Select Committee on Home Affairs Minutes of Evidence


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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