Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I must apologise for having made two errors as regards the independent monitor on Monday. First, I said that she left her post on 1 November when it was on 1 December. Secondly, I implied wrongly that the independent monitor might have been pushed, as I understand that she was not willing to accept an appointment on the full-time basis that the post has now become. But perhaps I may be forgiven for making those errors because I tried very hard to find out what was happening on the appointment of the new monitor on Monday morning. I tried to telephone the UKvisas head office. I had great difficulty getting through and I listened to a number of recorded messages. When I finally spoke to a human being, I was referred to the Foreign Office, from which I gathered that the process of selection of the new monitor has been completed, but that the appointment has yet to be approved by the Foreign Office Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, and that the matter may be on his desk now. I am told that the appointee is of a very high calibre. If the Minister would care to break the secret and let us know his or her name, I am sure that we would be very interested to know who that person is. As the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, has said, the remit of the independent monitor is being extended to the much larger number of cases that will arise under the Bill where people have no right of appeal. She mentioned the figure of 280,000 refusals which the independent monitor was already dealing with. I imagine that the figure could double or treble as a result of the extension of the categories of people who do not have any right of appeal. What estimate has the Minister made of those numbers? Are the resources provided to the monitor proportional to the task to be undertaken in accordance with those estimates? If she has not made any estimate, it is difficult to say whether the resources being allocated to the monitor are adequate. I hope that that forecasting has been done. I am very worried about the large number of recommendations made by the independent monitor in the past to which, apparently, she has had no reply. In the last report, which was published in February 2005, there are two annexes in which she lists all the recommendations in her two previous reports. I take it that she has done that because she is still waiting for a reply from Ministers. What happens to recommendations made by the independent monitor? Are Secretaries of State obliged to reply or do those recommendations simply lie on the table indefinitely for someone to pick up, as we do now when we have an opportunity in Grand Committee? There ought to be a procedure by which Ministers publish answers to specific recommendations made by the monitor within a reasonable period, as in Select Committee reports. It will be interesting to hear what the Minister has to say on that. As regards the ombudsman, to whom the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, has referred, I note that UKvisas is not on the list of bodies in respect of which he has the power to investigate complaints, but the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is. UKvisas, being a component or a subsidiary of the Foreign Office—I do not quite know how one expresses that—ought therefore to be subject to investigation. I understand from the office of the ombudsman that if a sponsor in the UK made a complaint concerning the refusal of an entry certificate for a close relative wishing to join him in the UK as a result of unfairness, bias or prejudice, the ombudsman would have power to investigate that complaint. However, it could not tell me whether any such complaints have been made. But, as a matter of common sense, it is obvious that the sponsor and not just the applicant would have suffered harm, particularly but not exclusively when the applicant is a close relative wishing to come here as a dependant. It would be interesting to know whether the Minister has any statistics on the number of complaints to the ombudsman which have been made under this heading. With this group we are also discussing whether Clause 4 should stand part of the Bill. As we have seen, the clause drastically curtails the rights of appeal of students, workers, the self-employed, business persons and dependent relatives. That, of course, goes much further, as has already been said, than the Labour Party manifesto commitment to remove appeal rights from non-family immigration applicants. But the manifesto also promised that the Government would improve the quality and speed of decision-making. Again we have noted that there is no sign of this happening in the consideration of entry certificate applications. Although the noble Baroness has given certain assurances, it is all pie in the sky. We have not seen that happening in the overseas posts and no evidence has been submitted by the Minister or in other ways to demonstrate that the improvement in quality has taken place in advance of your Lordships being asked to approve the diminution of rights under this clause. In the meanwhile, ECOs continue to deal with the treadmill of 50 applications a day, which, without any regard to what is being done in this Bill, are predicted to double over the next 10 years, putting even greater strains on a system that is manifestly unable to cope effectively with the existing workload. The collection and storage of biometric data on all those applicants, as is already happening in some overseas posts, will add to the burden, necessary though it may be. We simply do not accept that a points-based system, which is supposed to reduce the time spent on applications because it is based on objective criteria, will provide the answer, for a number of reasons, which I will summarise. First, there is the element of subjectivity, which we have already discussed on the previous amendment—for example, in assessing the work experience of someone wanting to come here under the highly skilled migrants programme and in the provisions of subsection (2). Secondly, in paper-based applications under the present system, it still takes 10 minutes, as I have said already, to examine the documentation, and there have been problems with forged documents in some overseas posts in particular. It is wrong to take away the rights of appeal until the new system has been rolled out and assessed as fair and effective. The Government have said repeatedly that they have already taken steps to improve the quality of decision making, but we have seen no results. There has been no independent monitor in post—not for the three months that I mentioned on Monday—for at least two months. The report that she compiled before her departure still has not seen the light of day. Perhaps the Minister can tell us something about that too. It is a most unfortunate gap to have occurred at a critical period in the development of better procedures, training and supervision. We would like to see Clause 4 scrapped. But if that cannot be done, at least it should not come into force until a day to be appointed by order by affirmative resolution so that the Government could return to your Lordships in a year or two years’ time with a better story to tell than they have today.