Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500
- 519)
TUESDAY 7 MARCH 2006
MS MANDIE
CAMPBELL, MR
TOM DOWDALL,
MR CHRIS
HUDSON AND
MR DAVE
WILSON
Q500 Mr Malik: Are there any changes
which need to be brought into being to minimise these kinds of
cowboy outfits that exist? Is there something that we can do or
that you guys could do or is there a need for a change in legislation
to deal with this particular problem? Is it something where you
think you have systems in place which will eventually root it
out?
Mr Hudson: We think that the proposals
in the points-based document that we are publishing today will
tackle this because, if people are going to bring in overseas
students, they will have to be on our sponsor register. That means
there will be compliance activity and account management activity
focused on those establishments. That means that we are trying
to make sure that the people who are genuinely bringing in overseas
students are proper, bona fide organisations. I do not think we,
and I am not sure if any legislation, could stop people setting
up unlawfully and trying to hoodwink students in future into paying
out sums of money, but we certainly expect that the arrangements
proposed today will be a much tighter system and much better regulated.
Chairman: Thank you. We will move now
into private session.
Q501 Chairman: This is really an
opportunity, and we would be very grateful to you for being as
frank as possible, to let us have perhaps a more detailed picture
of the vulnerabilities of the system than you want to give us
in public session. Mr Wilson, what are the current, most serious
risks to immigration control at the moment, in your view?
Mr Wilson: *** Organised immigration
crime is now the second priority to drugs for the Government in
the scale of risks and looking at how organised crime has turned
into immigration because it is as lucrative as drugs and probably
easier to make money from than drugs. We also look at visa process
abuse, which the Committee has already looked into a great deal
this morning, abuse of the asylum process and then more administrative
areas, such as the balance between enforcement and compliance,
and by that I mean whether we are doing enough to look at students
and marriage balanced with the priorities of trying to remove
failed asylum-seekers. We are looking at the administrative processes,
trying to locate where the failed asylum-seekers are, getting
intelligence functions in place so that we know where we are likely
to get the most value for our money in terms of enforcement activity,
and we also look at the problems in our inability to remove people,
so we have got a major problem with documentation and the geopolitical
and climatic events, global events, that cause population movements
in those sorts of areas.
Q502 Chairman: But where are the
main problems at the moment?
Mr Wilson: ***
Q503 Chairman: We are in private
session, Mr Wilson, so it would be very helpful if you could be
very direct as to where and what sort of routes are the main preoccupations.
In our inquiry, we are looking at the operation of IND, which
is a very big and very expensive organisation, and it is not at
all clear that what it does is addressing the major problems,
so we need to know from you where the main threats are in the
system.
Mr Wilson: ***
Q504 Chairman: Those, if I understand
it, are all routes of illegal migration?
Mr Wilson: Yes.
Q505 Chairman: They are not even
attempting to be legal, if I can put it that way, so those are
not routes for people doing visas and student applications and
all the stuff we have been talking about this morning, but this
is straightforward illegal immigration?
Mr Wilson: Yes.
Q506 Chairman: Of those big flows
into the European Union, how significant is this country as a
destination?
Mr Wilson: It is very significant
simply because of the nature of our processes, the tolerant society
we live in, the fact that we speak English and most of those people
will either have English either as a first or an alternative language,
the perception that we are tolerant and that there is illegal
work available. ***
Q507 Chairman: If this is the case,
and this Committee has repeatedly said over the years that far
too little resource is being devoted to directly dealing with
illegal immigration in terms of employment enforcement and things
of that sort, it would seem from what you say that actually this
whole thing about managed migration and point systems and all
the rest of it are utterly irrelevant to the people who, you say,
are the major source of concern, of people coming to this country
who should not be here, just coming over on a boat, getting on
the back of a lorry or whatever. Being honest, as this is a private
session, are we actually doing the wrong things, trying to get
an ever more sophisticated visa system whereas what you have got
to be doing is going round the factories, the building sites and
everything else, picking up the people who are illegal workers
and reducing the pull factor? Is that a fair comment?
Mr Wilson: It is not really fair
because we need to do both. I genuinely believe that we certainly
need to do both. We have to make sure that the system is as good
as it can be in order to act as a deterrent and to act as a serious
structure in which people are properly vetted for visa or entry.
***
Q508 Mr Winnick: From what you have
said, Mr Wilson, Britain seems to be the first target of those
who want to come to Europe illegally and for the reasons you have
stated, with perhaps Germany as the second.
Mr Wilson: Yes, exactly.
Q509 Mr Winnick: If that is indeed
the case and if officialdom abroad, including the French who,
from what one can gather, are not particularly worried one way
or the other about such people coming to Britain, it does become
a problem which seems very difficult to resolve. If one was a
potential illegal, the knowledge is quite clear, the word soon
spreads and it would be odd if it did not, and it would apply
to us if we were in the sort of circumstances where there was
any sacrifice, any danger to be overcome in order to reach a country
where you could earn a living, unlike where most of them live.
Once you are in Britain, you are going to find work almost certainly
and you are not going to be subject to police controls and you
will over a period of time simply become part of the society.
If that is indeed the position, bearing in mind we are a liberal,
tolerant society with a sort of reluctance to take the action
which Germany or France take from time to time, and even they
are faced with a problem though not as acute as ours, but nevertheless
with quite a large number of illegals, there is no doubt about
that, a solution does not stare one in the face, does it? It is
rather negative, so whilst all the emphasis, as the Chairman says,
is on trying to control immigration of a legal kind, the illegal
kind does seem to be the one which all governments so far have
not been able to resolve.
Mr Wilson: You describe the issue
very accurately and it is compounded by the ability of different
communities to absorb people who do come illegally and that has
become worse and worse over the years as the numbers grow and
the different sorts of communities grow. We have imposed visa
requirements on any nationality which has grown in problem numbers,
if you like, so if you look at the most recent examples of visas
that we have imposed, you will find countries like Equador and
Peru and you think, "Well, why is that?" It is because
the communities have grown here which have the ability to absorb
others. ***
Q510 Mr Benyon: The President of
the Immigration Appeals Tribunals came and gave evidence some
time ago and he said that one of the reasons he has to maintain
such a large organisation, so many judges, so many support staff,
so many clerks in the courts is because we fail to enforce removals
when people have failed the system. This perception gets out into
the wider world and people feel they can come here and, even if
they exhaust the system, they can stay and, whether that perception
is a reality or not, it is a perception that people hold. Would
you agree with me and would you agree that your intelligence is
that that is a perception that is commonly held?
Mr Wilson: The intelligence does
suggest that, yes, that the biggest deterrent is for people in
communities back in China, for example, or on the Indian Sub-Continent.
The perception that people can sell their homes or whatever and
get the money to pay the facilitator to pay the smuggler and that
person will be able simply to be absorbed into the community here
acts as a major disincentive plus the fact that we are not in
a position, or we have been unable, to remove large numbers to
make an impact back in their own communities in their own countries.
Q511 Steve McCabe: I just wanted
to return to the point you raised earlier, Chairman. If we accept
that it is difficult to penetrate certain communities and there
will be countries where it is easy for people to pass through,
I am surprised we do not put a much greater emphasis on what happens
here, why we do not have regular exercises that target particular
industries where there is known to be abuse, why there is not
a simple, easy method for me to communicate with you when I have
picked up on the grapevine that this chap is clearly working illegally,
and why there is never any attempt to communicate with MPs who,
in the course of the average week, may see dozens of people, some
of whom are very dubious in terms of the claims that they are
making. If you have those difficulties that you know about in
one part of the system in terms of penetrating communities of
difficult countries, why is there not a huge, visible, up-front
targeting of work that will show that, when you are caught, you
are instantly dealt with, you are criminalised and you are out?
Would that not at least serve as some kind of deterrent? Quite
frankly, I have attempted to report people in this country and
I have never even had a call back to acknowledge that I have reported
it. Now, if that is my experience of it, what is the incentive
for anyone else to do anything about it?
Mr Wilson: We could do that and
have done that, but we then run into problems in the removal process,
for example. If we were to try to remove large numbers of Chinese,
we certainly would not get the documentation quickly enough to
make that an effective move.
Mr Streeter: I do not understand that.
Q512 Steve McCabe: So are you saying
that, if you are attempting to remove large numbers of Chinese,
you would not get the documentation to make that possible, so
it is better to turn a blind eye to it because we know that, if
we arrested them, we would not be able to return them? Is that
the implicit assumption?
Mr Wilson: ***
Q513 Mr Streeter: Could you give
us a scale of the numbers you are talking about because I do not
think you have indicated yet the kind of numbers per annum, and
I know this is best-guess territory, of who might be coming into
the country in this kind of way?
Mr Wilson: In what sort of—
Q514 Mr Streeter: Human trafficking
and illegal immigration through the transition countries you have
described. Are you talking about 500 or 50,000? I have no feel
for it.
Mr Wilson: ***
Q515 Mr Streeter: Okay, smuggling
then.
Mr Wilson: ***
Q516 Mr Streeter: So at our end,
here in the UK, there could be tens of thousands a year?
Mr Wilson: Well, it certainly
could be, but I would have to stress that they are not all coming
here. All of the European Union has a problem, but if you look
at France and their table of countries which cause them a problem,
you would see Mali fairly high up on their list for obvious historical
reasons, but they do not cause us a problem here.
Q517 Mr Clappison: My constituency
is on the edge of London and I just get the feeling, the suspicion,
that there are quite a large number of people in my constituency
who fall into the category you have described. Would you say it
was a particular problem for the South East, that a large number
of the illegal people we have been talking about, a large proportion
of them are actually in the South East?
Mr Wilson: It is. People do tend
to prefer to be in the South East, nearer London, but there have
been some quite noticeable movements elsewhere and—
Q518 Mr Clappison: Outside the South
East?
Mr Wilson: Outside the South East,
yes, and we have tended to concentrate our efforts from an enforcement
perspective in the South East, so there has been less visible
activity elsewhere. You will have to ask the Enforcement &
Removals Director this question, but he has certainly had to deploy
resources much wider afield, further afield now, all over the
country, in order to deal with growing problems.
Q519 Mr Clappison: I am just slightly
intrigued. You mentioned significant movements to other places,
but can you be more specific as to where that might be?
Mr Wilson: Into the West Midlands,
into the Bristol and Avonmouth area, Scotland.
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