Select Committee on Home Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60 - 79)

TUESDAY 13 DECEMBER 2005

MS MARY COUSSEY, MS FIONA LINDSLEY AND DR ANN BARKER

  Q60  Mr Clappison: If we could find some way of making advances to prevent surreptitious immigration but facilitate family reunions on a short-term basis.

  Ms Coussey: I think it is worth saying that the people who abuse immigration controls, the ones that we do have statistics on, are a very tiny, tiny proportion of the numbers coming in. Of course it is the area that gets a lot of the public focus but it is a tiny, tiny proportion and I do not think that is emphasised sufficiently.

  Q61  Mr Malik: How do you think that race equality can be built into future immigration policy?

  Ms Coussey: I think a lot can be done at the very early stages with the race equality impact assessments, and I am sorry to say that IND have not been in the forefront in doing these and have not actually done them to my mind as effectively as they should be done. But since I wrote my report there has been a session with some IND officials to try to get a more effective system of impact analysis. They have the data there, they could do it; they could look at new immigration policy, proposed laws and so on and make an assessment of which nationalities would be disproportionately affected—certainly they can do it for nationality—and consider whether there are alternative ways of reaching the policy aim without having that impact. So I think that is one thing at policy level that ought to be done much more rigorously than it has been up to now. But I think at the level of decisions, I have already answered that; you have to have a lot more transparency, a lot more monitoring, a lot more attention to inconsistencies and that has to be fed back into briefings and into training and so on, so that the quality of decision-making is more open and transparent and as objective as possible. Of course, under the present system it is never going to be objective because there is always a question of intention and that is a subjective factor.

  Q62  Mr Malik: So you are confident that effective race quality impact assessments could actually deal with some of the concerns you have?

  Ms Coussey: I think it could deal with some of the concerns that the new proposals are raising, yes, if it were done effectively.

  Q63  Mr Malik: Are you confident that it could be done effectively?

  Ms Coussey: I am confident it could be; I am not confident it would be.

  Q64  Mr Malik: Instead of a separate monitor with a limited role should the proposed Commission for Equality and Human Rights take over your particular role?

  Ms Coussey: I have not given that any thought but off the top of my head I think that is certainly worth looking at.

  Q65  Mr Malik: Of course the new independent Inspector of Immigration Services is one of the areas that I think you were speaking about as a possibility.

  Ms Coussey: I think there are a number of possible models. I think the important thing would be whether it was remaining independent, whether it was effectively resourced and, the most important of all, with what authority the recommendations are made and how they are followed up and whether they are implemented. So I think there are a number of ways of achieving that.

  Q66  Mr Malik: This is really to everybody and anybody, as it were. Do you think the correct balance is being struck in the immigration system between efficiency, security and then avoiding race discrimination? It is a difficult one.

  Ms Coussey: Yes, it is a difficult one. They always say there is not a refusal culture but all the performance indicators they produce are about how quickly cases are dealt with and how many are refused, et cetera. There is no so much focus on the quality of decisions, which would perhaps indicate that they are giving more priority to speed and throughput than fairness and quality. So I think there has to be a balance struck between those things, and the more you emphasise targets and throughputs there is a danger of overlooking quality. I cannot comment on security though.

  Q67  Mr Malik: You say then that the resources would have an impact, i.e. more resources would lead to a better balance, to better quality decisions.

  Ms Coussey: I think there need to be more resources to quality decision-making, yes.

  Ms Lindsley: I would echo that. My reports very much say that I felt UKvisas had, from the reports of my predecessors, moved on in efficiency; that there were not the endemic delays that previous Monitors had focused on; that generally people were getting decisions within reasonable periods of time. But now the focus we need to shift to quality of decisions.

  Dr Barker: We do see complaints about racism. I think the curious thing is that there are so few of them, and most of them come through the immigration side, the nationality side, through visa sides, rather than asylum seekers. But there is a problem in terms of the detention centres, for instance, identified by Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, who goes into the detention estate both short-term and long-term policy. Also Stephen Shaw went in, for instance, after there was a television programme about Oakington and the key to that was that there was an endemic culture of racism allied to a tolerance of violence. We had seen evidence of this in the files; we had seen solicitors identifying the problems and saying that something must be done about it, and saying, "We are going to go to television," and there certainly was action taken afterwards. But if you look at Stephen Shaw's quite comprehensive report you do see, curiously, a detention centre which had been saluted the previous year by Anne Owers as being in many ways a model of good practice, and yet underneath that and undetected—until some reporter went in and posed as somebody who was working for the contractor—and below what was being seen at inspection level there was a culture which was generating racism and was generating violence. So I think it is a hard one to tackle. And this had nothing to do with timeliness, it had nothing to do with efficiency; it had to do with in these instances we are concerned about, in detention centres, that the contract monitors are responsible, our officials in IND are responsible for seeing that the contract is managed properly. But when complaints have arisen they have been handed over in the first instance to the contract managers who then ask questions of their staff and they obviously do not have a stake in a full investigation, and indeed a partial one, and we have suggested that they in fact should not be undertaking any of the investigation into allegations. Secondly—and I think this is important—what Anne Owers has discovered is that in the detention estate it is very hard to get hold of complaint forms, it is hard to make a complaint. In many instances it is left to the individual asylum seeker to complain to an official, and many of these people come from countries in which the officials are seen as oppressive and they are obviously reluctant to voice their complaints for fear that it will jeopardise what happens to them next. So it is a bigger problem.

  Q68  Mr Winnick: Ms Lindsley, your position goes back—not yourself but the position which you occupy as the independent monitor—to when the previous administration did away with appeals. Is that correct?

  Ms Lindsley: That is correct.

  Q69  Mr Winnick: So around 1994?

  Ms Lindsley: The 1993 Act, yes.

  Q70  Mr Winnick: Your present position involves looking at cases again where there is no right of appeal, though the present administration restored family appeals. A rather leading question, but be that as it may: do you feel on the whole that entry clearance officers do a good job of trying to enforce the immigration control rules? It is a leading question.

  Ms Lindsley: Most people get the visas they apply for; 19% of people are refused visas across the board, so in the majority of cases there is a high customer satisfaction in roughly 80% going into an entry clearance post to getting the visa. And, as I say, there have been improvements with what is called streamlining, which has meant that they are getting the visa within a reasonable period of time in the majority of cases. So I would say that yes, the majority of decisions made by entry clearance officers are made reasonably quickly and positively for the applicant and therefore I would have no reason to complain about them. Entry clearance officers work very hard, they make maybe 40 decisions a day and they are generally committed to giving a service to the public. But obviously my remit is not to look at the vast majority who are granted visas; my remit is to look at those who are refused, so my reports are about them.

  Q71  Mr Clappison: Can I ask one quick question to clarify? The figure that you have given us, of 19%, is that of those of the visas where there is no right of appeal?

  Ms Lindsley: No, that is for non-settlement cases overall.

  Q72  Mr Winnick: I will come to refusals in a moment, Ms Lindsley, but there has been a view that entry clearance officers in certain posts, where refusal rates are pretty high, nearly 50%—and I will mention those in a moment—become somewhat cynical. They say in effect that they have heard this story many, many times about wanting to come for some wedding or other, and why should they be believed when the applicant is on a relatively low income, even on the standards of the Indian sub-continent? Why should they spend so much money, why should the sponsor in the UK want to spend so much money on the visit, and the rest? Do you feel that if ECOs in certain posts stay in those posts for a long time they do become—at least some of them, however much they may not want to do so—so cynical that an objective assessment is not really possible on applications? Or you would not say that?

  Ms Lindsley: I do not see the problem as being entry clearance officers in specific posts. Entry clearance officers in any case move around a lot; the longest any entrance clearance officer stays in a post is three years but many are moving much faster than that. But I do think there is an issue of institutional attitudes potentially to certain nationalities. And we do have rising refusal rates. Until about the year 2000 it was a very steady 6.5%; since then it is going up and going up and we are now at three times that. I have speculated as to whether that refusal rate is due to lower quality applications and therefore justified, or whether other less justifiable factors are involved, and what I have put forward is that statistics should be kept on appeals. Whilst we still have appeals we have an assessment of the quality of decision-making, and we could see whether in relation to certain posts they lost more appeals than others. So if a particular post lost 90% of its cases then you could conclude that it was refusing people badly and that there was a poor quality of decision-making there. Not only did I propose that, the National Audit Office proposed that as well. As far as I know UKvisas did collect some data but they told me they did not have enough time to analyse it. So they collected some data on the main family visit posts—I think the top ten—but it was never processed in any way. To me this is an ideal and easy way to assess whether we are treating some people less fairly than others. All decisions by immigration judges as they are now, adjudicators as they were, are headed up name of the Appellant against ECO, the place. It would be a very simple administrative exercise to keep that data, to record that data and to come out with, versus this post Appellants are winning this much, and this post this much. I did a little bit of analysis in my reports using data from the Immigration Advisory Service and I did get very disparate success rates. For instance, I think in relation to Polish students IAS only won 9% of cases, whereas in relation to other groups they were winning something like 70% of cases. That was a very small sample so I cannot be sure that that data would be reflected overall—and Poles are obviously a thing of the past in any case—but it is worth doing and the data is there and I really do not think it would be expensive, and I am very disappointed that that has not happened.

  Q73  Mr Winnick: It is quite likely that the Committee, when it comes to its conclusions, will want to pick up a very interesting suggestion, Ms Lindsley. But when we look at the position of refusals in some parts of the globe applications that come to the United Kingdom are very high indeed—in Accra, for example, Ghana, it is over 56% refusal rate, Uganda 53%, Kingston Jamaica 48%, Slovakia nearly 48%, Islamabad 45% and so on. Then if you re-look at the figures connected with the United States and Australia it is well under 1%. I suppose the justification for the difference would be, would it not, as far as the immigration officers are concerned, the pressure to come and stay in the United Kingdom as opposed to people from Australia and the United States who would have no particular economic incentive to want to stay here? What would be your comment on that?

  Ms Lindsley: You are right, I am sure that would be a generalised statement that might be made about why there was a disparity, that simply you get better quality applications made by Americans—although of course they do not have to apply for visas so I do not look at their files. But from a richer nation that does have to apply for visas, for instance Russians, a relatively low refusal rate of Russians, because they are economically better off then they present better applications and therefore they get granted. When I have looked at decision-making though I am concerned that we have two issues basically: in a visit case we have the issue of does the person have enough money and we have the issue of will they leave the UK? I find that the decision-making on those issues is not good enough in relation, very simply put, to money. There is no consistency; how much money does somebody need is not formulated, and I do not think it is very difficult to say how much money, as a minimum, is needed to come to the UK. Travel guides do it, for instance; you buy the Rough Guide and it says how much you need to spend a day in London, and the information is out there and very quickly you could come to a figure. And there is no systematic approach to finance. But finance is a minor point in the sense that most cases do not focus on the money aspect. Most cases focus on the intention to return and it is there that things get very complicated because basically an entry clearance officer has ten minutes to decide whether somebody is going to go back—they have a ten-minute interview or roughly about the same amount of time if they are looking at some pieces of paper—and I do not think they are given any sensible criteria on which to do that. I am not sure how easy it would be to formulate sensible criteria anyway, but the ones presently used are not, and I think the courts have said that as well, but entry clearance officers just carry on. So what we get is people refused because they have not travelled before. Obviously if we then take the set of Ghanaians and the set of Americans the set of Americans have travelled a lot more than the set of Ghanaians, ipso facto the Ghanaians are going to be refused more often. But is that a sensible way of addressing a question as to whether somebody will go home? I do not think so; everyone has to travel for the first time.

  Q74  Mr Winnick: The immigration rule in question—and I do not have it in front of me—it is quite clear, is it not, that the entry clearance officer or indeed any other immigration officer must be satisfied that the person intending for a visit will stay only for the visit? It is quite clear and explicit. I started off with a leading question and I am going to put another leading question to you, fairly or unfairly, Ms Lindsley. With your experience of having undertaken this job do you feel that had you been in the position of the entry clearance officers in the posts where there is the highest rate of refusal—I said this would be a leading question—do you think it is likely that your decision would be much different, if any, from those reached by the ECOs, again, where I have already quoted the refusal rate is over 50%, and bearing in mind the relevant immigration rules and the rest of it?

  Ms Lindsley: Often when I review a file I do not make a decision that the decision was wrong, I make a decision that the decision was made badly because I do not have the information that I would want to make the decision. Often I do not know whether it was the wrong decision. For instance, a refusal may be that the trip was disproportionate to the socio-economic circumstances of the applicant, but I do not understand the socio-economic circumstances of the applicant; I severely doubt that the ECO understood the socio-economic circumstances of the applicant either, but certainly I do not have that information, and I find it very difficult to think whether it is disproportionate for that person to spend that amount of money. In my forthcoming report I discuss an example of a Chinese girl who wishes to come to the UK to study English and both her parents work at academic institutions in China and she is refused because it is a disproportionate expenditure of money. I cannot do that calculation and I do not think an ECO can do that calculation. So if you are saying would I have given that girl the visa I do not think I would have started with the investigation upon which the ECO has embarked upon, I probably would have started with slightly different questions, and I simply do not know because I have not been put in the position. I also think that ECOs are not trained to interview in a way conducive to a ten-minute period. I do not think they look at the pieces of paper, decide what the issues are and put them; they do a general sort of trawl—which they do not need to do, in my opinion—and it takes up too much time and then they have no questions left for the key issues. So there are various problems with what is going on, but thinking of myself trying to do it, I do think it will be very difficult despite my many years of interviewing practice, and I am not sure how it easy it is to make a good quality decision—in fact I am sure it is very difficult—but I do think we need to look at how to do it.

  Q75  Mr Winnick: This ten minutes which entry clearance officers have, where is this ten minutes from?

  Ms Lindsley: They have to make 50 decisions in a day; they cannot go home until they have dealt with them.

  Q76  Mr Winnick: They are totally limited, no flexibility at all on this ten minutes?

  Ms Lindsley: I do not say there is no flexibility at all, I presume, if someone presented and there were some very particular reasons, but in the overwhelming majority of cases they have to be dealt with within that sort of timeframe.

  Chairman: It sounds very similar to our advice surgeries.

  Mr Winnick: I give my constituents more than ten minutes, even if you do not Mr Chairman!

  Chairman: You spend the time reading the transcript of the ECO's interview! Janet Dean.

  Q77  Mrs Dean: Fiona Lindsley, if we could carry on with this theme of questions. You have suggested one or two ways where decisions could be improved but in general how do you think the quality of initial decisions could be improved, without slowing down the system—and again you mentioned the ten minutes. Are there any other suggestions you could make?

  Ms Lindsley: I have put forward a formula, a plan of approach for ECOs where they would go through a series of steps to make a decision in the report and basically looking at issues of money first and focusing in on those. Then intention to return I think has to be dealt with in terms of the ECO to be given issues which should ring alarm bells and to put these and to say to the applicant, "I do not think you are going to go back because you do not have any property in your country and you do not have a stable job," and then for the person themselves to be able to refute that. This is the main way I would change it, I suppose, that the ECO would then have to be shrewd and quick enough to think, "What I am really worried about here is this person owns nothing and does not have a good job," so he puts to the person, "You own nothing, you do not have a good job." That involves someone with a considerable amount of intelligence and speed but also a lot of confidence because it is quite difficult to say to someone, "You do not have a very good job and you do not have any property, I do not think you are going to leave the UK at the end of your visit." A lot of ECOs are a bit more polite than that, I suppose; they do not like to do that. But, nevertheless, I think that gives natural justice to the system because then the applicant can come back and say, "I may not have what you think is a good job but in my community that is a really respectable job; and although I do not own a property neither do 70% of people who live in this town. I am also looking after my auntie next door and if I do not come back the neighbour is not going to look after her and she is going to die. So I will come home." Then you have the material to make your decision and you are focusing on the individual reasons why that person may go back.

  Q78  Mrs Dean: So you are suggesting that by a more direct challenge at interview that you will get a better decision in the first instance?

  Ms Lindsley: What I then have to say though is that interviews are going, and that in 30% of cases about—maybe a million, I am not sure of the figure, sorry.

  Q79  Mr Winnick: A proportion though is.

  Ms Lindsley: As a proportion of my sample it went up from 3% last year to 30% this year I have dealt with on the papers. I really do not know, and I would like to see UKvisas write it down how entry clearance officers assess intention to leave the UK at the end of the visit on paper. I have asked them to do that as one of my recommendations is to give guidance to ECOs as to how they are to do that. They have said they will but it has not happened, and I think it is because it is very difficult to articulate.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2006
Prepared 23 July 2006