MS LIN HOMER AND MS EMILY MILES

15 JANUARY 2008

  Q60  Mr Clappison: Has that policy ever been announced or published?

  Ms Miles: It is the same policy that we apply to all cases.

  Q61  Mr Clappison: When was that Legacy Programme instituted? When was that criteria issued to your staff?

  Ms Homer: I think, Chairman, Mr Clappison is referring to the commitment the Home Secretary made for us to deal with legacy cases by looking at criminal cases first, those cases where we could effectively reduce support costs, those cases where we could easily remove, and those criteria were set out on the floor of the House.

  Chairman: I think this is a very important line of questioning and the Committee is very interested to hear the answers, but what may be helpful, because we do have a very truncated session and a seminar starting, is to allow Mr Clappison one more question and then we are going to put these question in writing to you. I would like you to reply to the questions and then, if necessary, come back and answer the questions that we are not satisfied with.

  Q62  Mr Clappison: If I may, Chairman. You have told us that everything has been decided in the same way, according the law, as it always is. Is it the case that amongst these 52,000 individuals there are cases where asylum has been refused and any appeal has been dismissed and the individual remains in the UK?

  Ms Homer: Yes.

  Q63  Mr Clappison: So how can you say that you are applying the same law to these people, because it has already been applied once already, has it not?

  Ms Miles: I think I have already answered Mr Salter by explaining how, when we review the cases, the issue of delay becomes more insignificant and, obviously, also circumstances can change in the country where they apply from.

  Ms Homer: And our normal policy includes reconsideration and judicial challenge.

  Chairman: Thank you, Mr Clappison, for your forbearance. We will write to you with these questions and we will have you back to answer them if members of the Committee are not satisfied.

  Q64  Mr Clappison: One other short one. The 17,000 cases to which you referred, we are told they have been closed due to previously erroneous or duplicate records. What does erroneous mean?

  Ms Miles: This has happened in a lot of instances. Someone may have already been removed but our database was not updated sufficiently for us to read that when we did our management information check.

  Chairman: Mr Clappison, I am sorry, I have to stop you there because we have other questions. They are detailed, they are extremely important and we will be writing to you with all these questions. I am sorry you did not have notice of these before, because I am sure you would have responded, but we will write to you about it.

  Q65  Ms Buck: These are issues that I also wanted to pursue. Of the 17,000 files that are classified as erroneous, could you tell us what profile you have of data and at what stage the data effectively became useless for the purposes of pursuing your case? Of those, how many of them were migrated onto a computer system, how many of them were existing paper files and how many of them do you think errors were made transferring them from paper files onto the computer? I ask this because, as one of the constituency MPs with the biggest legacy caseloads on this Committee, it is constantly coming back to me that paper files that were destroyed by water penetration and eaten by rats, and all these different excuses that we used to use for our homework, the actual kind of standard of maintenance of those files going back over the course of the decade is a very serious problem. What is the analysis? Give us an impression now, but could you also perhaps give a little bit more of a detailed break-down as to how it became clear that information was wrong?

  Ms Miles: In order to make a decision on a case we normally have to look at the electronic record and the paper file. It is not that we are in a situation where the paper file does not exist. Some of the older cases, when you look at them, are quite an extraordinary bundle of a lot of judicial decisions and so on. In terms of breaking down the 17,000, around 2,000 of those were duplicates, where we literally had the same case twice. Perhaps we had not found the original file, we had to open up a new file, and so those were duplicates. Around 9,500 of those 17,000 were cases where it was an error, as I explained to Mr Clappison, where someone may have already been removed and the record on our database was not updated sufficiently, for when the sweep goes through to check the number of removals they would have been counted properly, and we have had to painstakingly go through each paper file and ensure that the CIV record, the database record, is current with the paper file. Then the remaining 5,500 of those closed cases are EU nationals, so they are people who had made a claim for asylum. The top nationalities were Romanians.

  Q66  Ms Buck: How many?

  Ms Miles: Five thousand five hundred, of which 2,500 were dependents, so 3,000 principal applicants (people from Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia—those are the top five nationalities), and they are people who, obviously, have the right to live in the UK now that accession has happened.

  Q67  Ms Buck: How many do you not have a current contact address for? How many of those in that 17,000 do you not have any current contact deals for?

  Ms Miles: For the duplicates and errors obviously that does not apply, and for the EU nationals, we have written to all of them to say that now that they are in the EU and they have a right to be here we are assuming that they have withdrawn their asylum claim. I cannot guarantee that all of those letters arrived to the correct individual.

  Q68  Ms Buck: Are you closing files because you cannot find people?

  Ms Miles: It is a good question. Not at the moment, but inevitably there will be people that we want to trace and we cannot track down. It goes without saying that there will be people who have left the country and, in fact, the previous Home Secretary referred to those when he originally announced the case records. In future the situation will be different. When we have electronic embarkation checks it will be much clearer about who has left the country, but we are struggling to trace a number of cases. They include Turks, Sri Lankans, Chinese and others, but in order to do that what we do is we check up to eight external databases, which include Experian, GB Accelerator, which is the voter's database, and the NHS, and we check five internal databases as well, or up to five, and we are basically trying to track those files down, those cases down

  Q69  Ms Buck: As of today no files have been closed because you have been unable to contact people?

  Ms Miles: That is right.

  Q70  Ms Buck: That is the current position?

  Ms Homer: Could I give a very brief example, because I had a small number of foreign national prisoners where we had a similar issue. I think, the last time I reported it, it was 127 we had not yet found of the 1013—it is now 123—and those four whom we had failed to find so far have come to our attention because we do not completely close the file, we keep looking. In one case somebody got a speeding ticket and that triggered a new lead and enabled us to find them. What we are trying to work out is how we can use the information that is genuinely available to us for those cases where, as you point out, we will reach a point where we cannot find where they are at present.

  Q71  Ms Buck: What proportion of cases that are currently with exceptional leave to remain or where exceptional leave to remain has expired and people are waiting for indefinite leave, excluding prisoners, do you then refuse indefinite leave to and have made moves to administratively remove or even deport?

  Ms Miles: I do not have that information.

  Q72  Ms Buck: Have you any idea?

  Ms Miles: No.

  Ms Homer: There is no reason to suggest it would be particularly different for these cases, but can we write to you and give you our—

  Q73  Ms Buck: My guess would be that it is very, very low. The reason I am asking is because if within your legacy backlog you are carrying out extensive exercises looking at people who have already completed a period of exceptional leave to remain, of whom, I would guess, excluding prisoners, 98% are going to be allowed their indefinite leave to remain, yet some of those people have been waiting for three years and four years with no status, what the purpose is of treating them in the same administrative manner as you are treating people for whom you have complex files and error in the data and so forth?

  Ms Homer: Can we write, Chairman. I think it would be helpful for us to give some thought to that.

  Chairman: That would be very helpful.

  Q74  Bob Russell: I am conscious of the time, so I just ask one question to Ms Homer. I understand your first priority is to deal with those who may pose a risk to the public. Of the 52,000 files that are now being dealt with, does that mean that all those who pose a risk to the public have been dealt with?

  Ms Homer: What Emily and her team have been doing is starting from clear evidence on the legacy files of some criminality; so they have prioritised all those cases where there was an indication of criminality, and what she has been able to confirm to me is that, in many cases, either that proved not to be the case or those cases had already been dealt with, but it has included a number of cases that have been prioritised for criminality. On the rest where there is not on the face of our record criminality, nonetheless an early stage of all of the cases is to do a PNC check and, if we get any hit from that, we then prioritise those cases to the top of the list. So, yes, we prioritise the ones we know about and, yes, we will continue to search for any where there is a criminal record that we have been unaware of until we start working on that case.

  Q75  Bob Russell: Those where you are aware there is risk you are satisfied have all been dealt with, but there may be others that will have come through?

  Ms Homer: I am satisfied we have started dealing with them. I would not say that we have finished all cases.

  Q76  Mr Streeter: How many individual cases are left in the case resolution department?

  Ms Miles: Just before Christmas I allocated all the remaining principal applicant cases, the records, I should say, to each of around 60 case owners, and each case owner has got 5,500 cases in their caseload. What I would emphasise is that I would anticipate many of those will be in the errors and duplicates category. Clearly, almost a third of the cases we have concluded so far fall into that category.

  Q77  Mr Streeter: Which takes me to my next question, do you expect the outcome of the remainder to be roughly a third to go, a third to stay and a third duplicate and errors?

  Ms Miles: I do not think it is possible to speculate on that. The original priorities that the previous Home Secretary set out included those that may fall to be granted and those that would be more easily removed, and clearly we have been prioritising those as we go.

  Q78  Mr Winnick: The Immigration Service Union publicised, as you know, that apparently there was a memorandum that students who overstayed their visas were not to be considered a priority in removal. Is that so?

  Ms Homer: No. I think it is the age-old problem of trying to capture something quite complex in as few words as you can. It does not always work perfectly. The situation we have got is that we have actually toughened up our approach to students. Whilst we used to take a view that there was a short period of grace if they applied to re-extend their leave after their leave expired, we will not allow that in future. I think the question is just getting the balance right. To refer to the point the Chairman made earlier, my intervention was not in relation to an individual case but to a type of case where we did end up seeking to remove an individual who had literally just filled the form in wrongly; she had put the wrong bit of her bank card into the wrong part of the form. The college confirmed she had been a proper student; she had told us all the right information. I have to say, I tried to give a clear message—I stand by that—that our enforcement resources should not be directed to students like that, but when they break the rules—if they work when they should not, if they do not study when they say they are studying, if they commit crimes—then we take action against them, and every year we deport students and, indeed, with help from colleagues in other parts of the public sector, we close bogus colleges when we have evidence that colleges are also guilty of abuse.

  Q79  Mr Winnick: So there is no real change when it comes to students who overstay.

  Ms Homer: I think we have toughened up. We expect students now to apply to extend their leave within the period of leave they have got, and we are sending a message that we are serious about that but I do not want us to toughen up to the point where we are being silly about it.