Clause 1 - Variation of leave to enter or remain
Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill
12:00 pm
Tony McNulty (Minister of State (Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality), Home Office; Harrow East, Labour)
That was a less than propitious start, so let me start again. Thank you, Sir Nicholas. It has been a long and necessarily complex debate, and I do not hold that against anyone. As hon. Members have said, this is the front load of the frontloaded, so it is right that we should dwell on clause 1.
As I said at the start, I appreciate that the Bill is difficult in the sense that it constantly refers back to previous Acts—principally the 2002 Act. By the bye, I take to heart the point made by the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) about the need for a consolidated piece of legislation, which is perhaps overdue, although that is not a bid for further legislative time in this Session. The hon. Gentleman will, however, agree that—for once—this Bill is not presented as the all-singing, all-dancing answer, solution and comprehensive retort to whatever is going on in the asylum and immigration world, as some of the others have been. It is important to stress—as he and others have said—that we cannot really discuss clause 1 without taking into account its interlocking nature with clause 3 and clause 9, and without a reference to clause 4 and to students, as my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow said. I am beginning to get the feeling that there probably will not be much of a stand part debate, Sir Nicholas, so you will forgive me if I wander a little on clause 1 and its relations with other areas, as well as dealing with the amendment.
If it was not complex enough that we have to refer back to previous legislation and that we cannot discuss appeals without reference to clauses 3, 9 and 4, there is another complexity, which is that all this needs to be seen in the context of the Government's five-year plan for asylum and immigration and, crucially, the current consultation paper on a managed migration points system. Many elements that we are discussing and that we shall discuss under the Bill are but building blocks of what we are trying to do with the overall five-year strategy and the points system.
For example, there will be—or at least this is offered in the consultation paper—a separate tier among the five tiers in the points system, tier 4, with a clear focus on students. I accept much of what the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham says about students. The Government do not resile from our strong view—this relates to the Prime Minister's initiative—that our overseas students not only are very important to the UK economy, but make an enormous contribution culturally and in other ways. Many eventually settle here and make a contribution. Others return to their country of origin and make a huge contribution there, often establishing a strong relationship with this country. I do not object to any of the comments in that regard. I do object to many of the hon. Lady's other comments on the amendment, but we shall come to that.
One further complexity is the fact that we are already doing a lot on entry clearance, which was the undercurrent to much of what hon. Members expressed. That is why I said earlier that we cannot talk about appeals without going back to the original decision that is being appealed against.
I shall go through some of the important elements that are germane to the amendment in the context of what we are trying to do with the five-year plan and the points system. Building on much of what we have already done in relation to colleges, as my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow said, we establish far more readily the relationship between colleges and other education institutions, their sponsorship role and the student, and exactly the same is true for employers. There is a far more ready focus on the sponsor rather than simply on the applicant. That needs to be borne in mind in the context of the appeals that we are talking about.
I do not want to dwell on this, but I am sure that it will be a refrain throughout many of our deliberations: we are already doing a significant amount and will do more to build on the quality of decision making. I accept the import of comments from assorted bodies that have written to members of the Committee, and the thrust of the contributions from hon. Members thus far, that the first thing we must do is get the quality of initial decision making right. That must be the starting point. The removal of appeals needs to be seen in that context. I shall return to this in far more detail when we consider entry clearance specifically. We are doing far more on training, promoting consistency and best practice, management time and how management get involved in the decision-making process, learning from appeal determinations, enhancing the role of the independent monitor and making more resources available to UK Visas. We are also doing more on a risk assessment and awareness basis in terms of specific sources of abuse from specific stations. All that must happen in the context of the decision-making process, regardless of what happens to the aspect that we are discussing. No one would demur from the notion that things need to be got right in the first place.
That is why I intervened on the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon to say that it is making a bit of a casual empirical relationship to say that every appeal refers back to a very bad decision in the first place. I accept his broad point, however. Even if we are talking about a figure of 25 per cent. rather than 33 per cent., that is still a very large number, even though only 1 per cent. of all students studying here have come through an appeal route. We can argue about statistics until the proverbial cows come home, but all that we are doing in this part of the Bill—our position on the amendment and more generally—must be seen in terms of the five-year plan, the points system and what we are doing with entry clearance.