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

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

IMMIGRATION CONTROL

 

 

Tuesday 7 March 2006

MS MANDIE CAMPBELL, MR TOM DOWDALL, MR CHRIS HUDSON

and MR DAVE WILSON

Evidence heard in Public Questions 401 - 500

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 7 March 2006

Members present

Mr John Denham, in the Chair

Mr Richard Benyon

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Ann Cryer

Mrs Janet Dean

Steve McCabe

Mr Shahid Malik

Mr Gary Streeter

Mr David Winnick

________________

Memoranda submitted by Ms Mandie Campbell, Mr Tom Dowdall, Mr Chris Hudson and Mr Dave Wilson

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Ms Mandie Campbell, Head of UK Visas; Mr Tom Dowdall, Deputy Director Heathrow Airport and the Airline Liaison Officer Network and Mr Chris Hudson, Operations Director North, Managed Migration, IND; and Mr Dave Wilson, Director, IND Intelligence Service, gave evidence.

Q401 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very much indeed for joining us for another of our hearings into immigration control of the IND. I wonder if each of the witnesses could very briefly introduce themselves and their role and then I will begin the questions.

Ms Campbell: Good morning. My name is Mandie Campbell. I am the Operational Head of UK Visas, with responsibility for the visa operations overseas.

Mr Dowdall: Good morning. I am Tom Dowdall, Deputy Director of border control, with particular responsibility for Heathrow and the overseas Airline Liaison Officer Network.

Mr Hudson: Good morning. I am Chris Hudson, Operations Director for Managed Migration in the North, with responsibility for the casework operation in Sheffield and Liverpool for managed migration.

Mr Wilson: Good morning. I am Dave Wilson, Director of the IND Intelligence Service.

Q402 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. It may be that towards the end of our hearing the Committee will choose to go into private session so that we can hear some of the confidential information that cannot be put in at the moment. Mr Wilson, if you feel there are things you can correct for the public record then obviously that is to everybody's benefit. We have had a number of witnesses in this inquiry so far who have suggested that to toughen up the system to control immigration is unlikely to be effective in tackling irregular migration. You have got a big driver which is basically the needs of the economy and if the economy has got needs then people are going to come in here and work. I would like your general views on that proposition that has been put to us by a variety of different witnesses. Is it a fruitless exercise that you are engaged in?

Mr Hudson: It is not a fruitless exercise at all. What we are trying to do certainly in the casework operations for which I am responsible is to get the balance right between providing a system which is open and visible to those that the UK wants to come into this country but also ensuring that we put in place as far as possible the right checks and balances that mean we can identify potential abuse and that we can take action to deal with it. I acknowledge there is a balance to be struck there but I do not think it is a fruitless exercise.

Q403 Chairman: If there are these strong drivers in the economy and strong needs for labour which constantly are putting people into the country, how well are you able to monitor those trends to find out the drivers, and how quickly and how directly does your operational policy respond to changing patterns of migration?

Mr Hudson: Chairman, the way the system works at the moment, certainly in the employment routes, is it is very market driven by employers who want to bring in migrant workers for various reasons. There are certain steps that they have to go through if they want to bring in workers from outside the EU. That is very much a market driven process at the moment. You see at various times the economy needs more workers in particular sectors than in others. With the accession of new states to the EU in May 2004 there has been a large increase in the number of workers that we are getting from the EU and we monitor that via the Worker Registration Scheme which was set up to try and measure the impact and the numbers of people coming and the areas they are going to.

Q404 Chairman: We will come back to that in a moment. The Worker Registration Scheme covers those who have come here from Eastern Europe to work, does it not?

Mr Hudson: We cannot tell how many people have not registered from those eight countries, but we have had 320,000 or so registrations so far under that scheme, so we believe it is reaching a significant number of those who come.

Q405 Chairman: How many is it now?

Mr Hudson: It is 320,000.

Q406 Chairman: That does not include any of the self-employed, does it?

Mr Hudson: No. This is people who are going in to employment.

Q407 Chairman: What I am trying to draw out is, when you get a big shift in migration patterns of that sort - and Mr Wilson is also monitoring the people who are not coming legally and not making any attempt to comply with your systems - how does the information that you have about the legal routes and the information Mr Wilson has about the illegal routes then come back and affect how the IND delivers its operation?

Mr Wilson: It is handled through the use of the tasking and co-ordination structure which was introduced as part of the IND's conversion to the national intelligence model, which is a business process which allows us to look at emerging trends. It is based on a risk assessment, so you look at what is coming towards us globally, the areas of abuse within the immigration rules, all of those sorts of things. When we have got all of that together it is handled through a tasking co-ordination process which is run from the very top. So you have got the IND board, which sits monthly, which looks at a risk assessment, at the priorities, at the vulnerabilities and identifies those which require action and that is across IND. For example, if we thought there was significant abuse of the Worker Registration Scheme at that level it would be highlighted and they would task either Chris, me or Mandie from the visa side to try to do something about it.

Q408 Chairman: To what extent do publicity campaigns, both about legal routes into the UK and about the consequences of illegal migration, play a part in the broader border control policy?

Ms Campbell: We are about to launch a publicity campaign in India called "The Only Way is the Legal Way" in order to spread information about how people can lawfully come to the United Kingdom, the sorts of categories that we want to promote, but also to indicate that there is a very strong control in terms of detecting forgery and fraud in our visa sections in India. It is advising people not to go down the route of using unscrupulous agents and to make their applications directly through our outsourcing partners so that they have the greatest chance of success.

Q409 Chairman: Today the Government announced it has launched the points based migration system. According to the analysis that we have been given by some witnesses, if the effect of that points based migration system is to reduce the possibility of low skilled migrants from outside the EU being able to come here legally then there will simply be an increase in the amount of illegal migration that is attempted from those areas. How are you planning to respond to that as of today?

Mr Hudson: The Government says in the document about the points based system that we have got a large additional resource of workers from the expanded EU. The points based system also makes provision for low skilled routes where they can be justified, where they can be targeted and where there are clear return routes. If there was a labour market need for those sorts of schemes and they could be set up robustly, I think the expectation is that we would seek to set up schemes specifically for low skilled requirements.

Q410 Chairman: I can understand that. The analysis we had from people like the Royal Society of Arts and the Institute of Public Policy Research made a different point, which was that you can do what you like with these schemes. If you simply make it harder for people to come here legally you will see an increase in illegal migration because the same people who would have come here last year legally will still want to come here. That is a change in government policy which might change the pressures on the system that you are dealing with. I am trying to get an understanding of how your approach to your work is now going to change in the light of a different pattern of pressure on the system, or do you just plough on doing what you are doing today until the faults in the system become apparent?

Mr Dowdall: From a border control perspective the principle has been very much around exporting the border and exporting the border to those areas of greatest risk. Among the activities involved are issues such as the juxtaposed controls that we have but also the work that we do overseas with our network of liaison officers, working with both the carriers and with the governments to identify those routes that we have identified as being routes for illegal migrants and to be able to counter those. We have to be very flexible in the way that we deploy those resources in order to counter the changing risks and the changing patterns of displacement.

Q411 Mr Streeter: Do you think it is an abuse for someone to come here on a visa and then claim asylum?

Mr Hudson: I think it would depend on the circumstances. There may be cases where circumstances in the country change, but it is not the way we want the system to operate for people to come here and then to claim asylum.

Mr Dowdall: There may well be specific issues, for example, where somebody has obtained a visa but then when that person arrives in the United Kingdom they have destroyed their documents or they appear with no documents. In those circumstances we do consider prosecution under the section 2 legislation that we have, but that is a separate consideration from any asylum claim.

Q412 Mr Streeter: Does it happen much?

Mr Dowdall: Yes, it does. A number of undocumented arrivals were significant enough for us to seek the legislation in the first place and the numbers of prosecutions for undocumented arrivals that we have had certainly this year has been in the region of 500 to 600.

Q413 Mr Streeter: On abuses, do you think it is fair for us to say that some scams are taken more seriously and treated more robustly than others, for example scam marriages and bogus colleges? Perhaps they are focussed on more than where foreign doctors who have come to sit their PLAB tests breach their visitor visas by working or studying.

Mr Hudson: I would say that we try, as Mr Wilson was describing, to prioritise the risks that we see in the system. The model that he described is an attempt to try to identify where abuse may be taking place and to assess the level of risk that it presents. Some routes will present large scale risks in terms of the numbers involved; others may present risks of a more serious kind in terms of security issues. So we are trying to assess what abuse is taking place and to give that the right level of attention to tackle it.

Q414 Mr Streeter: How do you decide to prioritise? Is it based on numbers or the level of risk? By what mechanism do you decide it? One of the things that perhaps people sometimes think is that you go for the low lying fruit first, do the easy things first or it may even be driven by the Daily Mail to prioritise. What is your reaction to that?

Mr Wilson: I do not think that is as true today as it might have been three or four years ago because the Government's target of tipping the balance between asylum intake and removals, which has been pretty successful in focusing the effort on trying to remove failed asylum seekers, which is not an easy job, and in most cases they are not people that could be described as low lying fruit ---

Q415 Mr Streeter: What is your mechanism for setting priorities?

Mr Wilson: Each directorate within IND has its own risk assessment process which looks at the vulnerabilities of its particular section and it will try to prioritise on the basis of a number of things. We are moving into a new era now where we will try to look at what harm the abuse causes society. The police and the Serious Organised Crime Agency are moving into that sort of area where they are looking to see, in terms of organised criminality and the facilitation that goes on in immigration, what level of harm that is causing our society and that might be the way forward. It will not be easy, it might not be possible, but it is certainly something that we are looking at.

Ms Campbell: Our risk assessment units conduct risk assessments across the whole range of application categories and they create risk profiles so that they are looking not only at the big volume application categories but also at smaller categories where there might be underlying evidence of abuse. It is not a case of only targeting one area; they are looking across the whole range of applications all the time.

Q416 Mr Streeter: What is the most common scam?

Ms Campbell: In the overseas environment forged supporting documents is a big problem. Obviously in a lot of countries it is difficult to get the authentication of documents and we find there are high levels of fraud with financial documents.

Mr Wilson: That is the same for the UK environment as well in terms of identity theft and the supporting documents which allow people to obtain proper documentation which testifies to a completely false or fictitious identity.

Q417 Mr Streeter: Are your priorities cramped at all by the lack of resources available? Have the targets set by the Government in the last few years helped or hindered setting priorities?

Mr Hudson: Resources will always be a factor in deciding what action we take in response to the threats we identify. I want to emphasise the way that risks are identified in different parts of the system. UK Visas, in-country border control and the central intelligence function are brought together at a strategic IND level to assess what are the risks to the system as a whole and how we rate those in the light of information we have, either in terms of numbers or other elements of risk and then decisions will have to be made about the resources that are perceived to be needed to tackle the particular types of abuse that have been identified. Yes, resources are always an issue in saying whether we have got the right systems in place. Some of these things will be very difficult to tackle without automated systems of the kind that we are working to introduce. Other forms of abuse can be tackled quite sensibly with the resources at our disposal. It would be foolish to pretend that resources were never an issue. I think they definitely have to be taken into account.

Mr Dowdall: One of the purposes of the tasking and co-ordination function is actually to allow us to do more in a systematic way and an ability to be able to prioritise those resources rather than have a scattering effect or just concentrating our efforts in one particular area.

Ms Campbell: We have found as well that it is about facilitating genuine applicants and if we can identify those that need only minimum scrutiny and we can process those much more quickly it frees up resources to concentrate on those areas that are more likely to be abusive. It is about using risk in that way to balance the resources that we have.

Q418 Mr Streeter: Things like asylum targets are set from time to time. Is that a helpful thing or does it skew the entire system?

Mr Hudson: It does not skew the whole system because we have these other methods of identifying the potential abuse for dealing with them. It may be at any particular time there is a priority to focus on asylum seekers or maybe there is a priority to focus on bogus colleges. We try and balance those priorities to get the right result in terms of maximising our impact on the risks that have been identified. It does not necessarily skew it.

Q419 Chairman: We had a very tough asylum target that we met and then the next thing that happened was that a minister lost her job because of a scandal in the work permit section as people were cutting corners. Is there really no connection between putting a lot of pressure on the system in one place and things getting unacceptably slack somewhere else?

Mr Hudson: There are clearly competing pressures, yes. I think with the issue you referred to in terms of abuse of the European Community Association Agreement route action was taken to deal with that. The issue there was having identified that there was a problem and taking the relevant action. We now have a much more robust system for identifying the risks, bringing them together and assessing at the strategic level which are the ones that we should be putting our resources into.

Q420 Mrs Dean: It has been suggested to us that visa refusal rates go down in peak periods to get through the numbers involved and that this is accepted by managers because any subsequent illegality will not show up in the system whereas visa delays do. Is this true?

Ms Campbell: Certainly refusal rates fluctuate throughout the year and are different in different posts across the world and there are a variety of reasons for that. What we have tried to do is introduce systems and processes that enable us to allocate as much time as is necessary to considering individual applications. We also changed our public sector agreement targets last year to give our staff overseas more time to concentrate on those cases where there was likely to be evidence of abuse and more enquiries and checks that we needed to make. In Nigeria, which saw a massive increase in 2005 in the number of publications, it was over a 100% increase on the previous year, they still managed to maintain a very high refusal rate against those abusive applications which in some categories were running as high as 80%. So despite significant pressures on the control in terms of volume numbers it did not mean that less scrutiny was being paid to those applications.

Q421 Mrs Dean: Can you say that there is not a connection between an increase in the number of applications and a more lenient look at those applications?

Ms Campbell: Our application numbers have been rising year-on-year over the last five years. We have had a 55% increase in total volume since 2001. Last year we had 2.5 million applications around the world and yet our refusal rate has risen year-on-year since 2001. It was 10% globally in 2001 and it was 19% globally last year. For individual categories in individual high risk countries their refusal rate is significantly higher. I do not think we can say that an increase in numbers means that less scrutiny is paid to applications.

Q422 Mrs Dean: UK Visas appears to have a policy of preventing applicants from making applications in particular categories, for instance working holidaymakers, where they perceive that there is a high level of abuse. Is this not effectively collective punishment for certain nationalities?

Ms Campbell: When you say preventing applications, could you perhaps clarify what you mean?

Q423 Mrs Dean: In trying to stop people applying in the first place.

Ms Campbell: Currently there are five countries where it is not possible to submit a working holidaymaker application. Four countries were suspended on the basis of significant operational pressures where the numbers were so large that huge queues were forming, and an agreement was made through a Memorandum of Understanding process that we would suspend the consideration process to enable us to reduce the queues and then open the process up again if a Memorandum of Understanding had been signed with individual countries. What it meant was that they would accept their nationals back if they were found to have abused the system. That process is still under way for those four countries where we have suspended. The other country where we have a suspension for working holidaymakers is Pakistan. We have had significant problems with the visa operation in Pakistan since we suspended the service in 2002 because of the tensions between India and Pakistan. We have reintroduced all of the categories over the last couple of years. We tried to resume a full service in May last year but application numbers were so significant that we were forced to restrict categories once again. The working holidaymaker is the last category that we are going to open and we do plan to open that soon now that we have managed to reduce all of the queues in all of the other categories.

Q424 Mr Clappison: Mr Wilson, I would like to begin with quite a specific phenomenon which seems to have been revealed in December of last year. The Home Office revealed in response to a freedom of information request that 108,904 people were removed from Britain between 1 November 2003 and 30 September 2005, but of those 108,000 or so people, 3,497 had been removed before. Some of them had been moved on a number of occasions and one had been removed on seven separate occasions. That is a fairly substantial number. Can you explain how this comes about?

Mr Wilson: You are saying that 3,500 were reported as having been removed on more than one occasion, are you?

Q425 Mr Clappison: Out of the 108,000, 3,497 had already been removed once or more.

Mr Wilson: I am afraid that is not really a question for me.

Mr Dowdall: Certainly from a border control perspective there will be occasions where, for example, individuals will have arrived in the UK clandestinely. We will have been able to identify and remove and certainly remove quicker on the basis of where we have non-asylum cases. However, some may well try and return to the UK either clandestinely or they may well then go and get a visa to look to come back to the UK. However, where, for example, we have removed somebody and, let us say, they do go to apply for a visa or entry, we will have evidence of that information and be able to make a judgment accordingly on those circumstances.

Q426 Mr Clappison: Do you have any break down of the figures as between those who come back through a visa and those who come back clandestinely?

Mr Dowdall: No, I do not. It may be something that we could refer to one of my colleagues on enforcement and removals who is also appearing as a witness.

Q427 Mr Clappison: Could you tell us how many of the irregular migrants who your work covers are removed from the UK?

Mr Dowdall: Again, that would be an area for my colleagues in enforcement and removals who I understand are appearing as witnesses in a later session here.

Q428 Mr Clappison: I think last year some Home Office research was published trying to give an idea of the number of people who were in the UK illegally. I understand there was a paper published suggesting that in 2001 there were 430,000 people in the UK irregularly or illegally, however you want to put it. Do you have a more up-to-date figure on that?

Mr Hudson: That is the only figure that the Home Office produced. It was a piece of research that was done to provide an estimate and so far as I am aware it has not been updated since.

Q429 Mr Streeter: We have just heard that in that same period the number of visa applications has increased by 50%. Is it likely that the number of people here illegally or irregularly may also have risen by 50%?

Mr Hudson: Without doing some further research I do not think we can be clear whether that is necessarily the case. The increase in visas may be the category where we can be more confident that they would have returned. I do not think the fact that the number of visas has gone up means, as a direct automatic result, there must be more people here illegally.

Ms Campbell: The number of visas issued has risen but the number of people refused has also risen. Of the 2.5 million applications last year, we refused over 480,000 visas. That gives an indication of the levels of control that we are applying through the overseas visa operation.

Q430 Mr Clappison: On this figure of people who are here illegally, do you have any sense of whether this figure is going up or down?

Mr Hudson: There has not been any further research.

Q431 Mr Clappison: Do you have any sense at all on that?

Mr Hudson: It is very difficult to produce any. It would be a guess to say whether we think it is going up or down. We may have different views amongst the witnesses here. We do know that we have got much more robust systems in place for seeking to identify abuse and to tackle it. For example, the Certificate of Approval in relation to marriage provisions has reduced the number of suspect marriages that have been reported. I would not venture a view on whether it has gone up or down without a lot more work being done to investigate it.

Q432 Mr Clappison: You were asked earlier on about the number of people who had come in from the accession countries and they are coming in completely legally but they are not part of this illegal figure of people who are here illegally. You mentioned the figure of 300,000 and I am not sure what period that was over. In any event, the number of people who come in from the former accession countries has greatly exceeded the estimate we were given a couple of years ago of about 13,000. With the numbers who are coming in from the former accession countries completely legally, do you get a sense that this was a once-and-for-all-shift of people coming here or is that number increasing? Was there an unplugging and people came here who wanted to come here or have the numbers been increasing over the years?

Mr Hudson: The scheme only came into effect in May 2004. Over that period the numbers coming have remained fairly steady. There have been seasonal variations because people might come to this country, for example, in the summer time and return later in the autumn, but overall the numbers have stayed at a fairly constant level. Other countries have not opened their labour markets up in the same way that we have. I do not know when they will do that and what impact that would have.

Q433 Mr Clappison: We are one of only three countries in the EU who took that decision. The other two are relatively small countries. It is difficult to say what effect other countries over time opening up their borders will have on this figure.

Mr Hudson: And the various economic performances of their countries which may affect where people decide to go to work.

Q434 Mr Clappison: They are here completely legally.

Mr Hudson: Yes, if they are here with valid documentation.

Q435 Chairman: How long have you been in your job?

Mr Hudson: Almost two years.

Q436 Chairman: So you covered the period of the massive EU migration.

Mr Hudson: Yes.

Q437 Chairman: When you started two years ago you were told by the Government there were going to be 13,000 people a year and now it is massively bigger than that. Is it part of your role to say we have got far more people coming in than we anticipated, therefore other parts of the system, where they are bringing in, for example, skilled workers from outside the EU, we had better clamp down on straightaway?

Mr Hudson: Yes. Various estimates were produced. The one I saw was a 50,000 estimate but that was based on net migration. The actual numbers have been very much bigger. The advantage of the Worker Registration Scheme is not just that we are able to monitor total numbers but also to monitor into which sectors people are going to work, which means that in some other low skilled routes we have cut back on the size of the scheme that we have operated. So we are trying to take a view of where the pressures are for labour outside of the EU.

Q438 Chairman: That is really helpful. Would you be able to provide the Committee with the documentation which shows how, as the EU accession state migration has increased, there have been cuts in quotas from other countries? I think the Committee would be very interested to see how the system responded to that increased migration.

Mr Hudson: There was a sector-based scheme for hospitality which was closed, the quota for food processing was reduced and the application for the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme has also been reduced. We could provide any further documentation if we have it but that is broadly speaking the picture.

Chairman: If you could give us the numbers and timing et cetera I think that would be enormously useful.

Q439 Steve McCabe: I want to go back for a second to the European Community Association Agreements which I think we touched on earlier and particular Mr Sutton's investigations after all the fuss. I understand that one of the outcomes was the suggestion that caseworkers were being given conflicting messages. On the one hand they were being encouraged to process people because of economic demand and on the other hand the overriding government message was to restrict inappropriate applications. The suggestion emerging from Sutton seemed to be that caseworkers were caught in the middle with conflicting messages. How do you communicate the government message to caseworkers and front-line staff so that they cannot be in any doubt about it? You will recall the suggestion was that people were accepting applications and documents without giving thorough attention to them and perhaps even when knowing they might not be wholly accurate.

Mr Hudson: Without wishing to rehearse all of the background to that particular incident, we have followed up on the recommendations in the Sutton reports and, in particular, the importance of all instructions and guidance to caseworkers being cleared at senior level. One of the problems with that incident was that there was a lack of clarity about exactly what the message should be and we have taken steps to make sure that all of our guidance is cleared at senior level, so there should not be any ambiguity about precisely what the process is and what is expected of caseworkers in determining applications.

Q440 Steve McCabe: When did that come into effect?

Mr Hudson: I think the Sutton reports were in mid-2004 and it was soon after those reports that we began a process which I am personally involved in of clearing at my level casework instructions and guidance to caseworkers. If there is any doubt about if there are bits of the process where we have backlogs then it is also my responsibility to say precisely how those backlogs should be tackled. Again, any instructions that are given about the clearance of backlogs would be down to me to issue. There should not be any lack of clarity.

Q441 Steve McCabe: As far as that particular explanation is concerned, that should not happen again, should it?

Mr Hudson: Yes. That is why these processes are in place, to try to prevent it. I hope we will not have a recurrence.

Q442 Steve McCabe: I understand that out of 703 allegations of internal corruption or misconduct levels of staff in the IND - and, in fact, these are all cases that have been reported to the Security and Anti-Corruption Unit within the last five years - only 139 cases have led to prosecutions or disciplinary action. I wondered how you explain that and how it compares to other parts of the immigration control system. It seems a remarkably small figure to me.

Mr Wilson: It depends how you look at it.

Q443 Steve McCabe: 703 and 139 dealt with seems to me to be a small figure.

Mr Wilson: You must understand that allegations are properly investigated. Immigration Service staff are investigated, which is all I can speak about, very thoroughly. It is not always the case that there is a case to answer and in very many cases these complaints or allegations are made maliciously, there is no evidence to support them, but certainly in every case where there has been evidence uncovered that person has been dealt with under the disciplinary procedures or under the judicial procedures.

Q444 Steve McCabe: How does your experience compare with other parts of the immigration control system? I am trying to find out if this level is roughly the same across the system. Only 139 dealt with cases sounds rather small to me. There are still about 270 under investigation and this is over a five-year period. That would suggest that some of the investigations are taking some time. I just wondered how that compared with the rest of the system.

Ms Campbell: From an overseas perspective, we have a very small number of allegations of corruption that occur during the course of the year against staff working overseas, and during 2005 we have had two cases taken to prosecution, so our numbers are very small in comparison.

Mr Dowdall: Where allegations are made, we ensure that they are properly and thoroughly investigated. As Mr Wilson has said, the nature of the allegations come in from various means, some of which can be malicious, but all of these allegations are properly investigated and, where appropriate, also referred to criminal authorities.

Q445 Steve McCabe: How appropriate do you think it is for registrars, colleges, employers and airlines to be involved in immigration control, particularly when they do not have specific training for that purpose and where there could be a conflict of interest between the immigration control demands and the commercial interests?

Mr Dowdall: We seek to work very closely with carriers and with ports authorities, indeed with other agencies; that is hugely important. In terms of conflicts with commercial issues, the carriers recognise that they have a responsibility to their passengers and a responsibility for the security of their aircraft. It is quite important that some of the issues which are important to us from an immigration point of view may also be of interest to them in terms of who they are carrying, et cetera. So certainly something that we do is value that engagement that we have with the carriers. Naturally enough, we will come into conflict from time to time. I think the important thing is that we have properly articulated what our position is, that the carriers can understand that and we work to try and come up with sensible solutions. We could not really do our work unless we worked very closely with that community.

Mr Hudson: In terms of some of the in-country sponsors you were talking about, registrars and education establishments, the proposals that the Government has published this morning place an increased emphasis on the role of sponsors. I would characterise this more as working together with sponsors to ensure that we have good information about whether people are actually being employed where they said they would be employed and being educated where they said they would be. I do not see it as transferring responsibility for immigration control to those partners. It is about having a much closer working relationship and then for us being able to act upon the information that they give us about cases where people have left the employment and they do not know where they are. It is about having that much better communication so that sponsors have a real stake in the way that the system works, because it is in their interests to get people who are suited to be educated at their establishment or to work in their employment.

Q446 Mr Benyon: A lot of airlines are complaining about the likely impact of e-border requirements and having to provide data to the IND and particularly the cost implications. Is it your understanding that the Government is going to pick up some of these costs or is this going to be imposed on the airlines?

Mr Dowdall: Much of that is still being worked through. In terms of e-borders, I can speak on it as a user of the tools that e-borders will provide rather than a programme management perspective. In terms of context, what we are seeking to achieve with e-borders is not very different to what many other countries are looking to do as well in terms of an ability to be able to gather information for us to be able to risk assess that information properly. We are certainly looking, through e-borders and through our Border Management Programme, to provide to the industry a single window by which they can provide their commercial information to us. There are real benefits to the industry there because at the moment the e-industry will argue that they are providing that information separately to us, to Revenue and Customs, to the police and others and so a benefit for the industry is to be able to provide that information once. What we are working through with the e-borders programme at the moment is the best means by which they will provide that information once, ie do they push that information to the agencies or is it pulled from them, and all of that will have an impact overall on what that cost will be. When we go out to tender we will work through with potential tenderers the best means of being able to do that and in the discussions around that we have talked constantly to the carriers about the best way to do it and the best way to mitigate those costs and we will continue to do so. So decisions on the extent to which Government will pay are still detailed as work that is being worked through within the e-borders programme.

Q447 Mr Benyon: Can you give us a brief indication of the timescales here? When is this tendering process due to come about? When should the airlines feel that the Government will have decided whether they are going to pick up any of the tab?

Mr Dowdall: The intention is that e-borders will start to deliver its range of tools from 2008 onwards; there is a window of 2008 through to around about 2040 or 2050. Therefore, that procurement exercise will be starting later this year and leading us up to 2008. Even prior to any formal tendering process there have been, and still will be, discussions going on with the industry in terms of identifying very clearly what our user requirements are and what is reasonable and sensible and proportionate to be looking to get from the carriers.

Q448 Mr Benyon: Looking at the reasons why people are refused entry, in what circumstances are passengers who have been prevented from travelling to the UK referred to the relevant authorities in those countries if, for example, trafficking, fraudulent documents or whatever is identified?

Ms Campbell: Perhaps I could give you an example of how we operate in Ghana in relation specifically to forged documents. We have engaged in a programme of work jointly with the Ghanaian authorities to look to drive down the use of fraudulent documents in visa applications. We notify the authorities when forged documents are provided in support of visa applications and they then take action against those individuals. Since we have engaged in this programme with them over the last 18 months they have prosecuted 1,400 individuals for providing forged documents in relation to their visa applications. That is a very good example of how we can drive down abuse jointly. Clearly there are issues to work out before we can enter into one of those sorts of programmes. We have to look very carefully at the likely response of the Ghanaian authorities and make sure that the penalties are of an equal level to those in the UK and proportionate to the offence that had occurred. The programme is working very well and it has had a very positive impact on the numbers of forged documents now being produced in support of visa applications.

Q449 Mr Benyon: Where a government is acting with you and is clamping down on the kind of fraud you can sense the benefit here and in the number of applications, can you not?

Ms Campbell: We can, yes.

Mr Dowdall: In addition to the work of UK Visas we have our Airline Liaison Officer Network operating in 32 locations across the world. They provide primarily advice to carriers in terms of the carrier's ability to identify incorrect documents of passengers. We have got our liaison officers based in both source countries but also in key transit countries across the world and in Europe and again there we can identify very clearly the forms of abuse and that also assists the carriers in knowing who they can bring to the UK.

Q450 Mr Benyon: For months now I have been asking questions about an investigation you have been running into an alleged abuse of the ancestral visa route from Zimbabwe. I have yet to be given any real proof that people have been identified as fraudulently claiming documents. All I know is that a lot of legitimate people seeking to come to this country under a long-established route have been held in a state of limbo. I know that the backlog is now being dealt with and I know that a number of people have now been given indefinite leave to remain. It seems to me a very blunt instrument when a large number of perfectly innocent people are disadvantaged for a very long length of time, with considerable difficulties, for example, travelling back to Zimbabwe to bury a relative or visit somebody who is sick because their travel documents are locked up under this great big umbrella of a title that an investigation is taking place. It has taken an enormously long time. Is this a typical example of one particular route where there is a very long and drawn out investigation or is it more complicated than I imagine?

Mr Hudson: I do not know whether it is more complicated. It is certainly true that this was one area where we felt there was potential abuse of the immigration control system in relation to the production of birth certificates in these cases. It may well be that we could have got on more quickly with identifying that abuse and dealing with the cases. As it was, we wanted to make sure, before progressing with the casework for them, that we were quite clear about the potential abuse and what action we would have to take to try to identify those cases which should not be granted under the UK ancestry provisions. We held the cases for a while whilst we were investigating. That does mean that they were not being processed and decisions were not being made. We identified what action we needed to take in terms of further investigations and then we began the casework process again. A number of them have now been granted either limited or indefinite leave to remain, but there are still some cases where we have referred them to our intelligence unit for further investigation to satisfy ourselves that the applications are genuine and that the supporting documentation supports the claim being made. It is very difficult to put a limit on how much time one should take to try to satisfy oneself that the correct procedures are being followed and that abuse is not being allowed to slip through. In other cases and in the ECAA case we referred to earlier we again had a hold on cases for several months whilst the difficulties were investigated and new guidance was prepared. It is not unusual when we do get cases of this kind where we suspect abuse that there may be delays in processing those applications. We do not seek to extend that unduly, but we do try to make sure that we are quite clear about what has to be done before we resume the processing of them.

Q451 Mr Benyon: I am interested in the Lithuanian case that you put in your document. It appears that it is easier to obtain forged or fraudulent documents from some countries, such as Lithuania in this case, than from others. When you find patterns of fraud or forgery, do you make representations to that country and follow it up through the usual channels?

Mr Wilson: Yes, we do. It is perhaps slightly misleading to say that some documents are easier to forge in some countries than others. The countries that are targeted by the forgers and the fraudsters are the ones that they think will have the best chance of getting through the controls, which will be ones where they use the British passport first of all and then it will be European Union passports because there is less of an examination on arrival. Those are the documents that are going to be targeted. They are not necessarily easier to forge, although in today's world the production of a forged document has become much easier through modern technology. We have done a number of intelligence-led exercises looking at Lithuanian documentation and the Lithuanian Government gave us access to their records when we let them know that this was happening. In the wider European Union where the Lithuanian documentation has become a bit of a problem for all of the Member States the Lithuanians are seeking to work with the rest of the European Union in order to try and solve the problem.

Q452 Mr Benyon: A number of police forces have told us that large numbers of people are fraudulently applying from outside the EU using forged travel documents from accession states. What practical changes have you made to the scope and focus of your intelligence and counter-fraud work to deal with the challenges of EU expansion and the effects of this wider problem?

Mr Wilson: We have a first rate national forgery unit which looks at all forged documentation not just for the Immigration Service or IND but for the police forces as well. We produce guidance and training courses to almost anyone who wants it and who should have it at three levels, ie low, intermediate and high, the high one being a 12 week intensive course which is available to anybody who is on the frontline and needs that sort of expertise. We produce regular guidance. I think I have one here which was produced for the UK Presidency which goes into great detail about what sort of things to look for. All of this is made available to our frontline staff. On the Immigration Service's intranet there are examples of what to look for on forged documents. As soon as a trend becomes noticeable it is put into what is called a forgery finder, which is a detailed explanation of what to look for within a particular document and that is circulated to all frontline staff.

Q453 Mr Benyon: It is must be a constantly changing world.

Mr Wilson: It is.

Mr Hudson: I understood your question to be about how we change our approach with new areas where there may be abuse in the system and expansion of the EU is one of those areas. It is not possible to say in advance of such developments precisely where abuse might arise, but we picked up Lithuanian forged documents and then began to put in place greater numbers of checks as it became apparent that this was a route that was being used for forged documents. I do not think it is possible necessarily to prempt it, but what it is certainly possible to do and what we try to do and work with UK Visas on in terms of what may be happening overseas in relation to EU residents here is to try to track what is happening in the system in real time, to try to identify where abuse appears to be occurring, to put more focus on that area and then work out what sort of response we can develop. Certainly there is an issue about EU residency permits being sought by people abroad who may be seeking to join people who are not EU residents and that is something that we have to be aware of and try to monitor.

Mr Wilson: As we get better at it, and we are pretty good at the identification process, so it moves into other areas, such as the supporting documents required to get passports, which is a real issue and which we have touched upon previously, getting a forged birth certificate or a forged sponsorship statement or whatever, which then enables the person to get a travel document or an identity card.

Q454 Chairman: We understand that biometric data has been useful in a number of African countries in revealing attempts to get visas for people with bad immigration histories and so on. How many people have currently been subject to the production of biometric data, and is there a target for making this routine for all visa applications to this country?

Ms Campbell: Yes, there is. We currently collect fingerprint data in 11 locations and those are countries in East Africa, in Sri Lanka, in Vietnam and, most recently, in Amsterdam. During the course of the last six months of 2005, we had around 8,000 matches against the immigration and asylum fingerprint database, but, of those 8,000, over 7,500 were people who were matching against their previous visa application, so it is simply affirming that those were the same people that were travelling and around 450 that matched against asylum records in the asylum fingerprint database. Now, those would not necessarily all be people that had matched by producing documents in a different identity, but those would certainly be people that we would then want to look at more closely, and a number of them would be applicants who had produced different identity documents in the course of their visa application from those that were held centrally in the immigration and asylum fingerprint database. We have a global programme to roll out biometric capture in the visa application process throughout the whole of the world and we aim to do that by the end of 2007. We will start the main global roll-out in the summer of this year and initially it is likely to start rolling out the process throughout Europe and then will go more widely at the start of next year. We will do that because at the moment our ability to match fingerprints against the immigration database is limited by database size, so we are increasing the size of the database along with IND so that we can actually have the numbers of matches that will give us the response time that we need because we are aiming to match that fingerprint data within 30 minutes of the fingerprint being taken in an overseas environment, so the system is being built to give us that sort of response time.

Q455 Chairman: Will that fingerprint data also be available in due course internally in this country, say, if the police are seeking to identify somebody?

Ms Campbell: It will be. The data at the moment all comes back from our overseas posts and it is stored on the immigration and asylum fingerprint database, so it is available from the point of collection.

Q456 Chairman: The cost of £70 million that you gave the Committee in your evidence, is that the full cost of introducing this project or is this the capital cost?

Ms Campbell: That is the estimated capital cost.

Q457 Chairman: There has been some evidence given to us from the JCWI, and this has also come up in relation to the identity card project, that the current biometric data systems have proved less accurate with certain, what in this country would be, ethnic minorities, though obviously not in the countries they are coming from. Is there an issue here about the quality of biometric data being used for this purpose?

Ms Campbell: There is certainly no evidence that any particular group has lower-quality fingerprints than others and clearly there are issues around ----

Q458 Chairman: I should know this from your evidence, but is this solely fingerprints we are talking about here?

Ms Campbell: Fingerprints and now a digital facial image as well.

Q459 Chairman: I think it is the digital facial image which has been questioned in the ID card project as being unreliable.

Ms Campbell: We are not using that to match at the moment; we are simply using the fingerprint data to conduct the matching against the asylum database and that will be used in visa purposes as a secondary match, if we need to do that, if there is a query about the fingerprint match.

Q460 Mrs Cryer: The new rules against sham marriages in the UK impact enormously on everyone subject to immigration control who wants to marry in the UK and could just result in people going abroad for sham marriages. Is this not a disproportionate and perhaps ineffective response to the problem and should the focus not in fact be on weeding out immigration applications which do not meet the rules?

Mr Hudson: The difference of approval process has been in operation since February 2005 and the aim of that new requirement which has been reflected in the reduced number of suspicious marriages reported to IND was to try to ensure that people who were seeking to get married in this country had a proper immigration status at the time. I think you were saying that that may have resulted in people going abroad to get married rather than do so here.

Q461 Mrs Cryer: Yes, that is right.

Mr Hudson: Well, that is one of the displacement risks, I think, with any policy that you introduce, that there is a risk that, if you tackle what is perceived to be the current concern, people will find other ways of getting round it. With an expanding EU with an increasing number of people with free movement, clearly there is the potential there, as I mentioned earlier, for people to see that as a potential way of getting round this requirement. I think we would still say that it was sensible and it has proved to be effective in the terms in which it was introduced, but it does not mean that we do not have to keep looking for other potential areas of abuse.

Q462 Mrs Cryer: So at the moment you would not alter it?

Mr Hudson: From our perspective, it is working very well, very effectively.

Q463 Mrs Cryer: You have to be married now at a particular registry office, do you not?

Mr Hudson: There are some designated registrars, yes, within the country and you have to have the status in this country of either six months' leave or more to be able to be granted a certificate of approval.

Q464 Chairman: Could you expand on the EU point? To what extent would it be possible for somebody simply to contract a marriage in another EU country with an EU citizen, possibly a British citizen in another EU country, and then gain right to entry? This seems to be a measure which it would not take a huge amount of intelligence to circumvent.

Mr Hudson: Yes, there is that possibility clearly. The point I was making was really more about the fact that there is a much larger EU, a much larger population with freer movement and rights to bring dependants into the EU and that is potentially an area we will have to monitor.

Q465 Chairman: Yes, potentially have to monitor. How would your systems pick up that?

Ms Campbell: Anybody who is contracting a marriage overseas with a view to bringing a partner back into the UK would be required to apply for a family permit.

Q466 Chairman: You say "overseas"?

Ms Campbell: In any country of the world. If they married a UK national and wanted---

Q467 Chairman: Including other EU countries?

Ms Campbell: Yes, and wanted to bring that third country national into the UK to exercise Treaty rights, they would be required to apply for an EEA family permit at an overseas visa mission and we monitor those numbers of people who are applying for those. We have conducted one training session for entry clearance managers from all of the EEA entry clearance posts earlier this year in Amsterdam to highlight potentials for abuse and to look at how we can tackle those, and we have got another conference coming up in April with exactly the same theme to make sure everybody is fully aware of the potential and that they are monitoring that closely.

Q468 Mrs Cryer: Mandie, I just want to ask you to reflect on what we used to have which was the primary purpose rule. A number of us were elected in 1997 or post-1997 and, therefore, we have no experience of how that rule used to work, so I wonder if you could just explain it to us, but perhaps I can put it formally. Some people in this country are forced into marriage where the sole, or main, purpose is to get their foreign spouse into the UK. Do you think that the old primary purpose rule, or something like it, should be brought back to allow marriage-based entry clearance applications to be refused in circumstances like these?

Ms Campbell: Forced marriage is an issue that is being looked at very closely. There is a joint Forced Marriage Unit staffed jointly by the Foreign Office and the Home Office and in the course of a year they have around 300 referrals to them of individuals who, in a variety of methods, allege that forced marriage is taking place. Our office in Islamabad is perhaps the largest operation that deals with forced marriage-type enquiries and they deal with, as the evidence indicated, about 100 cases a year. The difficulty with handling these cases in terms of the sensitivity is often the individual concerned, the victim, does not want to make public the fact that they are being forced into a marriage because obviously a lot of it is family pressure to do that, so the issue of the primary purpose rule actually would not make a great deal of difference in that respect because clearly in a number of cases the family and the evidence would support the marriage, but the individual might privately be telling us that they do not support the marriage and, unless they can actually put that information into the public domain, when it went to an appeal hearing we would simply have a weight of evidence which said that the whole family, including the individual, supported it, but we knew privately that the victim did not. In that circumstance, actually having a primary purpose rule would not avail us because, if we refused on primary purpose, we would still be expected to adduce evidence as to why we believed that that was the case. Therefore, it is really a question more widely of education campaigns and it is something certainly that the Forced Marriage Unit do, go out into the community to try and explain the circumstances around forced marriage and what we can do in terms of offering help and support to try and prevent it.

Q469 Mrs Cryer: I think the numbers dealt with by the Unit are the tip of the iceberg. I think probably MPs, in their advice surgeries, deal with just as many in the course of a year. If I can just move on a little bit, how do you gather and use evidence about the types of abuse which frequently recur in this sort of application, such as forging a sponsor's signature, and that is presumably where the girl does not want to marry and she refuses to sign the document, so someone in the family does it for her, supplying fraudulent wage slips and transferring houses from one family member to another to make it appear that there is adequate accommodation for this spouse coming in?

Ms Campbell: Certainly we do gather that sort of information and intelligence. We have a dedicated unit in Islamabad with a dedicated and separate database. Obviously the information is very sensitive and people do call through to the mission and purport to be other people to try and get information, so we are very alive to the fact that there are lots of methods being deployed to try and put a picture forward which might not necessarily be the case, so we do collect that information. The team is very knowledgeable about the sorts of abuses which might occur and they keep records that they refer back to in subsequent applications. In my evidence, I referred to the sort of miscellaneous category that we get involved in and those are the sorts of cases where perhaps we might have prevented a forced marriage from taking place, but then we have to be very alive to the fact that other members of the family might then seek to make visa applications to come in who might want to cause harm to individuals, so we do take account of that as well, so we are keeping a much broader look across the visa applications base to make sure that we are picking up on those sorts of issues.

Q470 Mrs Cryer: I have certainly seen many fraudulent wage slips. Where you think there are fraudulent wage slips in that the person who is acting as the sponsor should not be because he or she has not actually got a job, but there is a pretence that they have one, are you able to cross-check with the Inland Revenue that he or she is actually paying income tax?

Ms Campbell: We have a very developed relationship with Chris Hudson's part of the business, in Work Permits UK, where we can have checks made in the country, particularly of employers, to see whether the person is employed as claimed, and Chris might want to say a bit about his compliance team. There is quite extensive work that goes out to actually verify whether people are claiming fraudulently.

Mr Hudson: We can undertake compliance checks. If these cases are referred to us by entry clearance officers, we can undertake compliance checks with employers to establish whether or not people are working as claimed, but we also conduct marriage interviews ourselves in-country where we suspect that things may not be quite as presented to us in the original application and that is a sort of way in which we try to test out whether or not there are other things to be investigated in terms of validity of the documentation submitted with the application.

Q471 Mrs Cryer: Can you cross-check with the Inland Revenue?

Mr Hudson: I would have to check that. Honestly, I am not quite sure what we are able to check directly with the Inland Revenue.

Q472 Mrs Cryer: It would seem to be a very simple way of finding out whether a person was employed or not.

Mr Hudson: Can we check on that and let the Committee know, please?

Chairman: Yes, thank you very much. That would be helpful.

Q473 Mrs Cryer: What mechanisms do you have in place for handling settlement applications sensitively, and we have gone over this a little bit already, when they involve forced marriage and how could these be improved?

Mr Hudson: Where they involve forced marriages, I am not sure what we would do other than conduct an interview. If we had suspicions that a marriage was not a genuine one, then we would conduct an interview. If you are talking about how we would try and conduct those sensitively, again I am afraid I have not got the detail in terms of what we might do, but I hope we would make sure that there was the appropriate person conducting the interview with appropriate training, but it is something I would like to provide more detail on separately, if I may, in terms of our arrangements for that.

Q474 Mr Winnick: If I can follow up what Ann Cryer has been speaking about, and I think you probably know that my colleague has been doing some very useful work in exposing practices which we all deplore, one of the illustrations which has been given to us, particularly from UK Visas, is of a woman who has been issued a visa to settle in the UK for two years, returns to the country of origin with a spouse on the pretext of taking a holiday, that is, the spouse pretending there is going to be a holiday, but while there, the sponsor, who would be her husband, destroys the passport of his wife and returns to the UK alone. How far is this practice, as far as you know, going on?

Ms Campbell: It is happening, but the numbers are very small in comparison to those that we deal with in relation to reluctant sponsors, so I would say that in the course of 100 applications in a year from Islamabad, for example, the vast majority would be reluctant sponsors and a very small number would be the abandoned spouse situation. Those cases would be dealt with generally by the consulate part of the mission and the visa section part for which I am responsible would be looking at those that were making visa applications, so it is a slightly separate focus for us.

Q475 Mr Winnick: So the purpose of this racketeering would be what? They bring someone in for marriage, then they do what I have just said and you commented on, but what then happens? Do they try then to bring someone else in?

Ms Campbell: Potentially they could. I do not have the knowledge of the reasons behind why they do that. It could be a range of reasons from the person not wanting to continue with that marriage and thinking that the easiest way actually to end that marriage would be simply to return the person back to the country they came from.

Q476 Mr Winnick: Just pursuing this point about marriage for the moment, would you accept that most marriages or most applications on the basis of marriage are genuine?

Ms Campbell: The vast majority of the cases that we deal with are granted entry to come into the country for marriage and settlement.

Q477 Mr Winnick: That is the diplomatic answer! Does that, therefore, mean that you accept that those applications are genuine?

Ms Campbell: Well, I accept that the individuals qualify under the immigration rules to come here either as a spouse or as a fiancé to settle here which is the test that we have to apply.

Q478 Mr Winnick: If you had to give any sort of figure, and it may be difficult, but if we take the Indian Sub-Continent, the number of applications presumably is the largest, am I right, for marriage?

Ms Campbell: I am sorry, I have not got figures here of the numbers.

Q479 Mr Winnick: If we did take the Indian Sub-Continent, can you give any sort of figures for what you would consider to be just outright bogus applications using marriage simply as an excuse to come to the UK?

Ms Campbell: I have not got the figures in front of me of the numbers that we refuse each year from the Indian Sub-Continent.

Q480 Mr Winnick: Sorry, how many you refuse?

Ms Campbell: How many applications to come here as husbands or wives are refused each year, but I can certainly supply those to the Committee afterwards.

Q481 Mr Winnick: Do you think it is a growing problem or that, because of the way in which immigration controls have become more effective hopefully, it has become less of one?

Ms Campbell: The overall application numbers to come to the UK have been growing year on year and, within those, I would expect that the settlement applications would be growing proportionately. As I indicated earlier in my evidence, the refusal rate more generally across the whole of the immigration categories has been rising year on year alongside the rise in application numbers.

Q482 Mr Winnick: I have one other question to Mr Hudson as I think it is more your responsibility. Where someone comes in, a wife, who is the victim of domestic violence during the probationary period of a visa, she cannot claim benefits - is that the position?

Mr Hudson: I am sorry, but access to benefits is a bit outside my personal responsibilities. It may depend on the circumstances.

Q483 Mr Winnick: So whose responsibility would it be?

Mr Hudson: Well, I think we would have to look into it. You asked about access to benefits in those circumstances, and I would need to check on the benefit rules, but normally I guess someone comes to this country on the basis that they will not have access to public funds, but there may be some benefits and I need to check what access is available in those circumstances.

Q484 Mr Winnick: Obviously, as we know, it is sometimes spotlighted in the press, local as well as national, women who are the subject, once they come over here, of violence, indeed not only from the husband, but unfortunately sadly in some cases from the husband's family, so how is that dealt with generally by immigration authorities?

Mr Hudson: There is a concession that ministers have announced about how to deal with domestic violence cases and the aim there is to make sure that the person concerned is protected as much as possible and that their position here is not threatened as a result of the domestic violence, so again there are some specific provisions. I think it is a concession rather than something in the immigration rules to deal with cases where domestic violence is involved and again we can provide those details, if you would like.

Q485 Mr Winnick: Since clearly the marriage is not going as it should obviously with domestic violence, what would happen to the woman concerned? Would she be asked to leave the UK or what?

Mr Hudson: No, that is why we have the concession in place, the details of which I am afraid I do not have with me, but we can send those. It is because of that that there is a concession there to deal with precisely that situation, that it would be wrong for a woman to continue to be subjected to domestic violence because she feared her immigration status would be impacted, so that is why ministers have put in place a concession for those particular types of case.

Q486 Chairman: Children travelling alone, I do not know who wants to answer questions about this, but I know that you have had a pilot project in Jamaica. What did we learn from that, why did you choose Jamaica and what are the concerns about children travelling alone?

Mr Dowdall: If I can pick up on the Kingston pilot, that is some work that was going on for three months and completed in January. The formal analysis is going on at the moment and I am happy to share that with the Committee once we have completed that analysis. There are two things really. Firstly, with the Kingston pilot, we wanted, working with the carriers, to set really a gold standard, if you like, of duty of care in terms of responsibility for children, identifying those who were travelling alone, who was responsible for them both in their home country and also where they are destined for, so we gathered information from the particular carriers coming out of Kingston and were able to undertake some checks on those. The initial evidence was that we did not uncover trafficking, although we did not expect trafficking in this particular instance, but what we wanted to do here was to test the feasibility of such an activity with the carriers to see how well it worked, how well the relationship worked in terms of gathering that data from the carriers and being able to analyse that and provide feedback to the carriers. We provided training to the carrier staff and that was provided by the Immigration Service and the Metropolitan Police to help the check-in staff effectively identify triggers, if you like, which would raise questions in their minds, questions of doubt and they then had a hotline on which they would contact the UK for us then to be able to follow up. Now, that follow-up could include discussions with whichever adult was checking in with that child or who was checking that child in. It was about testing and proof of concept. Following the analysis, the intention is to go wider, particularly into areas and other destination routes which we think are of higher risk.

Q487 Chairman: What is the issue you are trying to get at here? Is it that these children are vulnerable or that this is skirting around the immigration rules, that they are going to be passed off in this country as being the children of parents that they are not or what exactly is the problem you are trying to tackle?

Mr Dowdall: It is a combination of things here. One is about the vulnerability of children and the concern that certainly our ministers have had that certain carriers, for example, will bring children, very young children, into the UK and effectively these children are then deposited at a UK airport, unclear exactly who has brought them or indeed who it is that is meeting them, so there are whole issues around that kind of vulnerability. In addition to that, there are other issues from an immigration perspective that we are interested in in terms of children being brought into the country purportedly with their parents, but not is the outcome. Mandie can speak probably a bit more in terms of some of the visa issues associated with that. It is really to tackle a number of issues and it also is to help us to identify whether or not there is trafficking into the UK. We had some empirical work that was done back in 2003 which was undertaken principally by the Metropolitan Police which we were involved in, as indeed were social services, known as PCC in terms of identifying whether children were being trafficked into the UK. There was not the evidence there to support trafficking, but I think we are constantly wary and constantly concerned about our duty of care in protecting vulnerable children.

Q488 Mr Benyon: A number of recent cases of child abuse or crime cases have exposed something I confess I did not know about, a much more cultural acceptance in some parts of the world that children will be sent to a country like this to stay with a distant relative and to enjoy education. Is there any form of tracking of what happens to them, how long this category is likely to stay, whether they then go back to their country of origin or whether they then morph into some different kind of category in immigration terms as they get older?

Ms Campbell: From the policing perspective, we have changed policies a couple of times in the last couple of years. First of all, in August 2004 we introduced photographs on visas for all passengers travelling to the UK and that includes children so that, even if a group of children were travelling on a parent's passport, they would have to have an individual visa vignette which showed their photograph so that we could link the child to the application. Also, from last month we again changed the visa process so that now any child travelling to the UK has to demonstrate, at the point of their visa application, either that they are travelling with their parent or that their parent has given permission to somebody for them to travel with them and what reception arrangements are available for them in the UK, and that the person travelling with them, their passport details are contained within the child's visa so that the adult who is making the application is inextricably linked. At that point obviously we test the intentions for the child travelling and in the vast majority of cases it is simply children accompanying their parents on holidays, but the provisions are there to ensure that, when children are coming for other purposes, we can actually link them directly back to the point of visa application and show that we have examined the purposes for them coming and that the care arrangements are sufficient for the reasons that they are coming into the country.

Q489 Mr Benyon: So if the parents then go home, the child is left and you have no system then of identifying the ones that are left behind?

Ms Campbell: In terms of coming into the country in the first place, the child would be prevented from travelling if they tried to embark without the adult whose details were contained on their visa, so that is an important first step to make sure that children do not get visas and then are simply sent off on their own across the world.

Q490 Chairman: We have had evidence from a group based in this country from the African community who acknowledge that there is trafficking and there has been exploitation and abuse of young African children being brought to this country. They have argued very strongly that, if you are going to tackle that, you have to work with the African community resident in this country. What work is going on with the African community in Britain to tackle these issues?

Mr Hudson: I am afraid I do not know what work is currently going on on that and with that particular group. I was just reflecting on the previous discussion about how we can track through whether people do go to the course of study that they say they are going to if they are children and, if they move on to some other form of status in this country, how we track that through. I think that is something that we hope that the new system will help us to deal with, that we will have much better co-ordination with the agencies involved, such as the education establishments, about whether people are doing what they say they are doing, but I am afraid I do not have any details with me at the moment of our contacts with community groups on that score.

Q491 Chairman: This is a rather general point, but on this issue, Mr Winnick's questions about domestic violence and Mrs Cryer's questions about forced marriage, these are complicated situations in every case in which some individual human beings are very vulnerable. Is it unfair of me to say that I get the impression that IND sort of says, "Our bit is just about whether they get them into the country and there aren't many connections between us and the other organisations that need to be dealing with other aspects of what's happening to these people"?

Mr Hudson: I do not think it is entirely fair. I am not very well prepared to deal with this particular focus of interest, but, for example, and I know you are not looking at asylum, but there have been some problems with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. I know that we have been working very carefully with local authorities and social services departments there to try to join up much better with them in terms of how those children are cared for and looked after while in this country. Now, it may be that there is some more work we need to do here to take that on into the managed migration routes and to build up stronger links with local authorities and community groups to make sure, as you say, that we are gaining their support in dealing with these cases, but also they are helping us in dealing with the immigration control aspects because there may still be immigration control issues that will need to be tackled.

Mr Dowdall: In relation to children, there is, and has been, quite a bit of work with IND in relation to other government departments, social services, the Met Police and others. To give an example, there is a joint IND and DfES task force to deal with issues of children and, as part of some of that work, the development of a national register of unaccompanied children and again that is some work with the DfES and with local authorities. I think it is a recognition that we are part of the equation and that certainly, whilst we are dealing with children, for example, at the immigration control, we have a duty of care, but, following that, then we are part of a supporting network, if you like, where other agencies clearly have the lead, but we have information which is quite important that we can gather at the outset because at that point there we are likely to have that child in front of us and, if we have any doubts, we can raise them at that stage.

Q492 Mr Malik: Just on student visas, I have two or three quick questions, I hope. I have a quote here from UKCOSA, whom you will be familiar with, and they say that, "neither we nor, to the best of our knowledge, anyone else has any reliable data on the scale of immigration abuse via the student route - though a number of unsubstantiated or misleading statements have been made over the last couple of years". Is it not true that your own data also suggests that only a handful of students fail to attend the college mentioned in their visa application and may be in breach of their conditions of leave? Is the Government's focus, based on what I have just said of abuse in this area, justified given the scale I have just spoken about?

Ms Campbell: Perhaps I can start from a visa perspective. We created a Home Office-chaired joint Education Task Force last year so that we could work very closely with the education sector to look at these sorts of issues, and UK Visas chairs a visa work stream as part of that work with the education sector. Within that work stream, we have shared quite extensive data with the sector about the sorts of abuse that we have detected in relation to student applications overseas and we are using that to develop our approach with the sector, both asking the sector for assistance in developing their acceptance letters and enrolment letters so that we can make sure they are asking for all the right information and, in turn, giving the sector evidence of the sorts of abuses that we are seeing. As an example of the levels of abuse, in August and September last year in Lagos, in one of our application posts, we verified just over 6,000 student visa applications and found over 1,000 forged documents in support of those 6,000 applications, so the abuse is quite significant. We are certainly sharing that information with the sector so that they can have a better feel of the type of environment that we are working in overseas.

Q493 Mr Malik: Are you saying that the data is not there because of the type of data that is being collected, the kind of intelligence and the systems that are in operation? Is that what you are saying?

Ms Campbell: What we have at the moment is extensive data of the sort of abuse which we detect in an overseas environment. What we have not had is information about how people behave once they are in the country if they have been successful in obtaining a student visa. We started to do lots of targeted exercise work where we follow up with individual colleges and universities to check compliance of visas that we have issued and there is also the joint notification project that we have been running with the sector where a number of colleges and universities have volunteered to give us confirmation information about whether people are complying when they come to the country, and that is due to report imminently on the success of that, but obviously the whole thrust of the new system, as announced this morning, is around linking the individual who obtains a visa to the individual college or university and then a developed relationship with that education provider so that the education provider will tell us if the person then does not comply routinely with the terms of their visa.

Q494 Mr Malik: I suspect that you do not know the answer to this one, but have you got a percentage figure for the kind of abuse that does go on with respect to student visas?

Ms Campbell: I have given an example of the sort of levels of abuse in one post and ----

Q495 Mr Malik: That is what I was interested in, but across the board if you have a kind of feel for that, semi-anecdotal, semi-scientific.

Ms Campbell: Across the board the refusal rate for students is higher than a number of other categories and that reflects the level of abuse in the application process with large numbers of forged documents across the board both of financial supporting documents and also lots of abuse of education certificates where people coming to study have to have a pre-qualification of a level of education. I have not got an exact figure, but in looking across our sort of top visa issuing posts, the refusal rate would be around 60% in terms of the numbers of applications of students that are refused.

Mr Hudson: Could I just comment on the in-country aspect of this, I guess, really in terms of the work we have been doing to try to identify whether the colleges themselves are bona fide. It is very difficult always to say what is the actual level of abuse because you cannot measure that which you are not yet aware of, but we have undertaken visits to colleges and in some cases in the numbers of visits undertaken, about 25% of the colleges visited have been judged to be non-genuine colleges providing proper courses of education for overseas students. There is clearly abuse, though we may not know the full scale of it, but the measures that Mandie has talked about and the measures proposed in the new system to be much clearer about what are the valid colleges and to ensure there is much stronger compliance will help us to try to make sure that abuse is not extended.

Q496 Mr Malik: I think you are both saying that the answer to my question is that the Government's focus on this abuse is justified.

Mr Hudson: Yes, in my view, it is clearly an area of abuse which we have to deal with.

Q497 Mr Malik: The register of education and training providers has been running for about a year now. On what basis are you assessing its effectiveness and what are your conclusions so far?

Ms Campbell: Before Chris goes on to that, I have just been passed the actual figures of students, so perhaps I can correct, and add to, what I said previously. Last year we received 276,500 student applications and there were just over 92,000 cases refused which overall is around 33.5% of the number of applications.

Q498 Mr Malik: But is it not true that some of them are just refused simply because they are a certain age and from a certain country and nothing to do with abuse whatsoever?

Ms Campbell: Every applicant has to satisfy the immigration rules for students coming to study here. If they do not satisfy those rules, then they will be refused. There obviously are large numbers of those who have provided forged documents and fraudulent documents in support of their applications, but certainly not all of them and it will be other factors that are considered.

Mr Hudson: On the register, we certainly think there is a good stop in the right direction in setting up the register and conducting visits. A lot of colleges and education establishments moved on to the register automatically because there were not concerns about them. As I said, we have undertaken, I think, about 1,200 visits to colleges so far to establish whether they should remain on the register or not. The answer to your question really is that the proposals that the Government has published today set out a much clearer basis for a sponsor register which would include education establishments and there will be a much tighter link between people who are on that register, the education establishments that are on that register and their ability to issue sponsorship letters for students who wish to come to study at those establishments, so I think the register is a step in the right direction, but we hope that the proposals in the new system will take that a step further and create a much tighter system.

Q499 Mr Malik: Do the new controls on colleges address the practice of certain colleges charging foreign nationals several thousand pounds to facilitate their entry into the UK and then enrolling them as vocational students, but in fact they work rather than study? Of course South Yorkshire police were saying that they had come across quite a widespread scam which worked in this particular way with this loophole that exists. I do not know if you want to comment, Chris. I am sure you do.

Mr Hudson: I think, first of all, are those colleges bona fide colleges? It sounds, if they are doing what you have just described, that they are not bona fide colleges, that they should be targets for our intelligence and enforcement arrangements to close them down. As I have said already, what we want to do is get a very clear understanding of what are the bona fide education establishments and they will then need to satisfy us not just as to whether they exist as a business, but whether they are providing education of the standard they say they are going to and then we envisage having compliance officers and account managers who will be responsible for maintaining links with those organisations to ensure that they are dealing with their overseas students in the way that they said they would deal with them. There will still be, I suspect, people who will try and set themselves up as colleges and maybe indulge in the practices you have just referred to, but that is where we try and gain intelligence and then focus our enforcement capacity on dealing with it.

Q500 Mr Malik: Are there any changes which need to be brought into being to minimise these kinds of cowboy outfits that exist? Is there something that we can do or that you guys could do or is there a need for a change in legislation to deal with this particular problem? Is it something where you think you have systems in place which will eventually root it out?

Mr Hudson: We think that the proposals in the points-based document that we are publishing today will tackle this because, if people are going to bring in overseas students, they will have to be on our sponsor register. That means there will be compliance activity and account management activity focused on those establishments. That means that we are trying to make sure that the people who are genuinely bringing in overseas students are proper, bona fide organisations. I do not think we, and I am not sure if any legislation, could stop people setting up unlawfully and trying to hoodwink students in future into paying out sums of money, but we certainly expect that the arrangements proposed today will be a much tighter system and much better regulated.

Chairman: Thank you. We will move now into private session.