this
Report.
Mr Gieve: I did not agree with
this judgment about £200 million. I agreed that they could
put the number in, but as you will notice, it goes on to say that
we do not accept it.
Q85 Mr Jenkins: Who signed the Report
off?
Mr Gieve: I signed the Report
off.
Q86 Chairman: To be fair to Mr Gieve,
he has always made it clear that he did not necessarily accept
this figure of £200 million. That is why I put the questions
to him right at the beginning and this is why it is a bit of a
departure for this Committee, but it was the Committee who asked
the National Audit Office to provide this kind of financial benefit,
which has been very helpful. Mr Gieve is unable to argue with
the actual figures. He does say that theoretically they could
be right, but in fact they do not take account of the difference
in capacity. Is that a fair summary of what you said?
Mr Gieve: That is a fair summary
and if you look at the bottom of paragraph 13 it makes plain that
we do not accept this as a judgment on what we could have saved.
May I just make one point about that? Over half the support costs—and
we are really talking about support costs here—relate to
families and we only cease supporting families at the point at
which they are removed. This figure of £200 million assumes
that if we had had a higher level of dealing with initial applications
we would also have speeded up our appeals and our removals. What
I am saying is that we need the staff in removals to get the removals
up. In terms of numbers of principal applicants, the numbers of
removals increased from around 7,500 in 1999 to 9,000 in 2000
and in 2001 we started removing dependants so the total came to
10,500, then nearly 14,000 and last year 17,000. So we have increased
the number of removals. I can give you a note on what that saved
in terms of the actual families removed, but the deterrence effect
is, as you will understand, a more difficult thing to quantify.[4]
It is reasonable to say that unless there is a credible threat
of removal, then the earlier process of deciding the applications
is unlikely to be effective.
Q87 Mr Jenkins: Paragraph 1.2 on page
11 says that one of the reasons why they come to the UK, as you
said and I just want to stress it, is slow decision making on
asylum cases and a lack of an efficient removal system for people
refused asylum. Now we are speeding up.
Mr Gieve: Yes. This was a Home
Affairs Select Committee report in 2001 and I shared that analysis,
which is why we needed to speed up our decision-making process
and build up our removal capacity.
Q88 Mr Jenkins: Fine. Could you turn
to page 36? There we have one case—and I know these are
just individual cases to make a point in the large numbers; I
know you have a very difficult job—of an applicant, which
probably was a fraudulent case, or certainly not supported. He
claimed asylum in December 1998 and was actually refused asylum
in April 2004. That is quite a long period, is it not?
Mr Gieve: Yes and there remain
a number of cases now, a few thousand cases, which are still quite
ancient, which we are still working through. We had to decide
when we were building up our system whether we focused on the
oldest cases first, or whether we tried to deal with the new cases
in an efficient way and then dealt with the old cases as we got
the capacity to do so. We decided to do the second, partly because
this is about sending signals to people who are thinking of coming
to the country.
Q89 Mr Jenkins: Would this person still
be sitting around living on benefits for those six years?
Mr Jeffrey: I do not know about
the individual case, whether this person has been removed yet
or not. If he was refused asylum in April, there is every possibility
that he has appealed against that decision and that there is an
appeal still pending.
Q90 Mr Jenkins: So he will be drawing
his old age pension here before we determine his case.
Mr Jeffrey: Not necessarily. We
are now essentially joining the system up more than it was before
and where people's appeal rights are exhausted we are more consistently
catching up with them at that point and bringing about their removal.
Q91 Mr Jenkins: The next case is one
of multiple identities and you have flagged up that this person
had three separate identities. Where do we go from there? What
have you done with that case so far? Obviously this person is
unsuitable, undesirable, claiming maybe three sets of benefits.
What progress have you made with regard to this applicant?
Mr Jeffrey: Again I am not familiar
with the individual case. It is obviously one which emerged in
the course of the sampling exercise which the NAO did. Where there
is a suggestion of separate identities, we are better equipped
than we were before to draw that out. The fact that we now fingerprint
all applicants means that we can spot cases where people have
presented themselves under more than one identity. We have a separate,
special, multiple applications unit which is doing nothing but
trying to identify such cases.
Q92 Mr Jenkins: The picture at the bottom
does not give much hope or confidence. I am surprised you let
that picture be published actually.
Mr Jeffrey: It is a picture from
the past I hope.
Q93 Mr Jenkins: I hope it is a picture
from the past. I should like to go on to recommendations.
The Committee suspended from 4.45pm to
4.58pm for a division in the House
I take it you looked at the recommendations
and you are thoroughly in favour of them. I should like to bring
two to your attention. The first is "vii The Directorate
should evaluate promptly any new information". That was referring
to Case H where outside information is coming in which indicates
this person is making a fraudulent claim. What are we doing about
it, rather than just filing it and forgetting it? Could you let
me have a note telling me exactly what you intend to do about
that?[5]
The next one is "xi The Directorate should update its country
information more frequently . . . reflecting the rate at which
country circumstances are changing". I cannot and shall not
blame you for the herd which comes over the horizon: it is how
you deal with it when it comes over the horizon. That leads me
onto a point which you brought up, which I found very, very interesting.
You were given this target to reduce the number of applicants.
I found that rather a strange target. Within your area you can
improve the processing when they get here, but how can you improve
the number of applicants? Surely that depends upon circumstances
in the originating country not yours?
Mr Gieve: There are things we
can do. First of all, we are trying to discourage unfounded applications,
but in our view the vast majority of applications over the last
few years have been unfounded. There are things we can do and
have done to reduce the numbers, particularly, for example, putting
our immigration controls in Calais rather than Dover. If you find
someone in Dover and they claim asylum they are in, but if you
find them in Calais you can stop them crossing the Channel. Doing
similar work in airports, requiring visas from some countries
and so on are all ways in which you can actually make it difficult
for people to come here who would claim asylum. Then of course
there is the point to which you drew attention before, that if
we can deal with cases quickly, efficiently, fairly and remove
people if they are found not to have a well-founded claim, then
that too is a discouraging factor. We saw that particularly with
Eastern Europe when we introduced non-suspensive appeals. People
were taken to Oakington for a few days; if their claims were rejected,
they were then deported and could appeal from their own country.
We found that more or less completely stopped applications from
those countries. So there are things you can do about applications.
Q94 Mr Williams: I shall just follow
up slightly on what Mr Sheridan was questioning. Who monitors
the lawyers and their charges and their practices as far as fees
and cases for asylum are concerned?
Mr John: There are two elements
to monitoring. There is the Immigration Services Commissioner,
that is Mr Scampion, I believe.
Q95 Mr Williams: What is his responsibility?
Mr John: The accreditation of
representatives in the field of immigration services.
Q96 Mr Williams: Would these be for advisory
services rather than for lawyers who are going to deal with cases?
Mr John: That is correct. On the
lawyer point, primarily it is the Legal Services Commission, in
managing contracts with practitioners, which is the controller
of those lawyers in the profession working on asylum cases.
Q97 Mr Williams: To whom is each of those
accountable? In accountability terms where do they go?
Mr Gieve: The Immigration Services
Commissioner is independent, but he is paid for by us.
Mr Jeffrey: He is appointed by
the Home Secretary and his remit is effectively to regulate the
provision of services by people who are not lawyers in this area.
He is answerable in that sense to the Home Secretary, although
independent, and makes an annual report to him.
Mr Magee: The Legal Services Commission
is a non-departmental body with an independent chairman and independent
members. It is linked with the Department for Constitutional Affairs.
Q98 Mr Williams: That is helpful; thank
you. So it is outside your remit. That answers one of the things
I would have been coming to: who is responsible for some of these
so-called immigration services? As Members we have dealings with
them and they are mixed; obviously we get some very good ones
and we get some appalling ones who just do not bother to answer
phones or even reply to MPs when they phone and we get lawyers
who are the same. The other responsibility, managing the contracts,
would that be the Lord Chancellor's? Who would be responsible?
Mr Magee: That would be the Legal
Services Commission who are responsible for managing contracts.
The arrangements which were being referred to earlier, which were
introduced in April of this year to help control costs and standards,
are policed by the Legal Services Commission. The fact that these
arrangements were brought in, by implication recognises that there
might have been a problem which needed to be addressed. As Mr
John was saying, we do not have the definitive information, it
having been only three months since this was introduced, to say
what the effect of the changes has been.
Q99 Mr Williams: Have you referred solicitors
or advisory organisations to either of these bodies to have them
looked at in terms of their credibility?
Mr Jeffrey: Have we referred them?
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