In one moment.
I listened carefully to the right hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), who made the interesting point that without the speed cameras we cannot see things going wrong. On the same principle, if we take off the monitoring, the Home Office will not improve its processes. The light that judges can currently shine on what is going on in the Home Office to show where it is incompetent, where it is taking arbitrary and flawed decisions, will no longer be there. According to the Home Office’s own statistics, 32% of deportation cases and 50% of entry clearance applications were successfully appealed last year. That means that the initial decision was wrong. We need the judges to be able to keep that focus on those wrong initial decisions. Yet the Government’s response to this high margin of error is not to seek to improve the quality of their decision making, but rather to reduce the opportunities for challenge. Instead of improving the bad administration and inefficiency at the heart of the Department, the Government are shifting the responsibility and attacking due process.
The administrative review process already exists for overseas applications, but my own experience of entry clearance manager reviews is that they are slow and of little better quality than entry clearance officers’ decision making. It is difficult to believe Ministers’ estimation that an administrative review would be processed within 10 working days of an application given the historic backlogs that already exist in the Home Office.
The Department has included in its impact assessment a summary of the ongoing costs and benefits of the changes to appeals. It has come up with a figure of £261 of benefits through a decrease in appeal costs. Interestingly, however, it has not included administrative review costs in the cost side of the analysis. It acknowledges that those costs will exist, but it has put in that column the word “unknown”. They are unknown, but the Home Office could have estimated them and did not, because that figure would have made the cost-benefit analysis come out in a way that the Minister did not wish. That is shameful.
In response to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made about the problem of landlords having to check people’s status, the Home Secretary said that we already had such a system for employers. We do, and I will read a letter of 14 December last year from an employer to an employee, whom I will call RS. It states:
“I am writing to advise you that we have received notification from the UK Border Agency regarding your entitlement to work in the UK and would like to invite you to an investigation meeting to discuss this and other aspects of your right to work in the UK…I must advise you that you are currently suspended (no payment) pending further investigation as we have liaised with you and unfortunately you have not provided us with the necessary documents to confirm your eligibility status within the UK.”
A week later, the employer wrote to RS again, stating:
“I am writing further to the investigatory meeting held on Tuesday 18th December 2012…We have received notification from the UKBA to advise us that they cannot confirm your status to work within the UK. We advised you of this notification and requested that you provided us with further documentation…I am therefore writing to you to confirm that you are required to attend a formal disciplinary hearing”.
That was on 21 December. I had become involved in the intervening period and written to the UKBA about the case. It confirmed to me on 19 December that the case
had been logged on its computer system, and that from that date the employer should have got a positive response when phoning the employer checking service. I understand that a manager checked on 7 January, but again, the system showed a negative response.
On 9 July, seven months later, I got a letter from the Home Office, which read:
“Thank you for your letter of 18 June with enclosure on behalf of”
RS. It stated that it had received her application on 27 July 2012—a year previously—
“and it is now still awaiting consideration…I am sorry to hear that”
Ms RS
“is experiencing problems with her employers. She may be interested to know that employers can check the eligibility of prospective employees to work in the UK by using the online Employer Checking Service”—
which was precisely what her employer had done the previous December, when she had not been logged on it, and every week and month since. The Home Office has done nothing, and a woman has lost her job and livelihood. The Home Secretary holds that up as an example to show that the system is already working. I think not.
Let us not be down on the landlords, though. I have a letter to the Home Office from a landlord, Mrs Patel, which states:
“I can confirm that”
Mr KA
“is my tenant. He lives at the property with his wife and three children. I understand that he is in great financial difficulties”—
that is because his case has been in limbo with the Home Office for 15 years—
“and I have accommodated this only because he has three very young children. However, I am unable to continue with this arrangement as I have a mortgage and other bills to pay. I would appreciate if his claim could be dealt with urgently so he is able to get help, as I am no longer able to let him stay at the property without paying his rent. I don’t wish to see him homeless, as he has three young children.”
That is a landlord who is acting like a human being. The Bill asks that she instead act like an immigration officer. Tenants often have limited leave to remain in this country and apply for additional leave to remain. During the pending period, what can a prospective landlord do? If they do not know their prospective tenant’s immigration status, they will not take them on.
I have to respect your wish for others to be allowed to speak, Mr Deputy Speaker, although there are of course many cases that I would like to cite. I must finish, however, by talking about the racist van that affected my community so dreadfully this summer. The Government claim that the objective was for people to realise that they could get assistance in going home. However, every person whom the Government could deport has received a letter telling them that. Mr KN has been signing on every single month for 12 years, and on every one of those occasions an immigration officer could have detained him and taken him for deportation. They have not done so. They know where every one of the people targeted by the van lives, but they have not bothered to go and ensure that they are detained and deported, because they do not want the costs. The idea that the racist van was sent out to remind people that they could go home,
when thousands of people are not being deported with the full knowledge of the Home Office, shows that that Department is the most dysfunctional in government.