Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 13 DECEMBER 2005
MS MARY
COUSSEY, MS
FIONA LINDSLEY
AND DR
ANN BARKER
Q1 Chairman: Thank you very much
for coming to give evidence to us this morning. As you will know,
this is the first hearing of the Committee in our new inquiry
into immigration control and the way in which it operates, and
we are very grateful to you for setting things going. I wonder
if we could ask you to introduce yourselves and then we will start
the questioning.
Dr Barker: My name is Ann Barker
and I am Chair of the Complaints Audit Committee.
Ms Coussey: I am Mary Coussey
and I am the Independent Race Monitor for the Immigration Service.
Ms Lindsley: Fiona Lindsley, Independent
Monitor into Entry Clearance Refusals without the right of appeal.
I have actually just finished my appointment.
Q2 Chairman: If I can start things
off, Dr Barker, you are the new Chair of the Complaints Audit
Committee. In summary, what are the biggest problems that you
have identified in taking your first look at complaint-handling
in IND?
Dr Barker: There are three major
problems: one, that the system is so fragmented that it is not
working at all efficiently and that customer satisfaction is not
what it should be; two, that the quality of investigations is
low; and, three, that operational complaints are not being addressed
at all adequately and no one knows quite how many there are. There
is no systematic procedure whereby they are considered and the
system is not working properly; indeed, there is not much of a
system.
Q3 Chairman: Just so that the Committee
is clear, could you set out what an operational complaint is?
Dr Barker: There has to date been
a division of complaints between formal complaints and just simply
those which have a named official with no differentiation as to
the cause of the complaint, the complexity of the complaint or
indeed the importance of the complaint. It is simply a named official
and, of those 500 to 600 cases a year in which officials are named,
a full investigation is conducted to the tune of £3,000.
Operational complaints are all the rest of them where there is
no named official. Those probably run to about 26,000 a year,
on top of which are 40,000 MPs' letters, which many of you will
be involved in responding to or receiving responses about. It
is a very arbitrary and unsatisfactory classification. My Committee
has drawn up a matrix to enable IND to classify according to quality
of service complaints and misconduct complaints and have proposed
two different systems for dealing with them, which I am pleased
to go into.
Q4 Chairman: That is very helpful,
thank you. In your first report, you said that the replies to
two out of three complainants gave "indefensible" reasons.
That is a very, very strong statement.
Dr Barker: It is a potent statement,
I agree.
Q5 Chairman: Can you give us some
examples of the sorts of things you saw which led you to use that
language?
Dr Barker: Yes, the main problem
is that the investigations themselves upon which the decisions
are made are not conducted equitably. Complainants are not interviewed.
The complainant's statement may be three lines and that is it
and there is no attempt to discover more. There is no attempt
to test the evidence given by the person by whom the complaint
has been made to the official about whom the complaint has been
made and the consequence is that the complainant's side, as it
were, is not properly investigated. There are paucities of independent
witness statements because of delays, and evidence like CCTV or
medical reports is often missing. There is very little on the
complainant's side. On the other hand, there is quite detailed
investigation on the side of the official in regard to independent
witnesses and any other corroborating evidence so that the person
who is writing the reply to the complainant, the reply-writer,
and it is a different person from the person who conducted the
investigation, is at a huge disadvantage. The reply-writer cannot
weigh the evidence properly on the balance of probabilities because
he does not have enough evidence to do it with, so that is the
first problem, that it is inequitable, and, if it is inequitable
like that, it is indefensible. The reasons also have to be clear.
They, at one level, have to be JR-proof and they have to conform
to legal requirements and they are not always clear. The basic
problem is the inequality of the investigation which is then built
into the reply and that they do not withstand inspection.
Q6 Chairman: My final opening question
may be outside your remit, but to what extent do you think the
problems that you see in the system stem from poor-quality initial
decision-making in the individual cases?
Dr Barker: That is actually outside
my remit.
Q7 Chairman: I thought it might be,
but it is an area of interest.
Dr Barker: The one area where
it does hit is that if there has not been a decision, and in many
cases decisions have not been made in regard to removals, for
instance, complaints can be generated from the lack of decision-making,
not so much from poor decision-making.
Q8 Gwyn Prosser: Dr Barker, as recently
as June your predecessor seemed to be putting quite a positive
gloss on the whole issue of complaints. For instance, he talked
about it being "heartening" that issues, such as, poor
administration, lost documentation and the need for training had
all been addressed and that complaints relating to those areas
were now very few and far between. Now, that appraisal is, I think,
in stark contrast to some of the things you have been saying and
the things we have been hearing this morning. Why is that, do
you think?
Dr Barker: It is because we looked
at our remit differently. The previous Committee and indeed previous
committees have accepted the limitation that they would audit
only formal complaints which amount to about 500 a year and the
way they undertook that exercise was to look at each file, to
identify problems in the handling of the complaint and either
comment about that particular file, with it then going back to
the person who was responsible for handling it with instructions
about how the case could have been handled better, or simply saying,
"File noted". We stood back and said that our remit
is about monitoring systems and procedures, it is not about checking
individual files. Checking individual files is a human resource
enterprise, it is not an audit enterprise, so we stood back and
undertook a risk assessment to identify the areas in which we
found IND to be vulnerable. We targeted our resources to those
areas which were the highest risk, we audited all of those files
and we audited only thematically other files relating to areas
of lesser risk, so this difference of approach has led to a very
different set of conclusions.
Q9 Gwyn Prosser: Do you still think
that the complaints system is in danger of "spiralling out
of control", to use your own words?
Dr Barker: Yes, but, as a footnote,
I am heartened that Lin Homer and the senior executive group have
taken on board our first report, and the Director of the Immigration
Service, for instance, as well as Lin are engaging with us not
just to identify where the problems are, but to begin to look
at how they might be sorted out, so there is a will to do something
and that is heartening, but it is early days yet to see what the
engagement will amount to.
Q10 Gwyn Prosser: There has also
been a dramatic change in the make-up of the membership of your
Committee. Have you got any comments or views on the way the Committee
members were appointed?
Dr Barker: I do not think there
has been a huge change. There was a police officer on the last
Committee and my Committee has Paul Acres who is the former Chief
Constable of Hertfordshire. We have then an independent who is
a businessman rather than a barrister, as was the last one, and
somebody who has sat on a wide variety of public bodies. Then
we have me with a fairly messy CV, whereas Ros Gardner's was far
more straightforward, as being someone who has an expertise in
customer case, so I do not think that the composition of the Committee
is that different and, insofar as the Nolan principles seem to
have been demonstrated in the selection process, I regard them
as satisfactory.
Q11 Gwyn Prosser: You have told us
this morning a little about the operational complaints as opposed
to individual complaints and I think that was an indication which
you brought to the system.
Dr Barker: That is right.
Q12 Gwyn Prosser: Why did you feel
that necessary?
Dr Barker: Because it is the volume
industry. If you are talking about 500 complaints with named officials,
at first there was a lack of clarity as to how many operational
complaints there were, and there probably still is. Twenty-six
thousand is a very rough estimate, but these are complaints which
demonstrate a series of problems, most of which relate to, for
instance, delays. We undertook a limited scoping exercise as part
of this audit and we looked at 3,000 of them, and 90% were due
to delays, but that is a general categorisation beneath which
there were other problems. The system is swamped by them at one
level and it does not know what to do with them, but they tell
you where there are problems in the system. They are an essential
part of auditing systems and procedures, to look at them, so both
because we regard them as part of our wider remit, but also because
they are part of the complaints system which is not being handled
at all well or effectively, we regard it as imperative that we
take it on board and indeed we have been encouraged by IND senior
executives and the Director General to do so.
Q13 Gwyn Prosser: Do you have any
plans to widen the remit any further or do you think the Committee
knows its bounds now?
Dr Barker: We have identified
a rolling plan over the next two and a half years of our existence.
The area in which there is still work on the side to be done is
to work with the IPCC. Because Paul Acres and I have police backgrounds,
we were happy to work with IND to work through the remit with
the IPCC who will be called in if there are very serious allegations
of a criminal nature made against enforcement and removal officers.
Stephen Shaw, the ombudsman, may take over that same remit for
detention centres and there will have to be some kind of interface
which is defined with him, so there are relations with outside
bodies. We have been given a ministerial remit to develop the
system of informal resolution that we have identified. We have
done a scoping exercise and we have a guess as to how many that
would entail, but the expansion of our activities is interesting
because it does not relate simply to audits. We now have two heads
and two hats where one is as independent auditors, but the other
is as consultants, saying, "Right, these are the areas we've
identified. These are ways in which we recommend you might address
them and we will support you in developing mechanisms to address
them with a view to getting them stuck into the business plan,
defining targets and indicators, and then we will audit their
implementation through our quarterly audits", so that is
an expanding area.
Q14 Steve McCabe: Dr Barker, you
talk about a deep-rooted "defensive culture" within
the IND. I wonder if you could tell us how that manifests itself
and what you think can be done about it.
Dr Barker: I think it manifests
itself most obviously in the form of complaints, investigations,
which, because they lack equitability, are conducted as self-justifying
exercises, so I think there is a defensiveness there. I think
that, because IND has suffered such wide criticism in the press,
officials are defensive, and it is an understandable reaction
to a good deal of negative press attention. I think the third
reason is that my predecessor did a very good job in raising officials'
awareness of the fact that they had customers. It is obvious in
some areas of the business, for instance, purchasing visas and
paying £500 to get a visa in one day, that there is an obvious
customer there and there was no problem, I think, in persuading
officials that these were legitimate customers. However, in a
broader sense, officials looking at asylum-seekers, for instance,
as customers is a rather large jump, so they got that far, but
they remain defensive in dealing with many issues because I think
they realised that they are not, for instance, dealing with them
properly in terms of, for instance, operational complaints.
Q15 Steve McCabe: You say that the
complaints system needs fundamental reform and I think you make
seven recommendations about that reform. Can I ask, what do you
think are the key elements of that reform and is it possible to
reform the complaints system if the underlying problems of IND
remain the same? I think you talk somewhere about repositories
holding thousands of files. In that kind of structure, is reform
of the complaints system particularly valid and will it make any
difference?
Dr Barker: I think it will make
a big difference. To answer your first question, what needs to
happen is fairly simple, although difficult. The system is highly
fragmented and it, therefore, has to be unified. There has to
be a multiplicity of ways in which a complainant can register
a complaint. Right now, the only way to do it is in writing and
sent to an address in Croydon. There have to be multiple ways,
either in person or email or telephone, you have to have more
ways in which you have access points, but then you have a unified
structure ideally in that you have a centralised unit which will
send operational complaints and service-level complaints back
out to the business to deal with. Then there will be a central
IT system because there are IT systems now all over the place
which do not relate to each other which is one of the problems,
and that is not just complaints, and you have a central database.
You have one mechanism through the matrix, which I mentioned,
by which you classify complaints and you also ascertain what level
of investigation will take place, the form of the investigation,
so that at one end you have service-level complaints which are
sent back to the area from which they came and they are dealt
with, and at the other end you could have death or serious injury
for which the IPCC is called in, but all of those are accommodated
within the matrix, so you have a mechanism for registering complaints
and ascertaining how an investigation of it should take place.
You then have a senior official, and you only need four to six,
properly selected, properly trained, properly monitored and supervised
investigators who conduct not lop-sided complaints, but proper
investigations to work from the centre, but not necessarily in
the centre. What you will then have is the thousands of service
complaints dealt with properly and the outcomes going back to
the centre so that they can be used for management information.
Complaints tell you where hot-spots and problems are. If you are
not seizing that information, then you are not using complaints
to benefit the system. You are then also having the proper investigations
going back to the centre also improving policies and procedures,
but you have a hold on the whole system and you know, through
proper file-tracking through the database, where complaints are,
you know that they are being properly handled, you know that they
are being bottom-lined and that results are coming back, so it
is a simple system. It does not entail many people, but it does
entail the will for the different parts of the empire to get together
and they have voiced an affirmation that they will get together,
so I look forward to that happening. As for the warehouses part
of the complaints process, if, for instance, you have an asylum-seeker
who was married five years ago and has sent in a marriage document
and says, "I want a decision. Please, can I stay?",
so the warehouses do have those kinds. You see them as MPs because
they then come out, nobody knows quite what to do, you get involved
and then you decide, "Well, is there malpractice here? Should
we go to the ombudsman?", so the ombudsman gets involved.
Therefore, you have large numbers of complaints about which final
decisions have not been made. They may become complaints, they
may become MPs' letters, of which there are 40,000 a year, or
they may become ombudsman's letters. The only way it impacts upon
us is if they are complaints, but I think it is fair to say, when
you were talking about defensiveness, that they are demoralising.
Any organisation which has backlogs is demoralised by them until
they are tackled and my meetings indicate that the senior executive
group is very worried about them and is planning ways of tackling
them and, once they do that, then you will have an organisation
which is more upbeat, which is not defensive and is dealing more
appropriately with what is coming in on a daily basis without
the weight of what is behind it.
Q16 Mr Clappison: Dr Barker, you
call for more intensive investigation of complaints of serious
misconduct and I note that you say that one third of complaints
against individuals fit into that category which strikes me as
being quite a high proportion. Can you share the reflection that
you have?
Dr Barker: That is one third of
the formal complaints, ie, that is the, say, 200. What we did
during this audit was to take the ministerial mandate to examine
the possibility of instituting a system of informal resolution
and to say to ourselves, "Among the 500 to 600, what proportion
could be handled in a much more immediate and less time-consuming
fashion?", and we impose three criteria. They had to be ones
in which there was not a serious criminal allegation, they had
to be ones in which there was not an allegation of racism and
obviously they had to be ones in which it looked as if the complainant
would be amenable to working it out very quickly with an official
as opposed to having to go through the whole investigation process.
Many people simply want an acknowledgement that something has
gone wrong. They want an apology and, if they get it, they do
not want a full investigation. It is not serving them any good
and it is not serving IND any good either. On the basis of those
three, and obviously the third one we could not ascertain because
we did not have the complainants, but on the basis of the first
two, two thirds of the complaints could have been dealt with that
way and would not be formally investigated as a consequence.
Q17 Mr Clappison: You have told us
a little bit about the criteria which determine how seriously
these are regarded. Can you give us any more specific examples
of what sort of cases they are, the serious cases, the one third
of cases which I think you said are about 200 or so?
Dr Barker: Those are mostly allegations
of assault. About half of them occur in detention centres and
the other half occur in enforcement and removal. They are not
uniformly and universally referred to the police, which is an
area we are also concerned about. There is ACPO guidance which
is very voluminous in its recommendations about asylum-seekers
in the communities, but it is largely silent on the interface
between the Immigration Service and the police.
Q18 Mr Clappison: What has happened
now to those serious complaints? Was each one of them investigated?
Dr Barker: Well, I do not know,
is the answer. Some of them are referred to the police, but one
of the problems is that there is no written audit trail, so all
you see in a file is "Police NFA", and you have no idea
of what they have investigated, why it did not meet the CPS prosecuting
standards and, therefore, was not pursued and that whole information
is lost also to the investigator who is looking at it for IND
on the balance of probabilities rather than beyond reasonable
doubt.
Q19 Mr Clappison: I suppose it would
be too much to ask in those circumstances if you have any idea
of how many of the allegations prove to be founded or turn out
to be founded?
Dr Barker: By the police?
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