My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness. A great many of the refusals of applications for leave to enter have been due to misunderstandings about what information is required, and there ought to be a simple procedure for rectifying elementary omissions. I think that I recognise the particular case that she mentioned, because that person has already been in touch with me as well. He made every effort by sending numerous e-mails to the people dealing with the case to try to find out exactly what omission he was guilty of, but was never successful in establishing what further information he needed to provide.
Clause 26 removes the right of appeal against the refusal of a visa to visit family members, except where the appeal is brought on racial discrimination or human rights grounds. I had hoped that in the five months since we considered this matter in Committee, and in the light of the arguments that we advanced then, the Government would have had second thoughts about this clause. It is disappointing to see no sign of that on the Order Paper.
I shall explain why we felt the need to return to this matter. The Government’s hostility to the right to family life is exemplified by the making of new Immigration Rules making it far more difficult and expensive for spouses and elderly dependent relatives to join heads of households in the UK, reducing the number by an expected 35%, over which the Immigration Minister is already crowing. Clause 26 turns the screw further by preventing appeals that would have been successful under the law as it now stands. I pointed out in Committee that if the argument for Clause 26 was that the number of appeals had risen to far greater levels than were expected when the right of appeal was restored in 2000, as was argued before the Home Affairs Select Committee, the obvious remedy was to get UKBA’s decisions right in the first place. Almost one-third of them are overturned, according to my noble kinsman Lord Henley in Committee, involving the taxpayer in a great deal of unnecessary expense. My noble kinsman said that taking away the right of appeal would lift the burden of processing 50,000 appeals from visa staff, but that was based on the assumption that officials would continue to reject bona fide applications at the same rate as they have in the past. We are told constantly that UKBA is undergoing processes of reform, which will enable them to be more accurate in the first decisions that they make.
After the case of Alvi, which your Lordships have discussed, the information required to be submitted with the visa application is now set out in detail in the rules themselves, so that in theory, there should be fewer cases where an applicant has omitted a particular document. However, considering the volume and complexity of the rules, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Lester on the previous amendment, it is inevitable that some applications will be refused for that reason. The Government suggest that persons who have omitted a document should put in a new application rectifying the omission at a cost of £78. That may be a trivial sum to my noble friends on the Front Bench, but it is a lot of money to a poor farmer in Gujarat or Sylhet.
I take the point that a new application is less expensive and faster than an appeal; but where the decision-makers have made an obvious mistake, I do not accept that a genuine family visitor should have to pay twice, and suffer, the complications affecting future travel, because the refusal has to be declared not only in the UK but to other any other intended destinations to which the applicant may travel. Therefore, it is a blot on the person’s copybook that he will want and need to remove if he is to go anywhere without hindrance.
If a person wins the appeal, it is likely that the tribunal will make a costs order against the Secretary of State, so that the appeal will be free in the end. Moreover, if the refusal was due to disbelief that the applicant would return home at the end of the visit, it is only too probable that a fresh application would yield the same result. Only by appealing can the person attack the errors that led to the original refusal, and it was for that reason that I advised Mrs N from Beirut—whom I think was the person that the noble Baroness was talking about a few minutes ago and whose case I mentioned in Committee—to appeal as well as to ask for the original decision to be reviewed.
Therefore, I am afraid that the reasons that were given by my noble kinsman for thinking that an appeal may not be the best remedy for an unjustified refusal do not hold water. I hope that in the light of that consideration, there should be a simple process that would enable the applicant to lodge supplementary evidence supporting the validity of any document or statement which is challenged, rather than having to start again from scratch.