Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1160
- 1179)
TUESDAY 13 JUNE 2006
MR LIAM
BYRNE MP, MS
LIN HOMER,
LORD TRIESMAN
AND MS
DENISE HOLT
Q1160 Mr Winnick: Who day by day
face the customers—who are obviously applying and all the
rest of it—and, unless those people at the coalface, for
many of whom the earnings are pretty low, do not have that feeling
of confidence and the rest, it is quite likely that what you are
trying to do otherwise will not be achieved. Would you agree?
Mr Byrne: Absolutely right. If
you think about the number of people who work for IND, every one
of those individuals will have thoughts and values from which
we could learn. It is not as if we have too much brain power working
on the problems that we confront with IND. We need to draw on
the intellect and the energy and the imagination and the values
of all of those people.
Chairman: Thank you. Point well made.
Q1161 Gwyn Prosser: The Government
is often criticised for trying to get things done simply by setting
targets, performance indicators, issuing instructions, et cetera.
Though they have their merit—and you have mentioned a few
times today the tipping point, which was an important target met—what
are you going to do during your investigation into IND to prevent
these quite strict targets and set points impacting negatively,
and undermining other areas?—and we could cite lots of examples
of those.
Mr Byrne: I think that is a very
important question. I have never worked for an organisation that
has not set targets. I am a great believer in targets as a way
or orchestrating, if you like, the movement of an organisation
that is big and often complex, so I am afraid I cannot promise
a bonfire of targets in eight weeks time. However, I think it
is important that we do understand what these processes look
like. Very often in organisational development or in turnaround
situations you will see two or three different themes that emerge.
One is about making sure there is a strong vision and a great
deal of communication, one is about making sure there are the
right people, but another is making sure that you have the right
dynamic management information that is available about the right
points in the process at the right time. When Lin Homer gave evidence
to the Committee last week, she made the point that there is a
lot of management information around, and, unless you have the
organisational capacity to interrogate that information in the
right way, it is not going to be of much use. I will be looking
for where there are targets which are causing serious distortions
in processes, but, to be frank, I will also be looking at areas
where I think additional metrics are needed, because, unless we
are able to define these processes very clearly, unless we are
able to track, using management information, what is going on
at different stages of the process so that we can see where the
bottlenecks are, only then will we be able to say, "Yes,
this is a system that is being dynamically managed effectively,
where the right calibre and the right attention is being paid
to breaking those bottlenecks," and very often that will
need to be done within metrics that define how those processes
should operate end to end. It will be important over the next
six or seven weeks to look at any conflicts that have been imposed
from targets, but equally—cards on the table, if you like—there
may be areas where we will say that there should be more standards
that define different things in parts of the business too.
Q1162 Gwyn Prosser: On the subject
of what you call dynamic management information, the Home Office
and IND, in particular, have had a lot of difficulty with numbers
and figures and statistics lately. What are you going to do to
ensure that the quality of that information, which will then need
to set targets and widen the scope of your policies, is accurate
and reliable?
Mr Byrne: It is unfortunately
one of those things for which there is no silver bullet. There
is no simple-shot solution to getting that sort of thing right.
To give you a simple example, you cannot get information systems
right unless you have processes that are well defined, so that
people actually know what the process looks like. You cannot get
it right if there is a culture within the organisation of denial
or opacity or obfuscation. There has to be a culture that is open
and transparent. Equally, you cannot get it right unless you have
your human resources strategy straight too. As I think we observed
with FNP, in putting individuals who are too junior to look after
a patch, sometimes it is unreasonable to ask that individual to
do certain things. I am afraid that is a very long way of saying
that there is no easy answer to getting management information
right. You do have to look at all the different components of
the organisation and try to bring that sort of thing into alignment.
It is very difficult to do and you have to start, review and get
better. You have to do, learn, do with these things.
Q1163 Gwyn Prosser: You have a lot
of work to do, frankly, to raise the credibility and integrity,
if you like, of the IND system, and the immigration system in
particular. Although there are lots of different monitors which
look at different and disparate parts of the organisation, there
is no central body overlooking immigration as a whole. Do you
see any value in having a strong independent body which looks
over those matters and might regain that essential integrity and
credibility?
Mr Byrne: I think this is an extremely
important question. When you look at public service reform across
the piece over the last five or six years and you look at those
parts of the public economy where there has been improvement of
some order—and I think, for example of local government
and I think of the comprehensive performance assessment—a
lot of us might disagree about how successful local authorities
have been in securing improvement over the last four or five years.
My own personal view is that a lot of authorities have got a lot
better, and I think CPA had a big part to play in that. Making
sure that there is systematic scrutiny of an organisation is very
important in helping make sure that there is a culture of transparency.
That process of external challenge needs to be robust. Part of
the reason that we will look at this cross-cutting issue, not
only of resources but also of the relationship with the Home Office,
is for this very point that you identify, that unless there is
the right structured challenge of the organisation then I think
it is very difficult for any organisation, no matter what it is
doing, to improve. It is a corporate governance issue, ultimately.
If the corporate governance is wrong, then it will often be very
difficult to get the rest of the business right.
Q1164 Mr Clappison: I would like
to ask you about applications, but, before I do, I would like
to go back to one point you were raising earlier. After hearing
your evidence I was not quite sure whether you were saying that
the Department was fit for purpose or not before you came in 11
days ago, and whether or not you thought there was a benefit in
having one body being responsible for looking at all of the implications
of immigration. Do you think there should be somebody in government
who looks at all of the implications which flow from immigration?
Mr Byrne: At this stage I hope
you will forgive me in not pre-judging the outcome of the review
that we will do over the next six or seven weeks. The point I
would make about your fitness question is that there are reasons
for optimism and there are reasons for believing, as the Director
General said last week, that it will take some time but IND is
very much within the realms of the fixable. When I look at the
Home Secretary's analysis of the changing context in which IND
now operates, and, in particular, when I look at the future, my
personal assessment is that IND is not fit for the future but
I think it is within the realms of the fixable. I do not know
if that answers your question.
Q1165 Mr Clappison: If we can disconnect
the administrative and the management from policy formation, my
question is about policy. Do you think that somebody should be
responsible for looking at all the policy relating to immigration
and all the consequences which flow from it, some of which you
have described in your introduction but not all of which everybody
would see as flowing from it?
Mr Byrne: The process of policy
developing is absolutely a core process of IND, and so is subject
to that review, and so that will be something that we will have
to look at over the next five or six weeks.
Q1166 Mr Clappison: Perhaps I may
give you one very brief example of what I am thinking of. Do you
discuss, for example, with colleagues in other departments in
government the housing implications which flow from immigration?
Mr Byrne: I have not personally
got to that stage yet, but that is absolutely the sort of thing
I would expect to have discussed. My constituency, as many people
will know who came to the Hodge Hill by-election, is a constituency
with a 46% BME population. I have schools in my constituency that
have gone from 5% Somalian intake to 25% in the space of a year.
I have fights in playgrounds between Somalian parents and other
parents.
Q1167 Chairman: Mr Byrne, fascinating
though all that is—
Mr Byrne: I will expand, perhaps,
later, Chairman.
Q1168 Chairman: We have not managed
to track down anybody in government who thinks that dealing with
the housing implications of immigration is their job. Does that
surprise you? You are making some very bold statements this afternoon.
Mr Byrne: Or ambitious.
Q1169 Chairman: But have you recognised
that there is a massive simile? We could not find anybody who
could explain how the fact that probably 10 times as many Eastern
Europeans have turned up as had been predicted, or 20 times as
many, has in any way influenced the issue of work permits to non-EU
citizens. There are huge areas here, which Mr Clappison is right
to pick up, where there does not appear to be anybody in charge
of overall policy on these issues and responding to events. I
suppose I am putting to you that what you are saying is very welcome,
but do you realise the implications of what you are promising
the Committee this afternoon?
Mr Byrne: This is an area where
I think the Committee's evidence will be extremely helpful. When
I say that we will look at the core processes of IND over the
next five or six weeks, we have to include the process of policy
development. If the Committee is able to present structured evidence
on this point in particular, it would be enormously helpful to
the review that we are trying to conduct.
Q1170 Mr Clappison: If I may move
on then to applications. Minister, your colleague made a very
important point a moment ago about giving people who legitimately
wanted to come to this country, but who need a visa, a good experience
of applying. That is very important. On the visits which our Committee
has undertaken, both to the Indian Sub-Continent and also to West
Africa, we were very impressed with some of the outsourced visa
application centres that we saw. Have you given any thought to
developing these, and, in particular, to introducing a similar
system in the UK?
Mr Byrne: May I suggest that Lord
Triesman answer.
Lord Triesman: Let me start with
those outside the country. We have also had a very good experience
and I am pleased that you did. Many of the more mechanical parts—because
the final decision still remains with our ECOs—have been
taken out of the ECOs' job and it becomes easier to direct ECOs
to deal with risk assessment management and then to make sure
it is a good experience, as you, Mr Clappison, have very kindly
described it. We would like to see that extended. I want to be
certain that, in every case where we do extend it, the business
that we use is robust, works to standards and understands that
if there is any fault line in those standards then they will lose
their contract with us. If there is any criminality, the criminality
will lead to prosecution. We are very rigorous about all of that.
It may very well be—though it is harder, from my position,
to judge within the UK—that there are aspects of that model
which could be very useful in the United Kingdom. As the review
goes forward, I would myself welcome the opportunity to explain
why I think that is the case to those undertaking the review.
I do not want to take any more time on past questions, but I wonder
if I could add one comment to the discussion about whether there
should be a central agency or not. It can be very appealing as
a concept—and I am sure it is going to be discussed very
thoroughly. One of the things I found was that, where we needed
to develop policy with some sophistication, it was absolutely
vital that a range of stakeholders who had not been much consulted
were brought into the loop. I will give an example of it, because
it is a useful one and that is the Joint Educational Taskforce,
which brought together the Home Office, obviously, the FCO, DfES,
the Treasury and the universities. In the discussions that have
taken place, there has been a lot of information fed into policy
making, which, candidly, could not have been fed in other than
by the people who really knew about it, were present and took
part. That is not a comment necessarily on the coordination of
policy making, but it is a comment about the necessity to make
sure, where there is complexity, that that material is drawn in
in an adequate way. I am very fearful sometimes that highly centralised
structures can press ahead without always recognising the degree
of complexity that they need to address.
Q1171 Mr Clappison: May I refer back
to what you said earlier on, because I think it is very relevant.
You spoke about the balance to be struck between the smooth running
of the system for people who are legitimate and also checking
on people to make sure that they are indeed legitimate and not
taking risks with whether they overstay in this country or not
or may do. It is a difficult balance to be struck, I think we
would accept that, but we understand from our visits abroad that
time pressures have led to many posts now interviewing only around
10% of visa applicants and to skimping on some of the checks made
on some of the applicants. Are you satisfied that everybody is
being checked sufficiently before they are allowed into the country?
Lord Triesman: I am, broadly.
Roughly speaking, half a million people did not get visas who
applied for them because those visa applications were rejected.
I think that is the result of a pretty rigorous process. In cases
where people are seen either very briefly or the thing is handled
on the basis of the documents, it is frequently, for example,
people who have come over on business repeatedly: they have never
breached any condition of the visa, they have conducted the business
they have said they were going to conduct. This is really about
risk management. It is about having a profile. Rather than, as
it were, addressing every single individual, having a really strong,
viable profile of people who pose very low levels of risk and
dealing as expeditiously as we can with people who pose low levels
of risk. It is very important, if that is to work, to make sure
that we do not just work on a comfort zone of assumptions and
that we on occasions interrogate our own process to make sure
that the risk we have assigned is realistic and accurate.
Q1172 Mr Clappison: I think you have
dealt with this to some extent already, but, given the way in
which a lot of these, as you would say, routine cases are dealt
with, the people who have a good record, do you see scope for
removing some of the work of routine cases to this country?
Lord Triesman: I would certainly
be prepared to explore that, although my principal concern at
the moment is to ensure that, where we try to control borders
because of significant risk or where we think we are still not
100% certain about the level of risk we should assign, we treat
our borders as being as far offshore as we can; that we do the
job in the countries of origin, so that we do not find ourselves
having to put people back on planes unnecessarily, having to turn
them round at borders unnecessarily. Where we do that well, the
results are very clear, and you will have seen that, I think,
in posts.
Q1173 Chairman: I would like just
to pursue that, because I am not quite clear. If you have an application
visa determined entirely on paper, by a member of staff who is
temporarily living, say, in Pakistan for three months, staying
in the High Commission compound in Pakistan and not having any
opportunity—mostly, I think, for security reasons—to
interact with local Pakistani society and very little time to
build up country knowledge, why determine that application at
that expense in Pakistan? Why not determine it here?
Lord Triesman: The critical question
I think there is whether somebody looking at the papers comes
to the conclusion that interviews are necessary. It is really
quite useful that the person who has looked at all the documents
is also the person who does the interview. One of the things that
you will have seen in posts is that we are highly sensitive, for
example, to forged documents or documents where the provenance
is not at all clear. You really want to get the people and the
documents together in order to make sure the questions you ask
are the absolutely right ones and the conclusions you draw are
the right ones. I am not saying it would not be possible to separate
out parts of that with some people, but I think you increase the
risk quite considerably by doing so.
Q1174 Mr Benyon: On that point, those
of us who have recently been abroad and seen the country clearance
officers working, came back, by and large, very impressed with
the quality of work and thought they were putting into their job.
There is a concern under that under the points based system they
are going to be a straightforward clerical operation and they
are not going to be allowed to use their skills and ability in
a way that a lot of us appreciated they do, in a way that I believe
is not understood in the appeal system. I hope you will allow
entry clearance officers in this new system to exercise their
skill at identifying the fraudulent from the genuine.
Lord Triesman: I think it is a
very good point. I do not want to lose the skills they have being
applied to the job either. I do want them to develop to a greater
extent the other range of skills that I mentioned, which is to
help work on and develop profiles, and to make really good risk
assessments against those profiles. It would be unhelpful, where
you had somebody who would be scored very highly in our points
system, where the documentation was all plainly legitimate, to
then go through a process which took up time, which I would rather
have used for people where I was very much less certain of that.
There are going to be some people, quite aside from business people
travelling here, who are family visitors, some of whom—and
they are not in the points system, which is why I pick on them—make
claims about their families which are perhaps wholly fanciful.
It is in those circumstances that I would like to see those skills
deployed and the time deployed, rather than looking at somebody
who is plainly a highly qualified chemical engineer, with a job
on offer as a chemical engineer in a major production plant in
the United Kingdom, and who has done it before.
Q1175 Mr Benyon: I could go on about
an issue like Zimbabwe, where the only people who can tick all
the boxes tend to be either dishonest, or members of the ruling
elite, and the genuine people whom we want to allow here, to escape
from that awful regime or to come here to contribute and to improve
themselves, cannot afford it. There is a big discussion which
I would love to have with you, but I do not have time now. I really
want to talk about the appeals. The amount of appeals that have
been allowed has gone up from 30% to 47%—and it is probably
over 50% now. On our visits abroad, time and time again we heard
from ECOs that they felt the good decisions that they were taking
were being overturned on appeal. To what do you attribute this
lack of confidence in the appeal system?
Lord Triesman: I think there is
a variety of things which can be set out under a small number
of headings. The first is that, quite often, when people appeal,
they produce material which the appeal is entitled to hear which
they have never produced at any other stage before but which adds
credence to the original application. There are many legal systems
where you are not allowed to do that, but this is one where you
are; so that material that might very well have been available
to the original ECO was not available to her or to him, and, as
a consequence, they might have come to a different decision. Secondly,
on appeal, judges simply double-guess what the ECO has seen. I
would put it very plainly to you—and I am probably being
very undiplomatic—but that is what I have seen.
Q1176 Mr Benyon: We heard examples
where a judge will say, "I don't know what this ECO is talking
about: that looks like a genuine bank statement to me." The
ECO sees bank statements from the Bank of Punjab every day, and
he knows a forgery from one that is not. There is a question mark
over the way the case is presented. That really leads me on to
the next point, which is about the way ECOs' decisions are defended
at appeal. On our visits, talking to ECOs and their superiors
who have had the results of those appeals back to them, it seems
that there is a lack of quality amongst the presenting officers.
We saw no testing of evidence, we saw no proper cross-examination
of witnesses, and we saw some presenting officers up against some
highly skilled, articulate immigration lawyers. Are you satisfied
with the standard of our presenting officers? Do you believe that
there is more that can be done to improve this area of work?
Lord Triesman: I do not think
there is any doubt that we can improve the area of work. I think
the whole of the training regime, whether it is for ECOs, presenting
officers or anybody else, can and should be improved. I have sat
in myself at Croydon and almost done the whole of the course to
see how it works and what it looks like. Whenever I to go to a
post, I always go to the visa section. Whenever I am abroad I
always go to the visa section, including sometimes when I am on
holiday—I probably ought not to do it, but there you are.
Q1177 Mr Benyon: Sad.
Lord Triesman: Well, they are
a much unloved group of people often, and I think popping in sometimes
is not a bad thing. I have watched—as I know you have—the
interviews take place. My feeling with all of these things is
that we need to get—
Q1178 Chairman: I am sorry, but could
we pin you down on the specific question about the quality of
the presenting officers. There is a general issue about the quality
of training, but I think the Committee has concerns about the
quality of work done by the presenting officers, and you were
asked a very direct question: Do you think they are doing the
job adequately?
Lord Triesman: I am sorry, Chairman,
I should not have strayed. I think it could be improved. I think
the reports that we are getting now are being analysed in UKvisas
in detail. We are trying to identify and make sure that we disseminate
the best practice, that the guidance and training materials for
them contains all of that best practice, and our intention is
to drive up the standard.
Q1179 Mr Benyon: You are also concerned
about the lack of communication in the appeal system. There seems
to be a lack of communication between presenting officers talking
to the ECO who made the decision or the IND case workers. What
plans do you have to improve the level of communication at this
crucial stage in the immigration process?
Lord Triesman: I think that is
one of the very good examples of best practice. Where you do see
it working, people prepare the cases very much more effectively
and they are very much more effective in advocacy. There is no
doubt; it is a very simple lesson to learn.
|
