Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his advice, but we are doing that now. We are doing any number of things in terms of the ECO process. Admittedly, we are just starting the process, but all those things are happening now. We are enhancing the role of the independent monitor. He will be full-time, but it is essentially the same post, to answer the question asked by the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham. I hope that he or she will be appointed in January. We are enhancing training, there is quality focus in UKvisas and we have objectives on best practice. This is within our international obligations. There are best practice reviews, more management resources for posts, quality of refusal notices—which are often a problem for many individuals and MPs—and we are working more closely with judges. There is any number of other elements: risk assessment, so we are informed far more readily on where risks are involved, communications, and general awareness, where we have suffered in the past. Those and other elements are happening now. I said this clumsily in Committee, as the hon. Lady reminded us, but I think that rather than delay matters to some far-off time, there is merit in looking at the notion that only when elements of the points system are introduced completely should the commencement order on appeal systems happen. The House will forgive me for not saying simply in terms that when the points system in all its entirety is introduced, only then will there be a commencement order on the lifting of appeals. I made it clear to the Standing Committee that there will be some elements of the points system that can be introduced earlier than mid-2007. Save for those elements that may be introduced earlier, including tier one and the highly skilled migrants programme, I will say that I am happy not to go down the route of introducing the provisions of the Bill that refer to appeals until the points system is in place. Those points were made in Committee and they are fair. I am trying to think of a way where, on the premise we get the independent monitor in place in January, he or she can help in that process, having grown into the role over a year when these resources are going in. There may be a commensurate impact both on allowed decisions and refusals, and more generally on the appeal rate, but it is not going to give us significant evidence to say yea or nay in any mechanistic sense. However, I will say, with the caveats that I have mentioned, that we will not do that with the appeal process until we get there. I will come back to money because it is in this huge pile here—not the money but the point that the hon. Lady made. There are some specifics to which I want to refer. Some go to the debate and some to other points raised. We have had, apparently, legal advice to the effect that, following the ECJ cases of Panyatova and Dorr and Unal, certain classes of persons claiming under European Community association agreements are entitled to rights of appeal under EC law. The hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) alluded to that point earlier. I will give him this note. Such persons have rights of appeal under current legislation, but those rights will be removed by the changes to appeal rights in the Bill. We may provide the necessary rights of appeal by using the necessary legislation without amending the Bill. In other words, this is still work in progress. I undertook to let the hon. Gentleman know about that. We may need to provide a right of appeal for non-EEA nationals who are primary carers of EEA children exercising treaty rights in the UK following a subsequent judgment. We think that we can cover that through section 92 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2000. I shall write more fully to the hon. Gentleman about that.