UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 775-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

IMMIGRATION CONTROL

 

 

Tuesday 13 December 2005

MS MARY COUSSEY, MS FIONA LINDSLEY and DR ANN BARKER

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 94

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 13 December 2005

Members present

Mr John Denham, in the Chair

Mr Richard Benyon

Mr Jeremy Browne

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Ann Cryer

Mrs Janet Dean

Steve McCabe

Mr Shahid Malik

Gwyn Prosser

Mr David Winnick

________________

Memoranda submitted by Ms Mary Coussey and Dr Ann Barker

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Ms Mary Coussey, Independent Race Monitor, Ms Fiona Lindsley, Independent Monitor for Entry Clearance Refusals, and Dr Ann Barker, Chair, IND Complaints Audit Committee, gave evidence.

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?

Q20 Mr Clappison: Yes, of the ones which are investigated, these allegations of assault.

Dr Barker: I do not know.

Q21 Mr Clappison: That is understandable. Have you given any thought to the resource implications of this proposal and what they would be, your proposal for a group of investigators to investigate the more serious cases you have just told us about?

Dr Barker: Yes, a formal investigation or a proper investigation now takes £3,000, so you have got 500 to 600 of those a year. It is completely unknown how much is being spent on service-level operational complaints. What is clear is that there is a huge repetition of attention to these. They end up with huge files because they go in, normally a delay is complained about, they go to the back of the queue if it is regarded as an enquiry rather than a complaint, and an enormous amount of paperwork builds up as it goes among officials and nobody is keeping track of what is going on. There is a large and incalculable amount of money which is being wasted now because the complaints are not simply going into the centre, back out to the area from which they came, having a higher executive officer responsible for saying to the executive officers or the administrative officers, "Deal with this. Either send out a pro forma letter and say that it takes six months to do this kind of work", and it is only three and it will be solved, "or send out macros or in fact just deal with it".

Q22 Mr Clappison: What do you understand to be the attitude of IND senior management in all of this towards the resource side of things?

Dr Barker: It would be wrong for anyone to say that anyone in Whitehall is unconcerned about resources. I think they recognise that resources are being used and what we are proposing - and they themselves are proposing as this is not just our recommendation because before we came on board, they recognised that there had to be a streamlining, there had to be a unifying element, there had to be one database from which all of the complaints-handling was both determined, tracked and then ultimately decided, so they have taken that on board - what we are proposing is not expensive. You have got officers in ports, for instance, who are doing investigations and they are now being obliged to turn away from their front-line duties, their main duties to undertake investigations. If you had had a small group of people, four to six, doing it, it is much cheaper than paying percentages of people hither and yon, and you also get a much better quality of product.

Q23 Mr Clappison: You have said a little bit about this already on a slightly different subject. Could you tell us what you think could be done to ensure the information from complaints is fed back into the system to improve the performance you aspire to?

Dr Barker: If you have one data system, if you have the matrix, if you have service standards which have to be developed in order for the matrix to work and a code of conduct, and we have drafted one, so that misconduct can be identified, and if you get the information promptly so it is real-time management information, then you can identify where there are hot-spots, where there are delays and where things are going wrong before they build up. Rather like the visa problem several years ago, you could have seen that one coming down the pike and you could have done something about it early.

Q24 Mr Benyon: Dr Barker, you may have answered part of this question just now, but at the end of your submission, you strike a more positive note, stating that you had found examples of good practice which you saluted in your current audit and you are encouraged by the attitude of certain officials. Can you give us some examples of that, and I guess what you have just described is good practice in many respects, but what is actually happening?

Dr Barker: At the public inquiry office, there is a person, an official, who is now responsible for complaints who looks at the complaints quarterly, analyses the causes as well as how they have been handled, indicates through their newsletter, which has a page in it, what the problems are and how they themselves can address these problems, so there is a virtuous circle in that area of using complaints to best effect. Now, there may be more throughout, as it were, the empire, but we have not undertaken the number of visits we might have done because we have been looking at files in such detail.

Q25 Mr Benyon: So there is a co-ordination role in the complaints procedure that you are approving of in that context?

Dr Barker: Well, I am saying that that is a model in and of itself. You know what the complaints are, you keep track of them, you make sure that the complaint is handled to time targets, you look at it, you identify what those complaints are telling you about your own systems and procedures which are not operating effectively and you then identify how they can be improved and you build that back into the system. That is the proper use of complaints and that is good. As I say, there may be others, but the problem with the system, and I use the word loosely because in one sense there is not a system, is that it is so fragmented that good practice like that simply is not shared across the directorates and it remains isolated.

Q26 Mr Benyon: How transparent do you believe the Government handles your Committee's recommendations and are you satisfied with the responses you receive?

Dr Barker: The answer to that is I am hopeful. We have attacked our business, as it were, in a much different way from our predecessors. Our predecessors gave recommendations yearly in the report to the Home Secretary and my predecessor finally said, "Look, they aren't being taken on board. Could we please look at the whole system as well as the role of the CAC to identify how the complaints system can be improved, but also how recommendations can then be moved into the business and taken account of?" Something called the SIMS Report was an internal investigation undertaken in 2003 and that was the first report which identified the need for the single system, the single database, et cetera. What we have done is to make a list of recommendations and we have given them a risk assessment so that IND can see what they should be tackling first and what they might wait for as lesser risk. We looked at their response and then we have looked at an action plan for time. Now, we have only just undertaken this on the basis of the first two quarters of this year which we have conducted and IND says in most areas, "We agree with your recommendations", but they have not come up with specific ways to address the problems, so we are going to have to go back now and say, "Let's discuss which of these you are going to take on in the first instance, how they can be taken into the system, how they can be incorporated into the business plan and how targets can be set and then the implementation process can be monitored by us", so I am hopeful that that will occur, but we are only now at the point of engaging on that particular, wide issue.

Q27 Mr Benyon: Can I ask you, Fiona Linsdley, do you have any comments on the handling of complaints in respect of visa applications and do you believe there should be a similar sort of complaints audit commission in addressing UKvisas' complaints?

Ms Lindsley: I do comment on complaints in my reports. I comment that, although relatively few people do complain, I think in about two-thirds of cases I found responses to complaints unsatisfactory. Largely, people were sent a standard letter which did not address the points they had raised in any way and often the points were what I thought were valid points. Of course I am slightly disadvantaged in that I look at refusals only, so I did not have a sample of complaints because presumably some complaints would be on files where people were granted visas or perhaps the complaint might be to the grant of a visa and then it would be outside my sample, so I cannot really comment on complaints as a whole, but I certainly did have concerns with the processing of complaints and felt that individuals who did complain, given that they were such a small group, ought to receive a proper response. As to whether there should be some wider body, I really have not given that any thought and I would not really like to say how it should be dealt with, but I am very impressed by the proposals there and, as I work in immigration and asylum, I know from my other practice many of the problems that have been outlined today.

Q28 Mr Benyon: The system of monitors and audit, obviously you believe it is effective, but what we have to work out is whether you are getting proper resources, whether you feel you really have all the resources you need to do the job properly.

Ms Coussey: Well, I would like to come in there because I do not have any resources, except myself.

Q29 Mr Benyon: You are the resources!

Ms Lindsley: We are the same. I have no budget, for instance, it is just me.

Ms Coussey: I think it is quite a difficult balance once you have made one report with some suggestions as to how far do you pursue those to see what is happening to those and how much time do you spend on your substantive monitoring role. Certainly I would not want to report at the end of the year with some recommendations and proposals and not follow up to see how they have been received and tackled and whether any of them are being implemented, and that can be very difficult to do, as Ann has already described. Finding the right locus in IND to follow things up is quite a demanding task.

Dr Barker: I do feel as if my Committee is being adequately supported. The central complaints unit does have one official, half of whose job is devoted, or has been devoted in the past, to the way things were done in the past, so we have gone through a transition period, trying to redefine what he is doing in regard to what we are now doing. It is quite different, it is labour-intensive, but there is adequate support because we are also doing a lot of travelling around and looking not just at the areas of the business, but also physically looking, for instance, at service complaints and operational complaints, so we have to go to the repositories where they are, we are provided with support and we have been provided with IT support which has been helpful as well.

Ms Lindsley: Perhaps I should say that the role of visa monitor is going to change. I have concluded my post and the new monitor is currently being recruited and that will be a full-time post. That monitor will monitor more files, about double the number I have monitored, write two reports a year and I think they will have a delegated, full-time person at UKvisas, so there will be potentially more support for that monitor and more time.

Q30 Mr Benyon: This may be an unfair question, but the question we have to address is whether we start from here and whether there is actually a case for some form of HM inspectorate which looks at the whole area of immigration as one organisation doing lots of different monitoring and audit. Do any of you have a view on that or do you think that this system where you are responsible for various different parts of it is the best approach?

Dr Barker: Perhaps I can start because there are several auditing bodies. IND has a proper audit committee for IND as a whole which is looking at finances and governance issues. The Immigration Service has an audit and quality assurance ----

Q31 Chairman: But, if I can press you directly on Mr Benyon's question, should there be an independent inspectorate which is not owned by IND in the sense that those things are?

Dr Barker: Right, but what I was doing, to fill out more of what he was saying, was saying that there are other bodies who are doing some of the same jobs and to a degree are overlapping. I think there would be benefit to having one rather than three, us and the other two, but you are playing different roles though. I do not know quite how.

Ms Coussey: I have certainly thought about this in relation to my role and more particularly in relation to the asylum side of it which I have commented on quite a lot. I think there are arguments for an independent body, but the two obviously would not go together, and one would be more like an inspectorate. I think there are arguments for an independent asylum body as well for making initial decisions, but that is not what you are asking, I realise. I think there is a problem with monitors where these roles are increasingly being used in areas of public administration. There is a problem with them, you are isolated, you are one person and, as I have mentioned just now, it is difficult to know how the report is going to be received and followed up, and you do not have any powers to ask for things to be done at all, but it is purely recommendations which can be rejected without more ado, so I think if this is going to be an increasing role, especially if appeal rights are going to be reduced in certain areas, it has to have the necessary authority and power to do a proper job.

Q32 Chairman: Mary Coussey, I am a Southampton MP so we have a major airport and we have a major port with a significant migrant population. Could you explain to me how a race discrimination authorisation would work its way through to immigration officers working on the front-line in my city and how that is meant to affect the way they do their job?

Ms Coussey: The authorisations are issued monthly with the designated nationalities on them. At the moment there are only nationalities on them, although it does cover ethnicity as well, but there are not currently any authorisations allowing you to discriminate on the grounds of ethnicity. These are issued monthly and they are disseminated to each port. They are pinned up on notice boards, they are on the intranet, and additionally in all ports, as far as I am aware, there are regular briefings, even daily briefings, about current developments, so each time the authorisation is issued, it would be referred to in one of the regular briefings.

Q33 Chairman: What would an immigration officer do as a result?

Ms Coussey: I do not think they would do anything differently. I did find, when I talked to some of them, that they were not even aware of the authorisations, although most were. To them, what it says is that they are covered if they need to question somebody more closely, somebody on the authorised list.

Q34 Mr Clappison: What do you see as the pros and cons of the authorisations that you monitor?

Ms Coussey: I said in my report that I thought the pros were that it brought a little bit of transparency and accountability into the system. This was happening before ----

Q35 Mr Clappison: That was subjective then?

Ms Coussey: It was totally subjective. It was based on gut feeling and such other subjective factors. The authorisations at least bring the thing into the formal system. It has to be authorised by a minister and there has to be statistical and other evidence on which the authorisations are based, so yes, it brings in some transparency. Against that, as I have said in my report, I think the problem is that it can become self-fulfilling. If you say to somebody, "These are the nationalities who have got a history of immigration abuse" or refusals or whatever it might be because they use the whole range of decisions, not just refusals at ports, then, as people have said to me, "Well, it does create a certain mindset". If you are told that these people are more likely to be involved in coming in under different pretences than they are giving, they are not really genuine tourists, or whatever it might be, if you look for that evidence, you are more likely to find it. I think the other difficulty with it is that you adopt a different standard towards such people and what would be accepted in a national who is not on the list, it will not be accepted.

Q36 Mr Clappison: But you would see a need to guard against treating people who were on the list who were bona fide visitors to the country in a different way from other bona fide visitors from countries not on the list?

Ms Coussey: That is certainly the case, yes.

Q37 Mr Clappison: Taking everything into account, do you think it is necessary and effective?

Ms Coussey: Yes, I have thought long and hard about whether it is necessary. I think it is necessary simply because of the sheer volume of the numbers coming through. There has to be a system that allows the Immigration Service to focus on where there is most risk, so it is necessary from that point of view. Is it effective? It is effective in the sense that again it does allow them to focus their resources, but I think there are a number of problems involved in the implementation.

Q38 Mr Clappison: You have done lots of travelling to ports and elsewhere and looked into a lot of cases. Do you feel that on the whole immigration officers are making the right decisions?

Ms Coussey: I only see a tiny fraction of the decisions. I think this is one of the problems and this is why I have asked for further research to be done. As soon as I walk into a port, they know who I am, so that is going to affect how people make decisions. I cannot say across the whole system because we are talking about 12 million people coming in from outside the EU, so I cannot say whether all decisions are fair and professional. Some of the cases I have seen where I look at samples of files, I would certainly suggest that they are not.

Q39 Mr Clappison: On the basis of what you have seen, have you got any suggestions as to how the quality of decision-making could be improved?

Ms Coussey: I certainly think that there should be more detailed monitoring. You have all seen the statistics in the annual reports about who comes in, the statistics produced within the Immigration Service and, for instance, at my request, they have just started to look at port refusal rates and that has thrown up a lot of anomalies. In fact, it quite surprised me what came out when they produced the port refusal rates. What appeared to be the case was that the highest refusal rates were at the small airports and I assume because they have got more time to examine people, whereas if you are at Terminal 3 at 7 o'clock when all the intercontinental traffic is coming in and there are 300 people in the arrivals hall, you have to be really very focused on who it is you are going to ask further questions of, so I think that is a factor. They do need to know why that is. If there are differential refusal rates for same nationalities at different ports and at different times of day, there needs to be an explanation for that. Is it sheer pressure of work or are there other factors? Yes, more detailed monitoring being used in the way Ann has described to improve the business, not necessarily to point fingers at people, but to improve the business.

Q40 Mr Malik: Mary, you will be well aware that the Government is increasingly tempted to exercise immigration control outside of the UK, ie, before people reach ports of entry.

Ms Coussey: Yes.

Q41 Mr Malik: Has this kind of governmental trend of 'exporting the border' made race-monitoring more difficult?

Ms Coussey: Initially, I was told that my remit did not cover juxtaposed controls, but in fact in clarifying that, yes, it does. Yes, it makes it more difficult because the decision-making is more dispersed. I have visited some of the main ports, I have visited Gard du Nord twice and I have visited Coquelle and looked at the operations there. I think the same kinds of decisions are being made, but again I would say that early indications are that there are higher refusal rates at those places. I have speculated as to why this is. I do not know for certain because there has not been enough monitoring of individual port decision rates, but it looks to me as though it is easier to refuse somebody if you are in Belgium or France because it is not your problem, if you like, they are not in the UK, so you do not have to get involved in arranging for them to return, so that may account for it. Also, the other factor is just the sheer physical conditions under which people are operating at those ports where they have very cramped, tiny accommodation. At Paris Gard du Nord it is just a little box at the side of the station and there just is not physically the room to make the sorts of enquiries that would be made in this country, so I think again, and this is speculation, but this may mean that the likelihood of being refused is greater because you cannot go into the case to the same extent.

Q42 Mr Malik: So the quality of decision-making is poorer?

Ms Coussey: Well, I think there is a possibility. As I say, I have not been able to monitor it for long enough to say that, but some of the cases that I looked at that most worried me were those where the decision was made in Paris or Coquelle.

Q43 Mr Malik: You have already in part really answered the question I was going to ask when you responded to James Clappison which was really about the differential refusal rates between ports and you talked about the least busy airports detaining people for the highest proportion of time. Is this a serious problem and, if it is, how do we deal with it?

Ms Coussey: I have to say I have only had that data for a year. The other thing I want to see from that data is whether there is any indication of refusal rates increasing for the nationalities on the authorisation because that would be another way of checking whether it is becoming self-fulfilling. As to what to do about it, if there are tougher decisions being made, I think this has to be fed back to the officials who work in those ports. What happens is there is quality control within the port, but, as far as I am aware, there is no quality control between ports and there would not be any system for picking up whether, let's say, Brazilians are treated more harshly at City Airport than at Terminal 4. That does not happen. It happens within the specific port. Therefore, I think there needs to be that kind of review as well, with the information fed back and then somebody at a more senior level has to be taking a view on whether it is fair, whether it is fair that people should be refused in one place and not in another and that is then fed back into training, briefings and so on for officials, for immigration officers.

Q44 Chairman: Can I take it from what you said earlier that you are happy that the research that is now being commissioned by the Home Office is going to provide you with the information you need to assess the impact of policy on race and immigration?

Ms Coussey: The research has been done at Heathrow and Gatwick. I am happy with the research methodology and the design, but I have not seen any results as yet.

Q45 Chairman: But, in principle, you think it is the right questions and the right type of approach?

Ms Coussey: In principle, yes.

Q46 Chairman: To what extent, if there is race discrimination within the system, does that stem from attitudes deeply engrained amongst officials who are administering the system?

Ms Coussey: I cannot say whether they are deeply engrained attitudes. What I can say is that I think that in any system, any casework system, and I think the police have the same problem, you tend to build up this kind of picture of almost a stereotype of somebody who merits a refusal. I mentioned similar stories. If you come from South Africa, saying you had won a hotel room in a competition, you will not be believed, that kind of thing. There is a build-up of cynicism from dealing with similar circumstances. I think people become cynical and whether it is deep-rooted attitudes, I cannot say.

Q47 Chairman: The reason for asking the question is that what follows from that is: how do you challenge those attitudes? Are those ones that can be challenged effectively by good staff training? The police obviously now have a very extensive system of pre-recruitment testing to establish, for example, quite deep-seated racist, homophobic or other attitudes where they try and filter people out before they ever get into the police force, whereas five years ago they would have tried to sort those attitudes out once people had got inside. Are the issues that we are dealing with in the Immigration Service ones that can be dealt with by good training inhouse or is it going to take a more fundamental approach as to how to recruit the staff in this section of government?

Ms Coussey: Well, I think there are similar issues, as there are with the police, that yes, recruitment is important and something I have not looked at is how immigration officers are recruited, though I have looked at some of the training. However, I think it is the other problem, which is that once you get into the culture, you start to adopt the norms, the attitudes and the behaviours of the culture and it is a very strong culture, so that is why I think using evidence from monitoring to feed back and reinforcing training at regular intervals is going to help. The more transparent it is and the more decision-making is reviewed, examined, discussed, looked at and opened up, the more it will help. I think the other point I would make is that, although I have not spent a lot of time looking at training, I have attended parts of the immigration officers' initial training and a lot of it is concerned with process because process is quite important of course. To my mind, there needs to be much more on understanding evidence and information, bias and so on as well, and the actual decision-making, to my mind, does not receive enough time in training, and that is also true, I would say, for asylum caseworkers too.

Q48 Mr Winnick: If immigration officers are accused of prejudice in certain posts where over a period of time they have become rather cynical about claims to come to this country for visits and so on from central/west Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, and if it was put to those ECOs that they are racially prejudiced, is it not possible that they would say, "It's nothing to do with colour. If I was dealing with Americans who happen to be black, my attitude would certainly not be based on any form of prejudice", and they would deny there is prejudice, "but my assessment", the entry clearance officer would say, "is nothing to do with colour, it is nationality and the experience this post has had over many years", and what would be your reply to that?

Ms Coussey: Well, that is exactly what they do say. I can only talk for immigration officers and that is exactly what they do say and that is one of the reasons I asked for the research to be done, so that there would be a more rigorous basis for testing that. I cannot obviously say that they are acting because they are racially prejudiced because that has not been revealed to me, although I have overheard comments made which have suggested that there are certainly stereotypes of people and that is a form of prejudice.

Q49 Mr Winnick: But that would apply, would it not, to various European places, eastern Europe, where the refusal rate is pretty high ----

Ms Coussey: Yes.

Q50 Mr Winnick: ---- Poland, Czechoslovakia before admission to the EU and Turkey who, as far as I understand these colour classifications, although I am not an expert any more than you are, are presumed to be white as we are presumed to be white? What would you say to that, where the refusal rate is pretty high and the people concerned are certainly in those circumstances black or Asian?

Ms Coussey: I think it is an indication of, as I said, the cynicism that can build up and how it can become self-fulfilling. It is certainly true that in 2003, before accession, the highest refusals were of Poles, and there was the same attitude building up - an attitude of suspicion or a lack of an inclination to give somebody the benefit of the doubt to young Poles, particularly young men.

Q51 Mr Winnick: But that is clearly based on nationality, absolutely nothing to do with colour prejudice.

Ms Coussey: From the evidence I have seen, from the way this works, it is in relation to nationality as much as any other factor. I cannot say from what I have seen that colour is a determining factor, but that is not to say that it is not.

Mr Winnick: I take the point

Q52 Mrs Cryer: Mary, you have made a number of recommendations to government and I wonder if you could give us some examples of those recommendations that have been accepted and some of those recommendations that have been ignored.

Ms Coussey: I suppose the most obvious one that has been accepted is where I asked for more rigorous information - the question that David Winnick has just been asking me - is there any evidence that people of colour more likely to be stopped and questioned? And that is the basis of the research that has been going on, the results of which I have not yet seen. So that was accepted and the requests I made for more detailed monitoring of Ports has been accepted, I have been told, subject to resources - they are not certain whether that can always be done. I have made various suggestions about improving the content of training, as I just said, in relation to having much more on how you make decisions, using evidence of what people have said and how you make decisions, and I have been told that the training is being revamped but I have not yet seen the outcome. On the asylum side - and I understand you are not focusing on asylum today - I think there are more questions there about whether my recommendations have been accepted.

Q53 Mrs Cryer: So they may have been ignored?

Ms Coussey: They have been challenged to a greater degree as well, yes.

Q54 Mrs Cryer: Could you look at how immigration policies fit in with wider government policies so far as race equality, which you have already mentioned, community cohesion, social inclusion and so on? Apparently in your first report you did emphasise the importance of integrating immigrants into the community, but not in later reports and I wondered why that was?

Ms Coussey: I guess it is really a bit wider than my remit to go into integration in this report because I am just looking at how the authorisations operate, but of course there are implications for good community relations. If people from some communities find consistently that their family members, visitors or whatever are refused entry of course that has implications because people feel resentment, people feel that they do not belong here, they are getting different treatment, et cetera. I think the other side of it, which worries me a lot, is how the climate about immigration impacts on decision-making, and I am quite sure that if you come to work and you see a tabloid bus outside the office and journalists trying to get in to interview asylum seekers, that kind of negative publicity screaming out at you every day I am quite sure that affects how you make decisions. You cannot be isolated and immune from that, and people have said that to me, as well, "Yes, and of course we are aware of it." And I have seen things pinned up in offices, anti-immigration articles pinned up in offices and obviously immigration people are influenced by the negative climate.

Q55 Chairman: Is that pinned up on your staff notice boards?

Ms Coussey: In the areas around the desks.

Q56 Chairman: Signs on filing cabinets, or whatever.

Ms Coussey: Yes, that kind of thing.

Q57 Chairman: So indicating that people working there share the views.

Ms Coussey: They are certainly noting those sorts of comments, yes - aware of them.

Q58 Mr Clappison: The general point was put to you, but on the first point you were making there, particularly about the family visas - and I have a lot of constituents who come to me with these issues - is there any research done or any way of seeing how many people actually abuse the family visa system by overstaying on that permission? If there was little evidence of that happening that might win more confidence for people being given the right to visit family members in this country?

Ms Coussey: Fiona is visas.

Q59 Mr Clappison: Can I deal with that now? I think the point is that nobody wants to stop family members meeting each other and if there is a way of giving confidence that that system is being used properly then that is something which should be stepped forward.

Ms Lindsley: I think one of the problems is that there are no departure controls so the short answer is that nobody knows who leaves. There are statistics obviously about people who are picked up, having broken controls. This is not my remit either but if you raid Indian restaurants you find Indian over-stayers and Indian illegal entrants and so the statistics on who breaches controls are not necessarily even. If you go to the bars where the Australians work you might find Australians. So it depends what sort of controls you do after entry. If you have no universal control, which gives you the data - I think there is some consideration as to whether with new technology it would be possible to have departure controls but obviously the main reason why we do not have departure controls is the whole of Heathrow and other airports would jam up if we did at the moment.

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, 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 who would be disproportionately affected by which nationalities - 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?

Q73 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.

Q74 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 Ankara, 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 disparate, 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.

Q75 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 at 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.

Q76 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.

Q77 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.

Q78 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.

Q79 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.

Q80 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 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.

Q81 Mrs Dean: What sort of targets do you think would help to ensure more effective controls?

Ms Lindsley: I do not think I really understand the question. Controls in what sense?

Q82 Mrs Dean: Effective controls at border points for good decision-making to be made.

Ms Lindsley: I think that better decision-making would be improved by knocking out all the things that are currently used, such as, "You are young, male and single, you are of marriageable age, you have never travelled before," or "You know someone who has travelled and stayed," all these illegitimate things need to be put aside and very clearly put aside. Then we need to decide what it is that makes people go home and I think that is a very broad matter that needs discussion and some legitimate criteria need to be established. I think what will make better decision-making is more directive framework given to ECOs by UKvisas, and I say this in the context of ECOs being trained for three weeks to do their jobs. They are not lawyers, they have three weeks' training, they are a long way away from the central management, and I think there should be some sort of framework. I have put forward one framework; it does not have to be that framework, but a systematic processing of the issues and very clear guidance on things that are not relevant criteria. Another irrelevant criterion is vagueness. For some reason vague people are going to be the evaders of immigration control. That is a mad statement if I say it like that, and yet so many people are refused a visa because they are vague.

Steve McCabe: It also means evasive.

Q83 Mrs Dean: In monitoring the quality of initial decisions do you think that should be done independently of UKvisas, or independently of the direct organisation?

Ms Lindsley: Yes, I do think there is a role for independent monitoring. I think it is done at present in the most minimal form and I do not think that is satisfactory. I think it would be good also to be able to monitor the whole of the visa system, not just the refusals without a right of appeal.

Ms Coussey: Could I just pick up on what Fiona has been saying about assessing intentions to return because this is exactly the same criterion being used at the Ports, and vagueness is one they use as well, but only if you are a priority nationality; if you are a vague American it is not a problem. I would endorse what she is saying about a need for more explicit criteria and a framework given for such decision-making because it is very subjective and what is doubted on the part of one immigration officer will be accepted on the part of another and so you get unfairness creeping in and cynicism, as we have already discussed, so I agree with the approach that Fiona is suggesting about making it more systematic and articulating the criteria more transparently and objectively.

Q84 Mrs Dean: One final question. You have already obviously said that you consider some of the reasons given to be wrong or inappropriate. Are the examples you have given the so-called culture of refusals, as some interest groups have suggested, and have you seen any attempts to change the culture and how effective have they been?

Ms Lindsley: There is not a culture of refusal because most people get the visas, but I think there is a culture of attitudes which differentially impacts on some communities. If we look at ECO attitudes, first of all we find ECOs that are generally polite, well-motivated, hardworking, they work well as teams, but they do live in ex-pat communities; they do not speak the language, generally, of the communities in which they live, and they get moved a lot. So even if they have positive ideas about finding out where they are some of them are literally doing six weeks in one place and then six weeks in another place and they do not have that opportunity. So they live in their community. I do think that they are not given appropriate training. If they are going to make decisions which are based on, "You are doing something inappropriate for your socio-economic class" they need to understand that to a very high degree. So a lot of decisions now are made on disproportionate and non-commensurate grounds, i.e. "What you are doing is not something of your sort of background would do normally therefore you must be up to no good." That is the sort of method. If they are going to use that method then they have to be very well trained in who is who in their society and I do not think that is done well enough. In one of my reports I have pointed out that in one post I did find somebody who was very well integrated herself, who was able to communicate quite well to the people she was working with, but that is not common and I think that should be a much bigger part if that is the way the decisions are going to be made. On a more legalistic level ECOs do not understand about evidence - and I think Mary pointed this out - they do not know what a piece of evidence in support of a proposition is, and this leads to:

forgery? - a perfectly good basis on which to refuse someone a visa. Unfortunately three-quarters of forgery decisions are not supported with anything, presumably because the ECO thinks that they know that document is a forgery, but that is not evidence that it is a forgery. By evidence I do not mean something heavy-handed, I mean them writing in the file, perhaps in a note - and this does happen now in some posts - "This document is a forgery because of these reasons." Or a telephone note, "I called the bank, they said it was a forgery," with a name on it. That is the sort of level. In some instances probably this was done but there is not seen the need to actually have some evidence to support it because they do not seem to see that that is very important. I think that is one of the major reasons why there have been so many appeals, because there is a disparate culture, there is a culture in entry clearance posts which does not understand that they interface with a legal culture in which they must evidence their decisions. They do operate as a collective body rather than individuals, in accordance with propositions which are not supported by research and which do discriminate in the end against people from poor, unstable and largely black countries. So a lot of refusals say things like, "I am aware that a greater economic opportunities and higher standard of living will be open to you in the UK than here in Iran," for instance. That was said to a government architect who had had the same job for the last 11 years in Iran. I do not think there is any evidence that he does have greater economic opportunities in the UK. There is a lot of evidence that things are economically better in the UK than in Iran but it is a big leap to say to an individual, "I am not giving you a visa because you would be economically better in the UK." He might be economically a lot worse, working illegally as a cleaner or whatever is the proposed idea, than with his job in Iran. So those attitudes do prevail.

Q85 Chairman: Could I follow on from Janet Dean's question? You mentioned earlier your concerns about ECOs getting three weeks' training and you raised the issue of training before, obviously with very little progress being made. How long would you say, if this is the best way to do it, that an ECO should be trained for? If they were going to have the type of level of skills that you have just described, to be able to assess the cases properly, how long do you think an initial training period should be?

Ms Lindsley: I should say that I think there are some movements in training at UKvisas. Again, my time as visa monitor is so short that I do not have the time to go and investigate all the things that they are doing and I am conscious that I may be doing them down, but I am aware that they have put in effort and resources and they had very impressive people doing the training. I did take a day and went and sat in on training. But as Mary said, an ECO has to learn many technical and team operational issues and of course there is a lot of time spent doing that and there is less time spent on quality of decisions. My feeling is that it is very hard for me to judge because it would depend who you took in the first instance. At the moment again my understanding is that there are no educational qualifications necessary for an ECO so you do not start with any particular level and that may be an issue. If you had graduate entrants maybe you would need a shorter period than if you take from a broader base. But I do think I would want more external training.

Q86 Chairman: We have a sense of what you think the skills are and I am trying to get a sense for the Committee. If you do not feel able to answer it then please say so.

Ms Lindsley: No, I have not given that sufficient thought to be able to say how long it would last.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Gwyn Prosser.

Q87 Gwyn Prosser: I want to talk about your latest report where it talks about individual advice being vital for applicants overseas. Do you agree with the government's proposal to regulate overseas immigration advisers?

Ms Lindsley: I did not know the government was going to regulate overseas immigration advisers. I am not sure how they could do that. They regulate immigration advice within the UK, and do I agree with that? Yes, I do. In fact in another capacity I write accreditation exams for lawyers working within the UK. Externally, at least to my understanding, there was even a problem endorsing good sources of advice. I did go and visit the Immigration Advisory Service project in Sylhet, which is the only source of UK-connected cheap advice. I think various firms of solicitors have set up abroad and do provide advice but they would be at normal private solicitor rates rather than the rates of £10 for as much advice as it takes. I do think that given that UKvisas is not prepared to say, "You need to submit X, Y, Z documents" - for some good reasons because in certain countries those documents will not be available, so documentation of your claim remains an open book and basically here are the criteria and how you document it is up to you - in those circumstances it is something where it helps an individual to go and talk to somebody who understands the rules and says, "Okay, so in your circumstances you do own this piece of property and so you should take the deeds. You do have payslips so you should take those. You do not have any bank statements because people do not have banks in your place."

Q88 Chairman: I would like to keep you, if I could, to the particular question. Our understanding was that the five-year strategy from the government suggested that a regulation could be introduced for overseas advisers and the proposals are being brought forward next year, but it is not something you have looked at?

Ms Lindsley: No, I am not aware of that but I could say that there are very few of them. I just do not quite understand how, for instance, you would regulate Bangladeshi lawyers giving advice on British immigration law - that does happen - or other people in Sylhet. In Sylhet town there were lots and lots of advisers, most of which who were regarded as totally rogue and just taking money. How would British authorities regulate that? I just do not see that they would have any remit to do so.

Q89 Gwyn Prosser: You have given us a number of examples indicating why decisions have perhaps been made wrongly, but specifically with regard to what we call paper family visits.

Ms Lindsley: Paper family visits.

Gwyn Prosser: We are told a third of these go wrong. What is your view there? Why do you think that is happening?

Q90 Chairman: Paper based appeals.

Ms Lindsley: Paper based appeals. Of course, that is not in my remit. However, I do quote that figure in my report because I think that is indicative of poor decision-making because when an appeal goes to a paper hearing all that happens is that an immigration judge gets the same pieces of paper that the entry clearance officer reviewed in the post and decided that was a fine decision. If in further cases all that is needed is for somebody else to look at those and say, "No, that is not a decision" - I think it is 37% actually, slightly over a third - to me that is pretty damning. I think entry clearance officers think in family visit cases that their overriding belief is that they are won by the sponsor in a suit and what I have spent time to them saying is, "Okay, yes, in oral appeals you have a sponsor in a suit potentially. But what about these other ones? What about these ones where you have nobody present and all you have is the judge with the papers that you had? Why are they allowing such a high percentage of appeals there?"

Chairman: David Winnick on appeals.

Q91 Mr Winnick: On the position of appeals, which was mentioned previously by myself, the present administration brought back appeals for those who wanted to visit family members. What is the current position as far as the government's policies are concerned? Have you been consulted about restricting further the right of appeals?

Ms Lindsley: No, I have not been consulted. I have expressed opinions in my reports and the reason I did that was because one of my major findings in my reports is that when you take away a tranche of appeals you take away other appeal rights that Parliament did not intend to remove through wrongful interpretation of the legislation, and over my three reports I have estimated that approximately 46,000 applicants for visas were denied appeal rights when they should have been given them. This is because although the rules seem very simple, there is a simple definition of a family, and there is a cut-off, it is six months or less, you do not get a right of appeal as a student, that seems very simple, it does not seem likely to go wrong, but it does because there are various issues. For instance, with the student one what if the module is less than six months, perhaps we can deny right of appeal in that circumstance? What if we think that the letter for the college is a forgery, perhaps we will deny right of appeal there. So these practices have built up, but particularly in relation to family visitors, and largely in relation to family visitors by simply not seeing that the visitor that was being visited was on the list - that simple a mistake led to this quite substantial body of people being denied rights of appeal. So in my reports I oppose the withdrawal of further rights of appeal on the basis that you will not just lose those ones, you will lose some more almost inevitably, particularly if the people you deal with are abroad and do not have advice, because the overwhelming majority of people I look at the files of have no lawyers, no community organisations, nobody; they act solely on their own in person. So they do not know it is wrong, they do not know that it is wrong to refuse them a right of appeal on the basis of the length of the module. They have no idea, so they accept it and they go away, they do not challenge it. Again, another point in which I would oppose any removal of right of appeals would be simply the quality of decision-making as reflected in the high rates of success on appeal, really incredibly high rates of success on appeal.

Q92 Mr Winnick: On this, of course, without the right of appeal the entry clearance officer is judge and jury, knowing that the decision is not to be challenged and that the only way it may be questioned is if the Member of Parliament being asked by the sponsor writes to the Minister, and more than likely the Minister will uphold the decision of the entry clearance officer. So clearly you do accept that the quality of the ECO's decision, is to a large extent based on whether or not such decisions can be appealed against.

Ms Lindsley: I think it does not necessarily improve the quality but it would necessarily give people a way of challenging it and it would bring the information home as well. It brings the information back to this country that things are going wrong. There is a very much touted Tony Blair quote, in which he says it is human nature to make better decisions if you have a right of appeal. I think to a certain extent it is but you also lose the information about the quality of decision-making if you take away the right of appeal, and it stays out there rather than being back here. Remember, I am dealing largely with people who have no UK nexus, so although you may have people coming to you about family visits those without the right of appeal at present have no connection with this country, and one thing recently I addressed my mind to is that they cannot complain to the Ombudsman either about mal-administration, because you can only complain to the Ombudsman, to my understanding, if somebody in the UK has suffered some sort of injustice and you have an MP. So if you are somebody who applies to visit just as a tourist and you are treated very badly you have no mal-administration remedies.

Q93 Chairman: In the case of family visits, which I suppose are the ones that I, as an MP, see most of, for the reasons we have just explained - and this may reveal me to be a very bad MP - I must say that in practice I for a number of years advised constituents who had sponsors to resubmit the application dealing with whatever issue it was that had been pointed out by the ECO, and had a very high success rate, much higher, than going through the appeal procedure because that inevitably looks at the original decision. It seems to me it is very often the case that the decision may be, from a commonsense point of view wrong, but there may have been some reason for it, and that has always led me to feel that the issue here is not so much about the appeals but the quality of advice that is available for people making an application. Because I would say - and I am just putting to you, I do not know if you are experienced about this - the great majority of cases that come to me, had they taken proper advice in submitting the application, would have been successful in getting the visa, and a small amount of redirecting as to how they present their case enables people to come and visit their families, stay for the wedding and going back again. So should you not be putting at least as much evidence on the quality of advice that exists to applicants as on the inevitable bureaucratic procedure of appeals?

Ms Lindsley: In my reports I say both, and as somebody mandated to look after the interests of people without appeal rights then obviously advice is what I can say. I cannot say, "Give these people back their appeal rights," that is not what I am there to do. So, yes, I do focus on advice. We only have one project abroad really that is doing free-ish £10 advice at the moment. But I would totally endorse that; I think with help people do go and get the document that shows they do have the reason to leave the UK at the end of their visit and they understand what it is about. So, yes, a lot of people can correct that and sometimes it is faster than lodging an appeal. But there are going to be other cases where you just hit a brick wall and the ECO says, "That is not enough," and the applicant says, "It is," and they are the ones where you would want to go to appeal.

Chairman: Mr McCabe, to end the session.

Q94 Steve McCabe: You told the Committee earlier that your successor will have a slightly broader remit than yourself. I wondered, to the best of your knowledge are there any additional areas that could or should be monitored that will not be included in your successor's remit that you think are important?

Ms Lindsley: I do not think my successor has a broader remit at the moment. Obviously if the current Bill goes through Parliament and there are more categories without the right of appeal they have a broader remit in the sense that more categories with no rights of appeal will be added to them, but as yet I do not know what those are going to be and so we will have to wait and see on that front. They do not have a broader remit in the sense that I would see it would be quite good for the visa monitor to be the monitor of the visa system and to be able to look at the thing as a whole because it does operate as a whole. So, for instance, I am the visa monitor for people without rights of appeal but I often see that if we focus resources on those people on the desk, which there has been a tendency to do, an incoming flood of applicants, let us get those dealt with, what happens is there is not the time spent on paperwork and the processing of appeals. So although it is great for the people that I represent - and we see the time of waiting going down and decision-making is faster - if you are monitor of the whole system you can say, "Yes, that was a successful move by the post but unfortunately they did not process any appeal papers that year as a result of putting resources in so all the people with appeals waited for three years." So it would be better from that perspective. It has not been popular where I have gone into other areas either, but I think it is very difficult if you go into a post and you see something else going wrong and you know no one else is going to know about it unless you report on it, and I think it makes sense for the person who is monitoring on visas to be able to comment on all issues of visas.

Chairman: That is a very good note on which to end. Can I thank all three of you? You are obviously all pushing the limits of the roles that you have been given to the absolute extreme and interested in delivering a better system, and we have benefited enormously from you this morning. Thank you very much indeed.