Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
FOREIGN AND
COMMONWEALTH OFFICE,
UKVISAS, AND
THE HOME
OFFICE
21 JUNE 2004
Q120 Mr Williams: Let us come to Mr Jeffrey.
What was minuted to your office, and when, that apparently somehow
you did not actually see?
Mr Jeffrey: I was not copied in
the exchange between—the letter from Sir John Ramsden to
Mr Mace and the reply that he received. That was about a month
after I had taken up post myself, and I was unaware of that exchange.
I find, going back to it, that I was copied on the exchange between
Mr Ainsworth and Beverley Hughes, which I would say, looking at
it, is in quite general terms.
Q121 Mr Williams: Yes, I understood that;
I noted general terms—
Mr Jeffrey: It simply amounts
to his supporting what he found, and Beverley Hughes replying,
saying that there was very little flexibility in the law as it
stands.
Q122 Mr Williams: That is fine; I have
got what I wanted; I have clarified what I wanted to know. Sir
Michael, you said that at some time the Foreign Office thought
it had been resolved, when it had not. What had you thought had
been resolved when it had not, and when was that?
Sir Michael Jay: I was there referring
to the reply to Sir John Ramsden's letter that came from the Home
Office and explained that the Home Office understood the concerns
raised by the Embassy in Bucharest and Sofia, but that their interpretation
of the rules governing the ECAA scheme meant that they believed
they had no alternative but to continue to operate the scheme
as they had been.
Q123 Mr Williams: When was this?
Sir Michael Jay: I think that
letter, if I remember rightly, was in November 2002. When either
Bill Jeffrey or I said that it had been resolved, what we meant
was that the issue had been settled in the sense that at that
stage the Foreign Office accepted the Home Office advice, and
asked the UKvisas operations to act in that context. So, as Bill
Jeffrey said, it was in that sense resolved, but resolved unsatisfactorily
because, as Ken Sutton's report has subsequently shown, the legal
basis on which that judgment was made was not correct.
Q124 Mr Williams: Both your offices in
2002 were alerted, but misinterpreted what had been notified to
you, or decided to do nothing about it. In the next 12 months,
then, if we look at appendix 7 on the very final small table there,
the number of cases from Sofia went up nine-fold, from 890 to
6,659; and the number from Bucharest went up seven-fold, from
184 to 1,375. Those are massive increases, are they not? Should
increases of that scale have caused any concern?
Sir Michael Jay: Yes, it should
have done, and I think it did, which was why the embassies continued
to express their concerns to the Home Office as that number rose.
Q125 Mr Williams: In that case, why was
no-one concerned when the number of applications in Sofia went
up from 2001-02 forty-fold times by 2002, when the notices were
first coming around? If you had noticed the nine-fold increase,
why did not anybody notice the forty-fold increase?
Mr Jeffrey: I think it should
have been noticed.
Q126 Mr Williams: It is quite noticeable,
is it not?
Mr Jeffrey: A big change. I think
generally speaking one of the problems we have had in IND in past
years is a lack of management information in the right form reaching
senior levels. We have reached a position where we get very good
analysis of trends of this sort in relation to asylum-seeking.
We are working hard to improve it elsewhere, and we now have plans
for much richer information and much better spotting of trends
of this sort. But I have to admit that that trend was not spotted
as early as it should have been.
Q127 Mr Williams: To come back to you,
Mr Barnett, when you were notified in 2002, it was then increasing
in 2002 to 890 that year, whereas the previous year it had been
only 23. Were you not concerned when you got this minute, or this
notification? Did you not to look to see if there was any significant
change in the trend in the number of applications, and then did
that not raise any worrying signal?
Mr Barnett: We did continue to
monitor what happened on ECAA applications, although—
Q128 Mr Williams: So you were aware of
a forty-fold increase—
Mr Barnett: I was not aware—
Q129 Mr Williams: —over two years.
Mr Barnett: No, we were not aware
of that level of increase.
Q130 Mr Williams: You did not monitor
it very well, did you?
Mr Barnett: I have to say that
our own management information, as the Report points out, has
in the past been far from ideal, which is why we—
Q131 Mr Williams: Far from ideal! It
has been grossly inaccurate.
Mr Barnett: This is why we have—
Q132 Mr Williams: And that is an under-statement.
Mr Barnett: This is why we have
developed a new central reference system, which enables us remotely
and automatically to collect accurate statistics.
Q133 Mr Williams: You see, because you
missed the forty-fold increase in the one year, you made possible
the nine-fold increase again in the following year. This must
have been an absolute bonanza for some of the crooks, the agents
who were operating. In the paragraph above that table it says
they were getting about £1,500 per case for guaranteeing
provision of visas. So on that basis, in 2003 the agents could
have made about £10 million in Sofia alone on the fees they
extracted.
Mr Barnett: We were aware of the
trend towards rising applications. That is one of the reasons
why an immigration liaison officer was posted to the region, and
why action was taken.
Q134 Mr Williams: When were you aware
of the trend?
Mr Barnett: We were aware of the
general size of the trend from late 2002 onwards. We were in discussions
with IND colleagues. However, it is IND that are responsible for
setting the policy against which ECOs overseas have to operate;
and, as the Sutton report shows, it was the IND view of policy
that prevailed.
Q135 Mr Williams: You were monitoring,
and yet seemed to be doing nothing, and yet if you take the combined
figure relating to Sofia, in 2001-02, to 2003-04, there was a
three hundred-fold increase, and still no-one seemed to be concerned.
Mr Barnett: Much of this was in
response to a series of individual cases. As I say—
Q136 Mr Williams: You mean a flood of
individual cases, do you not—a three hundred-fold increase
in two years?
Mr Barnett: I think the first
thing to say is that we were aware of a general trend, and that
individual—but the post did not address to me a systematic
case regarding a whole series of trends. The other point I would
want to make here is that—
Q137 Mr Williams: But did anything not
ring and say, "hold on, there was that minute or that document
I saw in 2002, and now things are escalating even further"
with this monitoring you were carrying out? Why did you not detect
that something was going utterly out of control?
Mr Barnett: While I accept that
the figures are quite high in and of themselves, against over
2 million applications a year, it was a relatively small number,
and partly because after exhaustive and repeated checks my staff
were told that the law that prevailed meant that we were not able
to carry out more thorough checks. But we are not—
Q138 Mr Williams: But you never saw fit
to mention to ministers that this problem existed?
Mr Barnett: We directly did not
address ministers, no. We believed that IND were fully aware of
the concerns and had reached this conclusion, and the fact—
Q139 Mr Williams: Do you have the impression
that IND was severely under-resourced?
Mr Barnett: No, I did not have
the impression that IND was severely under-resourced.
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