Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 139)
WEDNESDAY 26 OCTOBER 2005
HOME OFFICE
AND IMMIGRATION
AND NATIONALITY
DIRECTORATE
Q120 Kitty Ussher: I must start by
apologising for being late. My whips required me to vote elsewhere
and as frightened as I am of you, Chairman, I am afraid I am more
frightened of them. I hope I will not repeat points which have
already been explored. Sir John, how many failed asylum applicants
are currently in Britain?
Sir John Gieve: As the Report
says, we do not have a definite figure for that. The Report puts
it somewhere between 155,000 and 283,000. We know it is less than
the top of that range, we think it may be 50,000 less, but we
have not got a definite number.
Q121 Kitty Ussher: That figure you
just quoted is in the Report as of May 2004, and you will agree
it is correct that by June 2005 the top number of that estimate
had risen, and you believe that is approximately accurate?
Sir John Gieve: It has gone up
a bit since then because we have not removed as many people as
have come in.
Q122 Kitty Ussher: Since June 2005?
Sir John Gieve: No, I was saying
since the 283,000 figure.
Q123 Kitty Ussher: You said in an
answer a few minutes ago to one of my colleagues that within months
you hope to be removing more than are coming in, which means,
therefore, that you are not doing that at the moment, so presumably
the top end of the numbers has risen even higher since June 2005,
is that right?
Sir John Gieve: Yes, it is still
rising.
Q124 Kitty Ussher: Within months
you hope it will equalise and then, presumably, start to fall?
Sir John Gieve: That is right.
Q125 Kitty Ussher: When will there
be no failed asylum applicants in our country?
Sir John Gieve: I cannot give
you an answer to that. If all the people currently on our lists
remain failed asylum seekers and do not get any other sort of
status, it would take many years. At the moment our target is
to change the direction of this total, we are not yet targeting
zero.
Q126 Kitty Ussher: I want to unpack
a little bit more what your targets and your business plan is.
You are saying within months, how know many months, can you be
more specific?
Sir John Gieve: The target is
to do it in this calendar year, so it is within one or two months.
I have been slightly hedging my bets in saying that I am not quite
sure we will get there by December, but it will be within that
sort of period.
Q127 Kitty Ussher: Within a small
number of months the outstanding number of failed asylum seekers
in this country will start to fall. Do you have any further targets
of that? When will it fall by 50,000 or 100,000?
Sir John Gieve: We have not set
ourselves a target of that sort yet. When the Prime Minister set
us the tipping point target it looked extremely ambitious, and
our next target, after achieving it, is to sustain it. Obviously
in the next Spending Review, when we will be rolling forward our
targets, we will then look again at what is realistic and may
set a quantified target.
Q128 Kitty Ussher: Do you not think
it is odd if your first target is due to be hit in the next couple
of months that you do yet know what your next milestone is? Is
it not dangerous that, perhaps the momentum could be lost?
Sir John Gieve: There is no risk
of the momentum being lost, in my view. The whole organisation
is focused on this and they know very well that this is not the
end of the process.
Q129 Kitty Ussher: If we were to
revisit this subject in years—I think we previously mentioned
this—what do you think the outstanding number of failed
asylum seekers will be?
Sir John Gieve: I do not think
I should bequeath my successor a particular number. Our formal
target on removals is to continue to increase the percentage which
removals represent of people becoming failed asylum seekers, so
that will drive down the stock, but I am not going to put a number
to it.
Q130 Kitty Ussher: I am sure the
Committee can draw its own conclusions from your responses. Why
is the number of voluntary removals so much lower than in other
countries? I think the Report mentions Scandinavia and Germany
which had much higher monthly voluntary removals.
Sir John Gieve: We discussed this
earlier. The answer is I do not know exactly why some countries
seem to have more voluntary removals and their figures are difficult
to compare directly. It may be something to do with the nationalities
who claim asylum and where they remove them to, which differs
across different European countries. What we do know is that there
are measures we can take to further increase the number of voluntary
removals here and we are taking them both in terms of extra publicity
and more vigorous use of Reporting centres.
Q131 Kitty Ussher: Would your life
not be made so much easier if we could detain every single asylum
seeker who came into the country?
Sir John Gieve: I do not think
so. The prospect of having a massive second detention, effectively
prisoner estate, would bring its own problems; that is not what
is necessary. What we are trying to do through our new asylum
model is to keep control and contact and to manage cases through
so that a much higher proportion of them are removed and they
are removed more quickly at the end of the process. I do not think
that requires detention for all cases. We have a lot of volunteers
for removal at the end of the process. Many people are quite willing
to stay in contact with us and do in the end agree to go, so it
is not necessary for them to be detained.
Q132 Kitty Ussher: You will accept
that it is easier to remove people if they are on your premises
and you will accept that the numbers have been pretty high?
Sir John Gieve: That it is why
we have increased out detention estate.
Q133 Kitty Ussher: Finally I would
like the re-emphasise the point made by Ian Davidson, I would
certainly welcome, as a Member of Parliament, more involvement
certainly in the statistics and also the situation in my own part
of the world and since these people come to see us at our surgeries
we may be able to help as well.[8]
Sir John Gieve: We are very keen
to engage with MPs and we are obviously not doing enough. For
example, I do not see why information which we share with local
authorities, should not go to MPs in the normal course and certainly
we will look at that again. We have various arrangements, especially
with the MPs who represent the key constituencies which account
for a huge part of our caseload, and we try and talk to them regularly
and have briefing sessions on where we are getting to on new procedures
and so on, but I take the message that we are not doing enough,
so will go and do more.
Q134 Chairman: On this point about
detention, do you have a cost benefit analysis somewhere in the
Home Office of what would be the cost of detaining all asylum
seekers on arrival?
Sir John Gieve: Can I send you
a note on that. I think we did do such an assessment. It was a
live issue at one point.
Chairman: You may well have assessments
and it would be interesting for the Committee of Public Accounts
to work out what would be the cost benefit?[9]
Q135 Mr Williams: Paragraph seven,
right at the start of the Report, on page two really condenses
in a depressing way the lessons which are described elsewhere
in the Report. Let us go through them, if we can, one by one.
The National Audit Office said: "We conclude that the application
function, the support function and the enforcement processes have
operated as largely separate systems reducing the prospect of
quick removal". Would you agree with that assessment?
Sir John Gieve: I do not think
I would say "largely separate systems" but I would accept
this has been a feature of how we have organised the work, particularly
in the years of the flood of applications. We split the process
up into small bite-sized chunks and ran them as separate operations,
and although that allowed us to get on top of the casework, it
is not an ideal situation and that is why our new model, which
I think the NAO endorse, is to have a case management function
with, if possible, a single named worker taking responsibility
through the whole process.
Q136 Mr Williams: Mr Davidson refers
to the comparison of the Child Support Agency, it is particularly
the apposite here because that is exactly what we discovered years
ago when we looked at the CSA. There were as many as four different
departments or offices dealing with a problem at the same time,
therefore everything got uncoordinated and no-one knew what they
were doing. How long have you been trying the one officer process?
Sir John Gieve: We have been running,
I think, since the beginning of the year certainly a fast-track
process based in Harmondsworth.
Q137 Mr Williams: Is it too early
to assess whether it is working?
Sir John Gieve: In the fast-track
it is definitely meaningful, we are getting very good results
in terms of removals and in speed of decisions. That is a segment
of asylum seekers who we think can be decided and removed quickly,
and we do that while they are in detention. That bit of it we
have got quite a lot of experience of and is working well. We
have started two other segments on a pilot basis in on the North
West and there we can see that the process is speeding up but
we have not yet got the people through to removal so it is still
early days.
Q138 Mr Williams: You find yourselves
trapped in a rather circular situation, the less efficient your
organisation is and one has to accept you have to start and feel
your way forward but nevertheless the lessons took a long time
to learn. We are told that in May last year 50% of backlog cases
had applied for asylum more than three years previously, and when
you have people who have been in the country that long they build
up relationships, families and communal links and so you now get
further pressures—social pressures, community pressures—added
to the normal processing. If your one official dealing with a
case works effectively that could make quite dramatic improvements
on new cases, could it not or could it?
Sir John Gieve: Yes, it is intended
to but the point of the process is that it should be very much
shorter than it has been in the past. You are absolutely right,
when people have been here years, particularly in family cases,
the question of removal becomes much, much harder. We are going
to also address, as the Chairman was saying earlier, some of the
legacy cases through the same model where we can.
Q139 Mr Williams: How far are you
learning the lessons of the more efficient enforcement officers?
They may not be more efficient because they are dealing with cases
they have but those get faster results, how far are you drawing
on that experience and spreading it to the other officers?
Sir John Gieve: That is what the
league tables, which Brodie was describing, are all about. They
are creating a competition between offices and they are also creating
clearer lessons on best practice.
Mr Clark: Some of the best pieces
of work which are taking place in the local enforcement office
are the very close collaborative working between caseworker, people
from the NASS outfit together with enforcement staff, and when
those teams start working together then the performance improves
significantly. Those are messages, even in advance of the new
asylum model rolling out, that we are seeking to spread across
the enforcement office estate.
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