Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
WEDNESDAY 26 OCTOBER 2005
HOME OFFICE
AND IMMIGRATION
AND NATIONALITY
DIRECTORATE
Q140 Mr Williams: In your case in
that same paragraph they make the point that the Directorate lacked
management information which was basically necessary for proper
control over resources and deployment of resources. Have you addressed
that and are you resolving it?
Mr Clark: I think we are well
on the way in terms of that kind of management information and
that is undoubtedly helping to focus and drive the business of
enforcement officers forward. Also, we have picked up work from
a Pelham Report which was a Report done to examine specifically
performance issues across the enforcement estate, and that has
given us some direction in terms of frontline performance by operational
people. We have seen some improvement in that over a relatively
short timescale.
Q141 Mr Williams: Both you and the
Department are working at improving the process and so on, but
then it becomes utterly frustrated when you turn to the removal
process and find these unexpected bottlenecks there, which the
NAO has referred to. I gather some of these were contractual problems,
badly drawn up contracts and that sort of thing, but having got
to the stage of a resolution, why on earth are you falling flat
on your faces at the removal stage?
Sir John Gieve: I do not think
we are falling flat on our faces at the removal stage, we are
pushing up the number of removals. It is extremely difficult to
remove people who do not want to go to countries which may not
want to take them back and who are active in trying to frustrate
the process.
Q142 Mr Williams: Are there certain
countries which are clearly identifiable as pursuing that as an
active policy?
Sir John Gieve: I do not want
to name particular countries.
Mr Williams: We need to know these things.
Q143 Chairman: Why not?
Sir John Gieve: I do not want
to partly because we are in negotiations with these countries
and are trying to win their co-operation.
Q144 Mr Williams: Before we move
on from that, can I suggest as a resolution to this—we need
to know as a Committee—you submit a paper to us in confidence,
we will look at it and make the ultimate decision on whether it
eventually gets published or not, but we do not normally publish
where it will damage the work of a Department. Let us have it
so we are aware of it as a Committee, can you do that?
Sir John Gieve: What we can let
you have, yes.[10]
Q145 Mr Williams: We would appreciate
that and it may be helpful to us. Then we come on to what has
been touched on by several of my colleagues, and again it is one
of the frustrating things. As it was pointed out right at the
start, so much saving is possible between the difference in the
cost of a compulsory removal and a voluntary removal, and yet
so little priority seems to be given by the Department to advancing
voluntary removals. The Report brings this out in several places,
why is that?
Mr Clark: I think the Report acknowledges
that there had been an increase in the number of voluntary removals.
Q146 Mr Williams: The point it makes
is you showed little priority and emphasise on the voluntary alternative,
even within some of your own offices and you were not making use
of the voluntary organisations outside to disseminate the information
as fully as you could nor were you directly giving the priority
to disseminate it to the cases you were dealing with. This is
such an easy money saver.
Mr Clark: We have accepted that
recommendation and we have accepted that voluntary returns is
a key area in terms of taking forward the removals agenda. Earlier,
I outlined the various pieces of the strategy which is looking
at promoting voluntary returns within the organisation.
Q147 Mr Williams: I do not envy you
your job and, as I say, I can understand the difficulties. Like
Ian, my surgery is dominated by immigration cases, inevitably
because of the length of involvement and detail of the cases involved.
I understand how complex and difficult it must be from your end,
and I am glad to see you are taking on board some of these lessons.
Mr Bacon: First of all, I have a question
in relation to the cost-benefit analysis, which the Chairman and
Ms Ussher's questions referred to earlier. You have 2,150 new
unsuccessful cases per month, have you not, according to the Report,
which makes 25,000 per year, what are you currently spending?
I read a number of £1.89 billion, is that correct, that is
your current spending on this?
Chairman: According to our brief, it
is £1.89 billion.
Q148 Mr Bacon: Does that number sound
familiar to you, Sir John?
Sir John Gieve: That is not this
year's budget, our budget this year is £1.5 billion.
Q149 Chairman: That was for when?
Sir John Gieve: For 2003-04 it
was £1.89 billion.
Q150 Mr Bacon: You have got 25,000
cases—just doing a bit of quick mental arithmetic—if
you spend £1,000 on each one, that would be £25 million
a year; if you spend £10,000 on each one, it would be £250
million a year; if you spend £20,000 on each one, it would
be £500 million a year. I do not know, you would probably
say you could not do it for £20,000 a year, although I believe
the average cost for each prisoner in the UK in normal prisons
is around £34,000. If you could do it for £20,000 a
year per person you could do what Ms Ussher was suggesting which
is to detain everybody on arrival and you would have your problem
solved, would you not? You said in answer to her, "What we
are trying to do is keep control", but it is obvious you
are not keeping control because the number is still going up.
Sir John Gieve: It depends on
which numbers you are looking at. The number of unfounded asylum
claims has come down dramatically, so that is a measure of some
success. Coming back to your arithmetic, your arithmetic was concerned
with one year's intake.
Q151 Mr Bacon: Yes, £500 million
a year.
Sir John Gieve: You are comparing
that with the total cost of dealing with the past intake, the
staffing of ports, dealing with managed migration and all the
other things.
Q152 Mr Bacon: The £1.5 billion
covers the hundreds and thousands—you do not know how many—who
are here as well, is that right?
Sir John Gieve: It covers all
the people we are dealing with, including those who we are supporting
in the community and they are already here. Your example is not
an alternative to the cost.
Q153 Mr Bacon: You have just said
you have gone from £1.9 billion to £1.5 billion, that
is £400 million right there.
Sir John Gieve: We have reduced
the cost of the existing asylum support.
Q154 Mr Bacon: I would be interested
to see, as the Chairman said, what work has been done on the cost
of detaining asylum seekers?
Sir John Gieve: I will see what
we have got.
Q155 Mr Bacon: If you can possibly
send a note in, as far as you have information on this, about
the number of criminals who are failed asylum seekers and are
then released from prison: how many there are, where they are,
what type of crime they have committed, what sentences they were
given and how long they served? Is it possible for you to do a
note on that?
Sir John Gieve: I can do a note
and let you have the information we have.[11]
Q156 Mr Bacon: One other note if
you can, I was struck by Mr Clark's questioning on the staff numbers
you have in the Directorate. You head up one of several Directorates
inside the Home Office, that is right, is it not?
Sir John Gieve: I have a number
of Directorates working to me covering a number of different areas
of business.
Q157 Mr Bacon: I take it that if
I looked in an organogram of the whole Home Office it would have
a Director-General with a certain number of staff on it for each
of a group of different Directorates of which the Immigration
and Nationality Directorate is one, is that right?
Sir John Gieve: Yes.
Q158 Mr Bacon: In relation to the
HR staff, it seems quite a high number of 540, I have divided
14,482 by 540 and you end up with 26 members of Directorate staff
per HR person, is it possible that you can send us a note of that
calculation: total number of directorate staff in each Directorate
compared with the HR staff in each directorate-general?
Sir John Gieve: This is across
the whole Home Office, certainly I will do that.[12]
Q159 Mr Bacon: Sir John, I was wondering
if the National Audit Office might possibly look at two, three
perhaps four comparable private sector companies, ones who contract
with Government to provide services and ones with comparable sizes
of numbers of employees to see what the ratio between total employees
and HR staff in comparable companies in the private sector would
be, if that is not too much trouble?
Sir John Bourn: We will do that
and talk to the Home Office to see that the companies are truly
comparable.
Sir John Gieve: I think we have
done that. I think we can probably save you the work because we
are trying to transform our back office to meet private sector
benchmarks at the moment.[13]
10 Information provided by witness but not printed. Back
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Ev 25-27 Back
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Ev 28 Back
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Contained within Ev 28 Back
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