Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 381)
TUESDAY 4 DECEMBER 2007
Mr Don Flynn and Ms Denise McDowell
Q380 Lord Skidelsky:
I may have misunderstood this but as I understand it the logic
of your answer, Ms McDowell is, that one should make every effort
possible to eliminate illegal immigrants because they cannot,
by definition, have rights of work—they are not allowed
to work. So how do you overcome that dilemma?
Ms McDowell: My argument is that if you create
the conditions where people are illegal then they are vulnerable
to exploitation. If you create an environment where workers can
be explicit about the fact that they are working, that they are
paying taxes, that they are contributing, then you lessen the
possibility of exploiting those workers. Whether you separate
that then from an immigration system which looks to deport some
people or whatever, it is quite different, but you give people
the right to work in order to lessen that ability to exploit.
Q381 Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market:
I would like to ask both of you—and it slightly follows
on from this—what your views are on the Government's plans
for a new points-based system for managing migration to the UK?
Would you like to hazard a guess as to what effect that will have
on migrant workers on the point we have been discussing?
Mr Flynn: I think the issue of a points-based
system is not so much in the principles but the way that it appears
to be being rolled out at the present time. The government programme,
when it was first announced that this was the direction that immigration
policy was going, the big part of the argument was that it would
be a considerable simplification of immigration control procedures,
producing situations which were completely transparent both to
the migrant workers and to the employers who were working with
them, and that the conditions of resident, the conditions of employment
and so on would be very, very clear. In fact I do not think there
is a lot of evidence that that has happened. The talk about the
existence of five tiers within the scheme obscures the fact that
there still remain something like 80 different labour migration
schemes within the system, every single one of those having its
own separate set of regulations and rules, conditions of employment,
rights which exist for migrant workers in some instances but are
withheld from migrant workers in yet other instances. In our view
the reduction in the complexity of the system is negligible under
the terms of this scheme. A second feature of it is one of the
things which we had appreciated about the direction of government
policy over the last five or six years or so has been the growing
expertise of the Border and Immigration Agency, as it is now called,
which existed in the form of Work Permits UK, in which there is
considerable expertise and vast improvement in the efficiency
of that department for evaluating the merits of work permit applications
and issuing them fairly quickly. Primary decision-making responsibility
for the issuing of work permits is going to be taken away from
that department and instead it is going to be given to entry clearance
officers who are based abroad. I am very much afraid that our
assessment of the decision-making amongst entry clearance officers
is that it is amongst the weaker sections of the immigration control
system. There is evidence of vast levels of variants between the
quality of decisions which are taken from one High Commission
or Embassy or Consulate than the next. Recent reports of the entry
clearance inspector have indicated that there is a chronic problem
of being able to get entry clearance officers to familiarise themselves
with the basic immigration rules that they are supposed to be
applying; very often they operate on the basis of what they presume
is an instinctive grasp of the way that the system operates. Our
feeling is that a system that operates on that principle is going
to generate a sense of unfairness and injustice about the management
of migration, which at some point is going to feed its way into
people finding themselves in breach of immigration conditions
or resistant to the conditions which should be imposed upon them
and looking for opportunities to transform their circumstances
in arguing with official policy, looking for opportunities for
legal challenge or indeed working with people like us in order
to see what political pressure could be brought to bear. So these
are the rocks and the reefs which I think are potentially in store
for the points-based scheme, which suggests that it is not so
much a solution as what is very often a continuation of what we
know to be long existing problems within managed migration.
Lord Vallance of Tummel: Are there any other
vital points that you wanted to make and you have not made during
the questions?
Mr Flynn: We are happy with that if the Committee
is happy with it.
Lord Vallance of Tummel: Thank you very much
indeed for sparing your time and for answering us so lucidly.
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