UK Borders Bill
10:30 am
Sir Andrew Green: That is a good question. The first thing that I would say is that I do not believe that you are dealing with an administrative nut; you are dealing with a major issue about which there is extremely widespread concern among the public. As you probably know, 75 per cent. of the population would like an annual limit to immigration. That is just one measure, but every poll will tell you that and every poll will tell you that 80 per cent. have no confidence in the present system, so it is not an administrative nut.
Secondly, is this the right way to get a better idea of what is going on? It might be the only way. Its purpose is to provide a means of counting people in and counting people out as individuals. I have justbeen to the United States, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. In all those countries, I was both counted in and counted out as Sir A. Green. It is perfectly possible to do that. That is what the measures are aiming at. Once we have that, we will have a number of other things. We will have a much more accurate idea of numbers, which is becoming important. Immigration is now so high that it is very important to know what it is, how tight the labour market is and what to do about interest rates, as the Governor of the Bank of England has said repeatedly.
Even if we go down that road, and I sincerely hope that we will, I should like to draw your attention to a potential weakness that could blow the whole system out of the water. I hope that the Government are conscious of it. The pressure on visa-issuing posts is so great that they get their brownie points for dealing with the queue. I noticed that when the Minister gave evidence he referred to Pakistan and the speed at which it had dealt with its queues. That may be brilliant or it may not. It may be that they were just dishing out visas. As you know, on average issuers have something like11 minutes to decide.
Related to that is an important second point, which is that decisions whether to issue bright new issues are not legal decisions. They are matters of judgment by the entry clearance officer as to whether the person standing in front of him will go home at the end of it. If that goes wrong, the whole system is futile. People simply come in with visas that they should never have had in the first place. We will be helped by the fact that this system will tell us that they have overstayed. At the moment there is absolutely no effective feedback. We will know that they have overstayed, but how are you going to find them and remove them? We have half a million whom we cannot remove now and we are making no impression on that half a million.
We issue 2 million visas a year and refuse half a million. You do not have to be very far wrong with those issues to build up a very large illegal community in Britain, so what I come back to is the care with which those visas are issued in the first place. In my view, it is going wrong. The balance is going wrong. The pressures are too great and we are moving towards a kind of computerised tick-the-box system that is extremely easy to fool. If applicants stand in front of a visa officer he will know, for example, if a person comes from a good family, if his father has a big business or whatever. Any of you who have stood in a visa section—I have stood in a lot of them—will know what the pressures are and how you rely on the instincts of the entry clearance officer and the support of his local staff. We are moving away from that. We have these systems whereby you apply to some agency somewhere downtown. That is a serious weakness and actually also extremely inconvenient to the applicant, because they cannot get at the man who is taking the decision. I will not go on about it, Mr. Illsley, but I want to underline the fact that your entire effort will be wasted if the Government do not re-examine the matter.
One delicate issue that I wish to mention is that we should not send immigration officers or ECOs of dual heritage to the country of their other heritage. That leaves them much too vulnerable to pressures offamily, friends and so on. I am not saying that they would—well, I am saying what I am saying. They are just too vulnerable. By all means send them to a different country, but not to their own other country. That is foolishness, and it is happening on a significant scale.