Examination of Witnesses (Questions 820
- 839)
TUESDAY 16 MAY 2006
MR DAVE
ROBERTS
Q820 Mr Winnick: Will you be in a
position to write to us within a very short period?
Mr Roberts: Of course. If that
information is available, I will make sure the Committee gets
it.
Q821 Mr Winnick: Are you in a position
to tell us today the number of people who do not comply with reporting
requirements who are obviously asked to do so but simply ignore
instructions?
Mr Roberts: Compliance issues
around reporting is an interesting question for us.
Q822 Mr Winnick: It is an interesting
question for us as well.
Mr Roberts: Can I give you a few
headline figures? We have over 900,000 reporting events—that
is not people reporting, that is reporting events—and that
applies to, I believe, just under 50,000 individuals. We do watch
compliance rates and we do so specifically, as we have applied
a different reporting regime to those who are reporting. These
are primarily asylum seekers, Mr Winnick, who are reporting, rather
than non-asylum seekers. I need to make that point. We have a
technological fix to reporting, which is the swiping of the asylum
registration card which then records the event and, if a person
does not report, there is an automatic link to the payment of
benefits that the National Asylum Support Service give. In relation
to that pilot, compliance rates, although the pilot is a small
one, are around about 90%. I would not want to suggest to the
Committee that that level of compliance will continue as the numbers
who are subject to this reporting regime grow, but that is our
current experience.
Q823 Chairman: Are we right to conclude
by your lack of an answer to Mr Winnick's questions, that if you
take the generality of those subject to reporting requirements,
which, as I understand it, may include some people who are not
receiving benefit because they have exhausted their appeal procedures,
you do not know how many of those are not complying with reporting
requirements?
Mr Roberts: No. Those that are
part of the technological pilot—
Q824 Chairman: No, I am talking about
the rest. The technological requirement is a pilot. There have
for a number of years been a number of people, we do not know
how many, but you are going to tell us, are subject to reporting
requirements. What the Committee would like to know is how many
of those people do not comply?
Mr Roberts: I cannot answer that
question in the direct way you ask it. I can only answer it in
relation to the technological pilot that I referred to.
Q825 Chairman: Can you shed any light
as to why IND, which issues the reporting requirement, has not
previously thought it was worth monitoring the number of people
who do not comply?
Mr Roberts: I did not say that
we did not, I just said I could not answer today.
Q826 Chairman: We may get the figures?
Mr Roberts: If I could again ask
to give you a note on that. Compliance rates are obviously dependent
hugely on expectations about what is going to happen, and the
way that we monitor contact with people who are not in detention
is through a range of actions, the physical reporting, and we
are also using electronic monitoring, which includes tagging and
phone recognition. What we need to do is manage the risk as people
go through a process, so at the point where they may feel obliged
to drop out of contract, ie when a decision has gone against them,
and we have got the most effective contact management regime in
place.
Q827 Mr Winnick: What about the number
of people sent letters from the Home Office saying they must leave
compared with the number of those who are actually removed? That
is a simple question, is it not?
Mr Roberts: It was a simple question.
We simply do not keep that information.
Q828 Mr Winnick: You do not keep
such information?
Mr Roberts: In terms of the number
of letters sent to people who have been refused permission to
stay here. I simply was not able to get that information.
Q829 Chairman: You must know how
many people have been told they should leave the country.
Mr Roberts: I do not have that
information, Chairman.
Q830 Mr Winnick: This seems a mockery
of the immigration control system. You are saying, in effect,
that people are sent letters saying they must leave, you have
no knowledge of the numbers and certainly no information you can
give us today compared to those who received such letters and
those who actually leave the country?
Mr Roberts: I can understand the
Committee's frustration here, but monitoring—
Q831 Mr Winnick: There is public
frustration.
Mr Roberts: And the public's frustration.
I understand that. In terms of monitoring people, whether they
are in the country or out, we do not, as the Committee knows,
record people leaving the country and have not done so for a considerable
period of time. If the Committee is looking to a system by which
we monitor people's arrival and whether or not they then comply
with the terms of their arrival, which I think is in part the
issue, then I would refer the Committee to the developments around
our electronic borders where the intention, as I understand it,
is to have an electronic means by which we can match this kind
of data. We do not have that in a global sense today, although
increasingly e-borders does give us access to embarkation data
of that considerable magnitude. Already there are, I think, between
seven to nine million records available to us for that data matching,
although I might want to check my figures before I put those forward
formally.
Q832 Mr Winnick: Are you in a position
to tell us about the number of people who are not removed when
all their appeal mechanism processes are exhausted?
Mr Roberts: I have not got that
figure. I think it goes to the question around how many people
are here illegally. I do not know how many of those people may
have left the country quite voluntarily, and we do not, as I said,
track individual cases. I do not think that tracking individual
cases at the level that you suggest by your question is an effective
enforcement strategy in relation (1) to the resources we currently
have available and (2) frankly in the internal controls that the
UK operates. We have powers, quite properly, to deal with people
who are here unlawfully, and I do not think it is an effective
strategy to be pursuing individuals. I think we need something
more sophisticated.
Q833 Mr Winnick: You have got me
there, I must confess. I am a simple person and it seems to me
if X has no right to be in the United Kingdom then, inevitably,
the question is asked why is not X removed? That is an individual
case to my simple mind.
Mr Roberts: Yes, and there was
a time quite a few years ago when I was an immigration officer
where we knocked on lots of doors following up lots of individual
cases, and it came as no surprise that none of those individuals
were at the addresses we had for them. What we need is a far more
sophisticated intelligence-led approach to this. If you have overstayed
and you are here unlawfully and you are working illegally, then
we have quite specific strategies in relation to illegal working
operations to find you in that environment. I simply cannot accept
tracing people as individuals, unless, of course, the risks they
present are so huge that you need to do that, individuals, for
example, who might present a threat to national security would
reach that level of threshold, and, yes, of course it would be
right to use whatever capability you had to trace them at an individual
level, but for somebody who has overstayed tracing them at individual
level I do not think is an effective strategy.
Q834 Mr Winnick: Perhaps that explains
the position we are in at the moment. Presumably the last detailed
question is you will not be able to tell us the number of people
who are refused bail but then walk free from the tribunal, because
no-one is there to take them back to detention?
Mr Roberts: The question is clear
enough. A person who applies for adjudicator's bail who is refused
bail and that individual, it is implied from the question, is
physically at the hearing to have that bail application heard.
Q835 Mr Winnick: Precisely.
Mr Roberts: Although I am not
sure that is the norm, but I may be wrong on that. I think the
norm is to hear a bail application on paper.
Q836 Mr Winnick: Where that application
is refused, the question I am asking you is, what number of people
in such circumstances just walk free and are not taken into detention?
Mr Roberts: I am not aware of
cases, but you would assume, and may be the assumption is wrong,
that somebody who had been refused bail is taken back into detention,
and we would have a contractor there to do exactly that if they
had been escorted to the bail hearing in person.
Q837 Mr Winnick: You were given notice
of that question. Some of your colleagues behind you seem surprised
by it. I think you are being given a note. Can I finally ask you,
do you feel that, as a result of the lack of public confidence
in the immigration control system and the questions which have
been asked of you today, in the next 12 months there is going
to be a greater effort to try and deal effectively with what is
clearly of much concern to the general public?
Mr Roberts: We have set out quite
clearly in enforcement and in removal terms what we are going
to do over the next 12 months. There is a business delivery plan
which sets that out clearly, and we still have to maintain our
removals in relation to failed asylum seekers. We have set ourselves
a target in relation to non-failed asylum seekers and removals
and we are working towards, something I mentioned earlier, a strategy
to deal with the amount of harm that people who remain illegally
cause us, whether that is an economic harm, a reputational harm
or, indeed, a criminal harm. Over the next 12 months I would be
very confident that that harm reduction agenda takes more prominence.
Q838 Mr Winnick: You will be writing
to us on the questions that you could not answer today?
Mr Roberts: Yes. Those behind
me have said that a person is escorted to and from a court hearing,
if that answers the question about people simply walking away
from bail hearings. That should not happen.
Q839 Mr Winnick: It should not happen
but it probably does happen?
Mr Roberts: I am not aware of
it, Mr Winnick.
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