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

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

IMMIGRATION CONTROL

 

 

Monday 12 June 2006

SIR JOHN GIEVE, KCB and MR STEPHEN BOYS SMITH, CB

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1089 - 1137

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Monday 12 June 2006

Members present

Mr John Denham, in the Chair

Mr Jeremy Browne

Mrs Janet Dean

Bob Russell

Mr David Winnick

________________

Witnesses: Sir John Gieve, KCB, former Permanent Secretary, Home Office, and Mr Stephen Boys Smith, CB, former Director General of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, gave evidence.

Q1089 Chairman: Good afternoon, Sir John and Mr Boys Smith. Thank you very much for coming to the Committee this afternoon. We do recognise that it is very unusual for a select committee to ask officials who were in post in the past to come and give evidence but, since the foreign prisoners issue emerged at the time we were doing the inquiry into IND anyway, it was almost inevitable that we would want to raise some questions about how the situation everyone has been dealing with over the last few months first began, so we are extremely grateful to both of you. I wonder if, for the record, I could ask each of you to introduce yourselves briefly?

Sir John Gieve: I am Sir John Gieve. I was permanent secretary at the Home Office for four and a half years until Christmas last and I am now deputy governor of the Bank of England.

Mr Boys Smith: I am Stephen Boys Smith and, relevant to this inquiry, I was director general of IND from 1998 until the summer of 2002.

Q1090 Chairman: Mr Boys Smith, can I start with you because your service starts a little earlier in time? It is clear that there had been some discussions taking place about foreign national prisoners in the system back before you were in IND at around 1995 at least, but can you recall in your period, in your job, what sort of discussions were taking place about the issues confronting the Home Office because we had a significant and growing number of foreign national prisoners in the system?

Mr Boys Smith: In terms of discussions, I do not recall a great deal. You will understand that it is four years and the lapse of time is therefore considerable. The only point that I recall with any clarity is our establishment of a special team - now I think the Criminal Casework Team, but I forget the title then - which we set up in my last year or so. The work had been undertaken in different bits of the organisation, but as we were by then emerging from some of our other problems, mainly asylum related, the time had come and the resources were available to put more work into this and into better liaison with the prison service.

Q1091 Chairman: Can you recall what prompted you to set up that team because you say the work had been going on for some time? Was it an awareness that some prisoners were, even at that stage being released without being considered for deportation or was it more organisational efficiency?

Mr Boys Smith: It was a sense of the latter without, that I recall, any clarity as to what the numbers might be together, because we had been through some difficult years which you may recall, with a sense that there were a number of aspects of the immigration control taking it as a whole that were still weak. Although asylum was and remained a priority, we were determined to put increasing effort into those areas that were less than fully effective, of which this was identified as one.

Q1092 Chairman: Is it fair to deduce from what you say that, looking back at everything that was going on at that time, this just did not appear to be the most significant issue in the in tray that had to be dealt with?

Mr Boys Smith: That is absolutely right. I think it is important, if I may, to remind the Committee of the way in which asylum and all the problems associated with it were the dominant issue for IND as an organisation and the dominant issue for ministers and perhaps for the wider public discussion on immigration.

Q1093 Chairman: In retrospect, does that point to a weakness in the way in which IND or the Home Office operates or operated at that time, that one issue could assume such great importance and another issue just did not seem to be needing to attract any attention?

Mr Boys Smith: I would not see it as a weakness in the sense that we were obviously falling down on the job. Clearly, there were priorities. Asylum was the priority that we had to focus on but we were very conscious then that there were other aspects of the system that we had to work on. One of them, for example, was the weaknesses in the control in relation to abuse of marriage cases. Another was abuse of language schools. This was a third one, into all of which we were putting increasing resources but not in a way that significantly distorted the emphasis on asylum. If one goes back again to those years and understands the pressures then on IND, the balancing act was quite difficult but it was a balancing act and one that did not allow us to be simply negligent or blind as to what the other issues really were. In relation to removals, for example, over my period there was a very considerable increase in the number of asylum removals but also in relation to non-asylum removals, so again we were trying to move forward in a constructive way but reflecting the proper ministerial priority on asylum.

Sir John Gieve: IND has been recovering for some years from a near disaster at the end of the 1990s when we did lose control of the asylum intake. The first evidence of that was a huge backlog of cases which needed to be dealt with and, under Stephen and his team in 2000, 2001 and 2002, we did get through that backlog to get 120,000 cases in a year. The intake continued to rise until 2002. It was only in 2003 where we managed to bring it right back down again. We were then left with the problems of value for money in the asylum support regime which we had to set up on the run and with pushing through the appeals because, as we found, the initial decision was very rarely the final stage and then on to removals. Even last autumn, when I appeared before the PAC and we touched on the prisoners issue, the main burden of that hearing was on asylum and why we had not gone further in building up removals and dealing with the backlog of cases. I think it was inevitable that we should give top priority to that. Everyone knew that that meant other bits of the organisation were stretched and were not getting the attention they wanted. Progressively over the years, we started to try and backfill that, particularly in 2004, but this was a crying political and organisational demand to absolutely nail this down.

Q1094 Chairman: I think we can understand the pressure that asylum put on the system in that period of time. I am quite anxious to establish though whether the failure to act to get on top of the foreign prisoner issue was a conscious decision taken at that time that, compared with other things, it was not a priority; or whether it was something that slipped through the system because it was only possible to be dealing with asylum.

Sir John Gieve: I do not think until this last year we have had a comprehensive system for dealing with foreign national prisoners and removals. It is not the case that we had a system up and running; we stripped resources out of it to deal with asylum and so on. It was more the other way around: did we see the increasing need to put resources into this? I think we did identify that first in setting up the unit; then expanding it and, particularly in 2004 and 2005, setting up new ways to make sure that prisons notified IND and so on. The fact is that that has brought to light the famous 1,000 cases over a period which were not brought to a decision before people left prison. There was no explicit trade-off. That has only emerged at the end of the process of building up our capability on this.

Mr Boys Smith: That is my view as well. This is certainly not an area of business where we consciously said, "We wish we could put a lot more in it. If only we could but we cannot because we have other priorities." I think it is fair to say that our understanding therefore of that area of weakness, foreign prisoners, was not as clear as the understanding we undoubtedly did have of weaknesses, for example, on the abuse of marriage.

Q1095 Chairman: Can I ask you if you can recall when each of you was first told that the consequence of the weakness in the system was that some foreign prisoners, including potentially serious offenders, were being released without being considered for deportation? When you were first told that, what measures did you take to assess the nature and scale of the problem?

Mr Boys Smith: I cannot recall it being articulated, if I may say so Chairman, with quite the clarity with which you put it. I think it was much more a case of: we are not doing enough in this area of business with foreign prisoners as we ought to be doing and we would like to do. We must do more and what kind of resources, given the other pressures and demands, can we wisely put into this activity and do more. In other words, there was a sense not of the size of the problem but of the fact that there was a problem of indeterminate size.

Q1096 Chairman: There must have been someone operating within IND at a lower level than yourself who would have seen the problem as clearly as I have put it because they were dealing with it on a day to day basis. With everything that has happened since, have you any explanation as to why people at that level did not bring this problem starkly to the attention of yourselves in order that it could be dealt with, because I assume that if it was not put to you with that clarity it was certainly never put to ministers with that clarity.

Mr Boys Smith: I am reasonably confident that is the case because I think I would recall it if it had been put to ministers. I cannot, to be honest, offer a good answer on that because I simply do not know. I think it is much more the case that in relation to this issue people simply were not fully aware of, if you like, the totality of the problem. They were aware that there were people coming out of prison but nobody had measured the problem in the round in order to have a view of the kind that you are now expressing. That is the best explanation that I can now offer, not because I am trying to fudge the issue but because I cannot recall it with any greater clarity.

Sir John Gieve: In terms of when I knew what, obviously I have been back over some of the papers since you called me here so I am trying to assess what I would have known. I think I probably knew in 2004 that we were taking measures through the new protocol in prisons and so on to make sure that there was better communication between the prisons and IND. The next time I remember dealing with this was in the summer of 2005 when we had a number of discussions with the then Home Secretary about foreign national prisoners in the context mainly of the pressure on prison places and the question: could we not move more people abroad sooner? One of the issues then was there were people being detained in prison beyond their release date because we cannot deport them. That was an issue which was being discussed. The next time I remember dealing with it was in October when I went before the PAC. It came up there as a question: how many asylum seekers were being released and what were they guilty of? I sent back a paper which had been prepared which said we were aware of 400 cases. At that time I know, having now been over the papers, the briefing I received and the belief of managers in the area was that these were 400 cases which were not serious. In other words, they knew there were cases which were not being dealt with quickly enough but they thought that the more serious cases were being dealt with first. The next I heard about it was March when that turned out not to be the case.

Q1097 Mr Winnick: This political crisis, Sir John, arises from the fact that the foreign nationals convicted of various offences recommended for deportation at the end of their sentences were not considered for deportation by the Home Office and other foreign national prisoners were not considered for deportation either. That is the background to what we are discussing now.

Sir John Gieve: Only a relatively small minority of the 1,000 cases had been recommended for deportation. I think the figure was 150 or something and they were not all the most serious ones, I do not think. The greater number were people who had not been recommended for deportation.

Q1098 Mr Winnick: That is not in dispute but neither is it in dispute with you that there was a significant number recommended by the courts for deportation. We agree on that, do we?

Sir John Gieve: Yes. I think it was about 150.

Q1099 Mr Winnick: What steps were taken, if any - you mentioned a meeting with ministers in the summer - to tell the Home Secretary of the time of the magnitude of this problem?

Sir John Gieve: In the summer I am not sure any were. The NAO report had had a couple of paragraphs on that so that was available. I do not know if ministers read it or not but they could have done. That was in July. The first number that I am aware of was the number I sent the PAC of 400. I did not draw it to their attention particularly and, looking back on the papers, I see it came in on e-mail and it did not go to their offices. I do not know when they knew. It depends when they asked.

Q1100 Mr Winnick: If I can quote what John Reid, the present Home Secretary, said in his evidence to us, he said that this subject which we are discussing was a matter of discussion for some time prior to this year and I have dates as far back as 1995 but this was a matter of discussion up to 2001. "However, I want to make it plain that the first time any minister was told there was a problem of magnitude, even without figures, was 17 March." That is obviously 17 March this year when you were no longer involved. Does it not strike you as somewhat strange that the previous Home Secretary was not notified in any way about the magnitude of this problem during the time that you were the head of the Home Office?

Sir John Gieve: The question effectively is: is it not strange that the figure of 400 was not passed to ministers in November rather than later in the year? Is that the issue? I think at the time - and I can only speak for myself - my attitude to this was that I knew that we were expanding the resources going into the unit to deal with foreign prisoners. I knew and I think ministers knew that there was a problem of a backlog there, we needed to put more resources in and they were keen that we should do so. I saw this as a statement that a number of cases had fallen through the net in the past. We were addressing that by expanding the unit and I did not see it as a crisis situation that 400 people who at the time were thought to be not serious offenders over a period of five years had been released in the past. If I had, obviously I wish I had questioned it, taken more uplift, intervened more than I did but at the time it seemed to me to be a statement about what had happened over a period of years because of the under-resourcing of a unit which we were then addressing with ministers' knowledge.

Q1101 Mr Winnick: You were the permanent secretary, the head of the Home Office. Many people would say that an issue like this, long before it came into the public domain, whereby foreign nationals were recommended for deportation at the end of their prison sentence, should at least have been seriously considered at a very senor level - at your level - and the Home Secretary of the day notified what the position was. As far as I can tell from your answer, no account was taken of what the court had recommended and clearly other foreign nationals who had not been recommended for deportation at the end of their sentence were not considered either.

Sir John Gieve: First of all, by way of context, government departments and the Home Office do not work on the basis that you have your department over here and the Home Office over there and every bit of information channels through the permanent secretary. There are many different channels of communication both to the Home Secretary and his minister of state. While I was there, there was always a full time minister of state and a half time parliamentary under-secretary working on immigration. From my point of view personally, I did not see my communications to the Home Secretary as the main means by which facts and figures got to him. It was not. It is team work with both politicians and officials together. Secondly, yes, of course there were definite failings in the handling of foreign national prisoners which I very much regret and they should not have happened. I am not trying to excuse the inexcusable. It was not the case that people were making trade-offs, saying, "We will let this bit of the business go while we concentrate on that bit but do not tell ministers." That is not what was going on. The organisation certainly at managerial level, so far as I know, was not aware until March of this 1,023 or the fact that 150 or so of them had been recommended for deportation. In other words, when I sent the figure of 400 - at the time we did not have a breakdown of offences - I think I was genuinely sending all the information that the organisation then had pulled together. It was not a case of should this have been considered at the highest level in the sense that it was somehow being decided somewhere else; it was more that we had uncovered a failing which was taking place over many years, but of course it was a failing and it would have been better if I or indeed other senior managers spotted it earlier.

Q1102 Mr Winnick: What would you say to those who would put the point that the reason all this was not dealt with as it should have been was because the Home Office at the most senior level - yourself and other colleagues - did not consider the position of foreign nationals who had been in prison to be such a serious one when it came to considering their deportation, once they were released from prison?

Sir John Gieve: I think there is some truth in that in that certainly if I or, I suspect, other senior officials had identified this as a major problem we would have taken action earlier than we did. This has come to light because we did take some action but nonetheless we could have done it earlier and more fully.

Q1103 Mr Winnick: Did the situation which led to the previous Home Secretary going come as a surprise to you and how this issue had blown up?

Sir John Gieve: Yes, it did come as a surprise to me.

Q1104 Mr Winnick: How far do you accept responsibility for what has happened?

Sir John Gieve: Of course I feel responsible for all aspects of the Home Office when I was in charge of it.

Q1105 Mr Winnick: I am talking about this issue. How far do you feel responsible?

Sir John Gieve: I very much regret and I am sorry that I did not pick up on this earlier, even as late as October/November and take a personal interest. I have said that to Charles Clarke. I was surprised both when I got the news in April that new facts had emerged and when he resigned.

Q1106 Mr Winnick: If you had stayed at the Home Office, do you feel you would have resigned as a result of what has happened?

Sir John Gieve: I do not know. If I had stayed at the Home Office I would have been engaged in the handling of this and so on. That is a hypothetical question.

Q1107 Mr Winnick: You do not know?

Sir John Gieve: Of course I accept that this was a series of errors in handling particular cases. I make no bones about that and I am very sorry it happened. On the other hand, I hope the Home Office and I will be judged on the totality of responsibilities and not just on one incident. I feel that the Home Office and indeed IND, under first Stephen and then his successors, have made real progress over the years in dealing with and delivering real improvements in the system. I hope that would get some credit as well as the fact that there remain a number of areas where performance is not good enough, of which this is one.

Q1108 Bob Russell: When the judges recommended that these 1,000 or so people, or 400, depending on where we started from, should be considered for deportation, who were the judges expecting would do the consideration?

Sir John Gieve: I think it is 150 out of the 1,000, as I understand it. I think they are assuming the Home Secretary or at least the Home Office in the name of the Home Secretary has to take action on deportation.

Q1109 Bob Russell: Whatever figure you have just indicated, the 150 - the figures keep changing - are there any others whose deportation has been considered and who did the considering?

Sir John Gieve: I am not following.

Chairman: We have figures in the public domain and the rest I think we will have by the time we report, so we will move on.

Q1110 Mr Browne: I was keen to ask a couple of questions about administrative procedures because that has been a feature of many of the evidence sessions that we have held on this subject, the seeming inability of the Home Office to process incoming information. For example on the foreign prisoner issue, there were supposed to be warnings about the problem from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons in 2003, the National Audit Office in July 2005 and then - you alluded to it - the public accounts committee in October 2005 when the committee heard that "around 500" foreign nationals had been released from prison between 2001 and 2005 without deportation proceedings being completed. What actions did the officials take in response to these warnings, because there appears to have been plenty of notice being given. It is not that the Home Office could plead that there was no incoming information. It just appears not to have somehow filtered through and percolated into the organisational brain of the Home Office once it arrived there.

Sir John Gieve: You have mentioned a number of times when the treatment of foreign national prisoners has been raised. It certainly was raised by the Inspector. As I recall, the points that she and her predecessor were mainly making were about the treatment of foreign national prisoners in prisons because they had some special needs. The other point they were making was that some were being held longer than they should be under their sentence because of the delays in deportation. I do not remember but you have to understand that there are many reports from HMI every year and about 4,000 recommendations. I do not remember her picking up on this particular point. When you come to the NAO - I have the report here - it says that the director has not kept records of the number of people who have been released before decisions are taken on their deportation and that was raised at the hearing. It was in response to that that I gave the figure which I think did reflect IND's then best information of 400. What did we do about it? At that stage, we were already expanding the team to deal with foreign national prisoners, not just in terms of delays in making deportation decisions but also in trying to get in on the act earlier, to work an early release scheme back to country of origin and so on. It was expanding quite fast. I think I remember having discussions with Lynn Homer about how quickly that should happen because she had identified some money from April but in fact we agreed not to wait until April but to put more staff in. I think that started to happen in the late autumn. In that sense, we did react when this particular issue was raised.

Q1111 Mr Browne: I have some sympathy for the Home Secretary or the permanent secretary of the Home Office because it is a very large department. You have reports coming in from the NAO, from the Audit Commission, from select committees and whatever it might be. They are raining down on the department. It seems unclear to me and maybe to other Members of the Committee how the Home Office goes about trying in a methodical way to process that information. When the report arrives at the Home Office detailing some of these concerns, I would be interested to get an insight on how the contents of that report are filleted and distributed within the department in such a way that the concerns are addressed and they feed into the organisational procedures rather than just being left in a library somewhere for future committee meetings to mull over.

Sir John Gieve: It depends what the report is on, who it is from and what it is about. Generally, there will be a directorate or senor official who is responsible for that area of work. They will prepare a response because nearly all these reports have responses. They will know that there will be a follow-up. The Inspector of Prisons is making many annual reports and will come back to these later so they know there is a follow-up. Usually, an action plan is drawn up. We decide what we are going to do in whichever area it is and then there is a monitoring process to make sure it happens.

Q1112 Mr Browne: There is not a danger with the people at the high level in the same way that came up with the IND? There seem to be people within the system who are aware of the concerns but they do not seem to have the ability to report those concerns to the most senior management or ministers, or not reliably so.

Sir John Gieve: That can happen in any bureaucracy, I agree. It may have happened here but so far as there are systems concerned there is a systemic attempt with reports from each and every of these bodies to follow up on their recommendations, to decide what the appropriate response is and then to keep track of it. Of course there are many. In terms of IND and this case, you have to remember the context in which they were working over the last few years. IND for a start increased in size from 5,000 to 17,000. That is a massive expansion and, what is more, it was not done like, say, Tesco would do it in a phased way as they decide to open shop after shop. It was done under the heat of pressure, if you like, in that we had a flood of asylum applicants. We could not phase the demand. We had to deal with it as it was. There were literally hundreds of thousands of cases at the end of the 1990s which were not being dealt with at all. It was a massive effort to get on top of that again. In that process, the fact that some cases in a different part of the organisation were not being dealt with as quickly as they should have been may not have attracted the management attention which now we all wish it had.

Q1113 Mr Browne: What you seem to be saying is that obviously all bureaucracies, all organisations, can have imperfect information flow to senior management. You seem to be suggesting - you have experience of different parts of the public sector - that this problem is particularly acute in the Home Office.

Sir John Gieve: I do not think I am suggesting that. You are suggesting that.

Q1114 Mr Browne: Do you think the Home Office as some people have suggested is too big to be manageable and that these problems are inherent in a department which has that many employees covering that many different aspects of government policy; that it is not just about the competence of the person in the position you used to occupy or the Home Secretary or the other ministers; it is about the department being completely reorganised or possibly broken into component parts?

Sir John Gieve: Firstly, the problem you are suggesting happened here happened within IND and I do not think anyone is proposing that that should be split up. In other words, the communication problems were not in this respect about the breadth of the Home Office. Secondly, I do not think the Home Office is unmanageable. Of course it could be split up. Any department could be but it has narrowed its functions quite a lot. First, when I became permanent secretary, we cut down quite a lot of the fire service, gambling licensing and a wide range of functions and now again, in the last few months, when responsibility for race equality and communities was transferred. I think what remains is pretty clearly a ministry of the interior - that is, the coercive forces: police, immigration, prisons - and I think there is a coherence to that from a management point of view. Of course each of those are very big businesses and each of them will have a problem about getting good upwards/downwards communication, particularly downwards up I agree - it is a problem in all organisations - and also laterally. I think there is a certain coherence and, in many ways, what is this about? It is about communication between prisons and immigration and I do not see that that would be improved by splitting them up. It could be done and, as in other areas of government, then we would have to work at strengthening the ties between the different departmental units.

Q1115 Chairman: Just to go back to the previous line of questioning on the HMIP report, in 2003 the Inspectorate criticised "the dilatory attitude of the Immigration Service" and went on to say that unless it was pressed it was not monitoring those liable for deportation. It does sound, unless I have the dates wrong, as though the Home Office was told it was dilatory in 2003 and began to put significant investment into this problem some time towards the end of 2005/6. If that is the case, the expression "dilatory attitude" seems about right, does it not?

Sir John Gieve: I am looking to see when the casework was expanded because I think it started a bit before 2003. There was a body of work which went on certainly in 2004 in terms of getting the prisons to notify IND about all foreign national prisoners, whereas before that they were only under instructions to identify those who had a judicial recommendation, which is a small part of the total. I do not think it is true that nothing happened until 2005. As Stephen says, when you set priorities, you are favouring some things over others.

Q1116 Mrs Dean: Sir John, you mentioned the increase in staff dealing with asylum applications and the vast increase in the Home Office in that way but could you tell us how many staff were moved from general deportation duties to the asylum backlog between 1999 and 2004?

Sir John Gieve: No, I cannot. I am sorry; I do not have that sort of information.

Mr Boys Smith: I cannot recall the statistics, I am afraid, but just to pick up your reference to staff moving from and to I think it is more the case that IND was expanding very fast. Indeed, over my four years, it doubled in size. One of the issues with that massive recruitment was of course to use experienced staff in a way that would maximise the effectiveness of those coming in because people with difficult decisions like asylum, for example, need mentoring and guidance. I would see it really as an issue of newly arrived staff suitably guided, being put into the priority areas of which asylum was one in terms of decisions and then increasingly, over the sort of period you are talking about, the case working to back up the removal of failed asylum seekers once they had been through our integrated system with, as it was, the Lord Chancellor's Department for the purposes of appeal. Rather than see a lateral transfer of staff, I would see a steady growth in various areas. For example, the case working to support removals came on rather later than the decisions because the priority in the nature of things was to take those decisions first. Hence the big surge in decisions that we achieved in about 2001/2, the 125,000 decisions in a year.

Q1117 Mrs Dean: Would the more experienced staff be moved from general deportation or removed from prisons to asylum?

Mr Boys Smith: What I would emphasise there is that, because of the run down in IND that had taken place in the mid to late 1990s - it started if I recall correctly in about 1995, before I was on the scene, but it carried on to the very turn of the decade - the number of experienced people at the case working level in IND as regards asylum was very small indeed. I hope you will allow me to qualify this. I may have the figure rather wrong. My recollection is we reckoned we had between 100 and 150 experienced asylum decision takers when we were grinding in that 100,000-plus backlog that was there at about the time I arrived. That was a consequence of the run down. The quality jam was very thin and had to be spread with great care in order to create effective teams that were predominantly new young people, just arrived, just trained and inevitably facing difficult decisions, trained by us to understand that these were decisions that were the biggest ones that would affect those people and those families in the whole of their lives and to take them carefully and wisely. People like that require support.

Q1118 Mrs Dean: We understand that the Prime Minister received regular reports on the progress on asylum. Did Downing Street also monitor other aspects of the IND?

Sir John Gieve: Yes. On the first point, the Prime Minister had regular meetings on the progress on asylum targets and so on. Those naturally went wider than just asylum. They covered things like memoranda of understanding with countries of origin, which was relevant on the terrorism as well as on the asylum front, or indeed would have been relevant to foreign national prisoners. The Prime Minister's delivery unit received regularly every month full management information from IND which did cover managed migration and a wide range, as you would expect, of all their operations and their finances. To that extent, people at Number 10 were aware of what was going on in the rest of the business and indeed were taking more of an interest in that as asylum began to be less of an urgent problem. I do not know that they would have briefed the Prime Minister except for things like Prime Minister's questions and so on which, as you know, can range over any and all aspects, especially of the Home Office.

Q1119 Mrs Dean: Did you ever try to persuade the Prime Minister that simply looking at asylum could cause problems elsewhere in the system?

Sir John Gieve: I cannot remember the nature of our discussions with the Prime Minister. All I would say on this is that it was quite clear to us and to our ministers that in prioritising asylum we were not giving the same priority to other things. Stephen has already mentioned abuse of marriage, the spurious colleges and so on. Nonetheless, when you are in a fix like we were, you have to concentrate on one thing first and it was quite clear they wanted to get on top and get a grip of the asylum problem which I think we have done, and do as well as we could in the rest of the business. Progressively over the last couple of years the Home Office has been doing better on the rest of the business. There have been initiatives and a better grip has been obtained both on accession managed migration, as it is called, and abuse of colleges and so on. Foreign national prisoners were the next in line. It has been the next in line and it is now well on the way to being fixed.

Q1120 Chairman: Was there ever a stage that you are aware of where yourself or ministers said to the Prime Minister, "Look, Prime Minister, we can deliver what you want on asylum but other things are not going to be done while we do that"?

Sir John Gieve: Without going over all the papers, I cannot remember if it was put to him in those terms. It is not the case that these things are completely cut and dried in that way so you can say if we do X we will have a 20% effect on Y, if you see what I mean. It is not quite quantified in that sense; it is that you are taking more risks on the other side. Anyone who deals with the copious correspondence that ministers and officials do on IND will have known over the last few years that this is an organisation which is not working perfectly. There are endless cases. You are all very well aware of them as MPs. The question was: is it on a recovery path and the right recovery path? Yes, it was an explicit decision, for example - I think it was 2004 - to set the next target in terms of tipping point on asylum again. There was a debate about whether we should do that and it was an explicit decision that we should.

Q1121 Mr Browne: I think everyone would accept that it is not absolutely quantifiable to say, "If we give priority to area X then there will be a corresponding percentage decrease in area Y". Nonetheless, politicians of all persuasions are prone to giving heavy emphasis to a particular issue that they regard as being at a high level in public concern and awareness. The Prime Minister's critics may say the Prime Minister is particularly prone in terms of eye catching initiatives and his desire to be seen to be on top of a particular topical issue. I am putting to you whether it was a sense for you that the political emphasis put on that particular issue meant that, if you stood back in a dispassionate, administrative way, you would say, "Gosh, this is skewing our priorities. I can understand why he wants to do it as a politician but for me as an administrator and a civil servant I am uncomfortable that the distribution of weight, if you like, is too heavily leaning on one area because of political priorities." I am putting it to you that that may have been a concern of yours at the time.

Sir John Gieve: Firstly, this is not just the Prime Minister; it is ministers generally and senior officials who were entirely consistent during my time that getting a real grip of the asylum problem was the top priority. It is not the case that we were always changing or being told to run after something else. This was an area where there was consistency. Secondly, if you look at the Home Office targets and objectives, I think it is true that in the crime area they are very much about final outcomes - i.e., reducing crime, bringing more people to justice, reducing the harm from drugs. The asylum target was more of an operational target. In other words, getting a grip of the process by which people claim asylum and reducing the numbers of unfounded claims. At some point everyone knew we were going to switch to a more balanced objective around immigration as a whole. The question was when and what counted as success on asylum. The tipping point target I think has genuinely been a great success. I think we are probably the only country which can claim to have got to the point of removing more people than are coming in with unfounded claims. This has happened since I left. Was I very disquieted about this? I wondered about it but I thought it was a reasonable decision and I also thought that ministers would expect us - and I expected us - to make progress on the other fronts as well. It was not that we were completely pushing these things to one side. I thought that we could get better on the non-asylum parts of the business as well as on the asylum parts and I think the Home Office did do that. However, we were still vulnerable particularly to the legacy of cases which we had assembled over those years of crisis. That is of course partly what this 1,000 is.

Mr Boys Smith: I entirely agree with what Sir John has just said. An important perception, certainly on the part of senior officials I believe shared by ministers at the beginning of my time - the very late 1990s - was the sense that because the UK had got itself into such an appalling position in terms of the time taken to reach asylum decisions that was acting as a positive magnet and was bringing in increasing numbers of, in the term current then, economic migrants as asylum seekers with of course huge expenditure implications for the Exchequer. Getting on top of it was not just something that was at the top of the list; it was a sense of something you had to get on top of or the problem would escalate beyond your control. That sense of priority reflected a real intensely felt situation that was based, I believe, on the correct kind of analysis, but at the same time, firstly, we did tell ministers where there were other weaknesses, some of them historic, some of them relatively new in their significance like, for example, the use of more forged documents to get into the country, like more clandestine entry through lorries at Dover and so on. We did, in parallel with the emphasis on asylum, put more effort into that as well but there was not the trade-off in percentage terms that you are talking about. There was, I genuinely believe, a clear exposure to ministers of these other areas that were less than perfect. Obviously we could do more but not everything in theory could be done if we dropped the asylum priority.

Q1122 Bob Russell: Gentlemen, each of you in your last response has stated that dealing with the asylum problem was a top priority. You will be aware, I am sure, that it has been alleged in the media and I understand elsewhere that the immigration authorities deliberately did not initiate deportation action against foreign national prisoners in case this generated more applications for asylum. Is that true?

Mr Boys Smith: I do not believe it is true and I do not think that that is how officials behaved in my time. I hasten to add if they had it would be unbeknown to me and not the right way in which to proceed. That would constitute massaging of the targets and that was not acceptable conduct to me or my senior colleagues.

Q1123 Bob Russell: We can have it on the record that officials were not encouraging their staff not to go after foreign prisoners in case they claimed asylum?

Mr Boys Smith: In my time which I must emphasise was up to July 2002, that is the position, yes.

Sir John Gieve: I have seen the allegations. I would be surprised if they were true.

Q1124 Bob Russell: For several years the allegations are untrue over the periods that the two of you were in position?

Sir John Gieve: I have seen the suggestion. That was certainly not the policy. I do not believe it is true. Of course, you might be able to produce someone who says, "I did it on this occasion" but I have not seen evidence of that sort. What I have seen is a general allegation that it was widespread. I do not believe that is true.

Mr Boys Smith: May I supplement that answer with one additional point which I think illustrates what I am trying to get at? During my time, in addition to doubling the number of asylum removals, we also significantly increased the number of removals of non-asylum seekers - that is to say, illegal immigrants found perhaps working falsely in the UK. Every time that we moved in on an employer or found somebody of that kind, we knew that there was a risk that that person would claim asylum and add to the asylum figures. Nevertheless, we put our effort into that and some proportion of them - I do not now recall the figure - did claim asylum. We were in that sense kicking our own shins as regards the asylum target but we did it because that was also another job that had to be done.

Sir John Gieve: The increase in the non-asylum removals did continue beyond Stephen's time.

Q1125 Bob Russell: If I may concentrate on the foreign prisoners issue, I did intervene earlier. Without going into the numbers, purely on the principle here, it has been acknowledged that, for a certain number of foreign prisoners whom the courts have recommended should be considered for deportation, that consideration did not take place. Are you able to say whether any recommendations for consideration for deportation were considered and that deportation took place?

Sir John Gieve: You will have to ask the Home Office for the figures but I am sure the answer to that is yes. I do not know how many recommendations there are each year but if 150 or so over a period of seven years were not followed up I am sure that, by implication, a very much larger number must have been followed up.

Q1126 Bob Russell: What is the mechanism for a prisoner's record and for the Home Office to be aware that a foreign national has been recommended for deportation? How is the mechanism operated so that the prison service ensures that that consideration is carried out?

Sir John Gieve: I prepared for this a bit going over what I knew and what I did not know. You really must ask the Home Office to go through the procedures.

Q1127 Bob Russell: The reason I ask that question is because I have not been at every hearing but I have yet to discover how the mechanism works. I am hoping that one day we will be able to establish in a prisoner's file where he or she is recommended for deportation that that consideration is carried out.

Sir John Gieve: I am sure the Home Office could give you a note on that.

Q1128 Bob Russell: To what extent were senior managers in control of guidance on deportation?

Sir John Gieve: I do not remember vetting, approving or drafting guidance on deportation myself and I would not expect to. I would expect that to be done in the directorate of enforcement and removals. Again, I do not have chapter and verse on how the guidance was altered but, for example, when in 2004 new guidance was drawn up for prisons on who they should refer and in what circumstances, I am sure that was approved at a senior level both in the prison service and in IND.

Q1129 Bob Russell: There was guidance?

Sir John Gieve: Yes.

Q1130 Bob Russell: Was the internal view about foreign prisoners actually one of thinking that they had served their sentence and so it did not matter too much if they were not also deported?

Sir John Gieve: No, not that I am aware. That suggests that there was a policy of not deporting and I do not think that is true.

Q1131 Chairman: The Home Secretary suggested that the Home Office's internal guidance on who to recommend for deportation went further than was legally required. In other words, there would be some who could have been recommended for deportation who would not have been because of the Home Office's own guidance. Were you aware that the Home Office guidance was more liberal or more generous when you were in post?

Sir John Gieve: No, I cannot say that I was aware of it. This goes back to the 1980s, does it not?

Mr Boys Smith: I cannot recall, I am afraid, with any clarity. All I can say - in a sense I am repeating myself in one of my original answers - is that we were aware there was more to be done there which is why, while I was officer of the watch, we set up that specific team to try to tackle it, but the nature of the guidance I do not recall.

Q1132 Chairman: The issue that follows on from this - you may only be able to express an opinion if you were not involved - is that part of the problem here is that there is an internal Home Office culture, an internal set of Home Office values about these types of issues, that is out of step both with the law and with what the public and ministers want; and that many of those working in the Home Office are inclined to take a less punitive, less hard line view on issues of deportation than people would expect the Home Office to do.

Sir John Gieve: I have seen that. I do not recognise that. On the whole, equally often, there is an allegation that the immigration service has become cynical about stories it is told and takes a very tough line. The job of management in IND is to address that at least as much as a human rights culture. My experience, talking to actual case workers when I went round the organisation, was that they took a very impartial and serious approach to the evidence put before them.

Mr Boys Smith: I agree with that. I am not aware of, and I would not have countenanced and would have guided against, any suggestions officials could put a different spin, different emphasis, on priorities ministers created. Again, the work IND did over my time which led to the increase in removals, particularly but not only, of asylum seekers is evidence of that; work which took place on the case work side and on the enforcing side. Again, if I may remind the Committee, though I do not have the figures in my head the Home Office could supply them, the amount of Immigration Service effort which went into removals until about 1999-2000 was minimal, it was scarcely on the agenda because their priority was port control and it was not in any significant way an in-country, internal, enforcement machine. It became that.

Q1133 Chairman: You have talked several times about IND and recovery and you left in December. Two or three weeks ago, as you will be well aware, the current Home Secretary said the IND was not in significant ways fit for purpose. What did you think when you read that?

Sir John Gieve: I thought he was keen that people should not under-estimate the challenge he faced, and I could understand that because I have been there. It is a challenging role.

Q1134 Chairman: Was it fit for purpose, in your view, when you left the Home Office at the end of last year?

Sir John Gieve: I knew, and so far as I know everyone else in the organisation knew, that it needed further improvement in a number of ways. The Home Secretary has referred to IT, the lack of a single identifier in the criminal justice system, for example, a lack of electronic border controls which we are trying to introduce through e-borders. Absolutely we knew we needed to develop those, we had not yet developed them. The case information, the database, which is a huge step forward, needs to be enhanced further to take on more cases. So in that respect I absolutely agree with him. I also agree that there is a persistent problem - and this goes in part to the very rapid expansion and the lack of experience at every level of IND in management and actually in staff working which has resulted in that very rapid expansion - that the quality of a lot of the case work and the productivity of the operations needed further improvement. That is absolutely common ground. The Home Secretary has recognised that. I suppose the only further thought I had was that, yes, the IND is not there, it is not where we need to get it, but it has made - and I genuinely believe this - huge strides and huge progress and has actually delivered a remarkable result on asylum and has at the same time tightened border controls, introduced a better system of managed migration, improved its value for money on asylum support. I suppose the headline treatment of what he said, which was a balanced message, did suggest, and I thought in an unfortunate way, that the efforts of many very good, excellent professional and hard-working staff were all hopeless. I know and he knows, I am sure and he said in his speech, that was not the intention and is not the case.

Q1135 Chairman: I am sure this Committee will acknowledge the areas where there has been real achievement and understand that some of the things that will help, like e-borders, are not yet in place, but if we look at this particular episode of foreign prisoners, there would seem to be two aspects of it which are worrying about the IND as a whole. The first is that the issue itself was not managed, in other words, the problem was enabled to build up over a number of years before action was taken. Secondly, for some reason, the organisation failed to spot this as a problem of real significance not for ministers or politicians but for the public. Those two things together are what have made this a crisis. It seems to me, though it is not for me to put words into your mouth, one of the things the Home Secretary was expressing was a frustration that he cannot be sure that will not happen to him again on some issue as has happened with his predecessors. Why is it the Home Office is not capable of spotting the significance of these problems as they emerge and saying, "We need to deal with this now"?

Sir John Gieve: I do not honestly believe that the Home Office is uniquely bad in this respect. I think the special thing about the Home Office is the political and public salience of the issues, which means that when a thousand cases are mishandled over a number of years in many organisations in the public sector, or even 100,000 cases are mishandled over a number of years in some sectors, they can expect a bollocking in the PAC and a hostile coverage on page 6, whereas in the Home Office you know one case mishandled is quite likely to dominate the front pages and the broadcast media for a day or more. That is what is special I think about the Home Office and gives it special risk and it is why the Home Office is particularly important obviously, because the decisions do have that salience. In terms of does the Home Office spot the problems, well, obviously we did not spot this one in time and I regret that very much, in the sense that last autumn we could have taken action which would have forestalled what happened in March. But, on the other hand, we only uncovered this because we were taking action, because we had identified there was a problem with foreign national prisoners and we needed to up our game. It was by doing that that we, if you like, unearthed the failures of the past. Stephen should say something about the Home Office because I have dominated this.

Q1136 Mr Winnick: When you say you did not spot this one and you have already expressed regret in answer to my questions about what happened, what I find difficult to understand is the lack on the part of the Home Office at the most senior levels to realise as far as the public are concerned that foreign nationals should have committed offences and, as you know, in a number of instances very serious offences and be allowed to stay on in this country once their sentence was completed without at least being considered for deportation. Of course one accepts arising from a wish to deport other problems could have arisen where they could not go back because of the possibility of torture, but in the main they would have left this country. It is this lack of sensitivity which I am putting to you as a question, not to realise the public repugnance that these foreign nationals having been convicted, as I understand it, in some instances of very serious offences were not even considered at any stage for deportation.

Sir John Gieve: Of course, when I saw the figure of 400 you might say why did I not say, "Gosh, this is something I have to seize immediately, what is happening about it", why did I say, "That has given me a state of play but we have got plans to fix it." It is difficult looking back on it. At the time there were hundreds of other things I was focusing on and I thought it was under control. Equally, I have to say if you look at the PAC Report that did not identify this as a bombshell at the time that was published in March. At the time there was a policy where there were not enough staff to deal with the throughput of cases that they should prioritise in terms of the seriousness of the offence, and that is what people thought was happening. I do not know I can add much more to that. I do not think anyone in the Home Office was under any illusions that the public care about these issues, of course not.

Q1137 Chairman: Can I move on to the last question because you both know the Home Office well and IND well. The Home Office has had a pretty tough time in the media now for three or four months; three months at least. In your experience, how will the Home Office as an institution, and IND in particular, respond to this pretty sharp criticism? Has it got the ability to learn and develop or is it likely to become more defensive and demoralised?

Mr Boys Smith: I think it can and will learn and will develop. I would cite as my main piece of evidence of that view the way in which IND in early 1999 was being - I hope in the presence of the media I can say this - abused in the media as a totally incompetent organisation filled with incompetent people unable to get on and tackle the asylum issue. The people there with the leadership, the quality, their commitment and energy showed they could do just that, and they came through. Yes, of course, there are many other imperfections in the system but they showed in relation to the thing on which they were being primarily criticised that they could rise to the challenge and succeed in tackling it. Notwithstanding all the problems which remained then and will continue, I think it is worth remembering one thing, at about the time I left not only was our performance in relation to asylum undoubtedly the best in Western Europe in terms of speed of decisions, but talking to my counterparts around Western Europe - and that was one of the ways in which we tried to learn and relate - they were full of admiration for what we had done. They saw IND's turnaround as an achievement of which they too would have been proud. So I think, yes, the Home Office will rise to this. It has been slagged off before and no doubt will be slagged off again.

Sir John Gieve: I hope so. If there is one culture in the Civil Service generally, and it is true in the Home Office, there is a soldiering on. People do soldier on and sometimes we wish they would sort of blow the whistle earlier than they do. I am sure it can continue to get better. I think it has got the foundations to do that but of course this sort of period is very dismaying especially for the senior staff.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, gentlemen.