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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 595-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
MR TONY MILLNS and MR NICK LEWIS MR PHIL WOOLAS MP and MR JEREMY OPPENHEIM Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 117
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Home Affairs Committee on Members present Keith Vaz, in the Chair Tom Brake Ms Karen Buck Mrs Ann Cryer David T C Davies Mrs Janet Dean Patrick Mercer Gwyn Prosser Bob Russell Martin Salter Mr David Winnick ________________ Witnesses: Mr Tony Millns, Chief Executive, English UK, and Mr Nick Lewis, Association of Colleges (and Principal of Castle College, Nottingham), gave evidence. Q1 Chairman: Could I bring the Committee to order for this one-off inquiry into
bogus colleges. Can I begin by declaring
my interest: my wife is a solicitor and a part-time Judge. Thank you very much for coming to give
evidence today. This inquiry is a
revisitation of a previous inquiry that the Select Committee conducted some
years ago but is being conducted within the context of the new points-based
system. The Committee was very concerned
to see newspaper reports, especially those in The Times newspaper, about the number of bogus colleges that are in
existence in Mr Lewis: There are and
it has been something that my Association, the Association of Colleges, has
been aware of for some time. It has been
something of a problem because of the impact on the Q2 Chairman: I wonder if you could tell the Committee how many colleges you think are bogus colleges and a rough estimate as to how many students you think are affected? It can only be a guess and an estimate based on information. Mr Lewis: I could not
hazard a guess on this particular one. I
do not know whether my colleague could.
Certainly my Association has 359 members and they are legitimate further
education corporations in Q3 Chairman: Presumably you have followed this subject for a while because you alerted the Home Office to it. Are we talking about five, a handful, hundreds, just give us a rough idea? Mr Millns: Perhaps I could help. English UK is the association of accredited English language centres which covers language centres in universities, further education colleges (and I am pleased to say Castle College, Nottingham is a member) and also the private sector, including charities and educational foundations and trusts. There are 421 members and 490 centres currently accredited under the accreditation scheme which we run with the British Council. However, we have been aware and have actually been campaigning for some ten years or so on the issue of bogus colleges. We have a database of non-accredited English language centres in the private sector. That database covers some 560 institutions. Around 450 of those have not made any move to get accreditation and a significant proportion of those 100 or so that have made a move to get accreditation have failed because of low standards. You are left with around 450 colleges, not all of which are necessarily bogus, but, how shall I put it, would benefit further investigation. Q4 Chairman: Dodgy? Potentially dodgy? Mr Millns: We cannot be absolutely certain that they are but the chances are, if they have not come forward for accreditation or made any move to gain it in the last four or five years particularly, when the Government has been making moves towards setting up the new register of sponsors, you do get the impression that a lot of them are probably sub-standard at the very least. Q5 Chairman: So we are talking about roughly 450? Mr Millns: Yes. Q6 Chairman: Covering how many students? Mr Millns: That again is extremely difficult to say. The whole problem with this area is that there is no Association of Bogus Language Schools to speak for them, so it is rather difficult to a get a handle on it. Some of them are undoubtedly very small with possibly only 20 or 30 students, but the problem is that of course until the end of March this year they were, if they were on the Register of Education and Training Providers maintained by the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, able to bring in international students who required visas, and it is simply unknown how many of those students they might have bought in over the last four, five or six years. Q7 Chairman: Are we talking about numbers of hundreds? Mr Millns: It could be tens of thousands quite easily. Q8 Chairman: There are tens of thousands of bogus students in this country at the moment? Mr Millns: Quite easily. Q9 Chairman: Have you raised any of these representations with the Home Office? Mr Millns: The Home Office and the Border Agency are well aware of the scale of the problem. Over the some five years since 2004 when David Blunkett was Home Secretary and made the announcement that accreditation and a register would be required, they have been making moves. One has to say not before time. I would not say in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee that this is entirely the Home Office's fault. It has always struck me as extremely strange, to pick up the point that Nick made about reputation, that the Education Departments, going under various names way back to the Department of Education and Skills, have never made a move in any way to license, accredit or quality assure private sector education establishments. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is a national scandal that nothing has ever been done. Q10 Chairman: Have you written to the departments? You have written to government, have you? Mr Millns: We have had many meetings with government departments. Q11 Chairman: When was the first time this was raised, can you remember? Mr Lewis: If I may,
Chairman, in 1999 the Prime Minister Tony Blair established the first Prime
Minister's initiative for the recruitment of international students and
international education contacts as part of a diplomatic and economic
development visionary agenda. There was
an inter-departmental group from the Home Office, Foreign Office, Department
for Education and DTI as was at that time.
I represented the Association on that group in 1999 through to 2002 and
on many occasions raised the issue of bogus students and bogus certificates and
the way in which it was having a deleterious impact on the Q12 Chairman: So this was first raised ten years ago? Mr Lewis: To my knowledge, I did so at an official meeting. Q13 Ms Buck: You talked about sharing that information in general terms but is there a process now or has there ever been in which, for example, the particular point you made about colleges that have applied for accreditation and failed or colleges that have not applied for accreditation, that information being shared with the Home Office? Mr Millns: Yes. Q14 Ms Buck: That is a routine process that you will tell them or they will ask? Mr Millns: It is becoming routine. There have been many developments over the last year or so since the Border Agency approved a number of accrediting bodies and there is a group chaired by Ofsted called the Accreditation Standards and Consistency Group, which is beginning the process of sharing some of this information, but certainly we have shared our database with the Home Office and the Border Agency so that they are aware. I must emphasise, Chairman, to go back to your point, that that database covers only colleges which offer English language courses. There is a whole field out there of independent tertiary colleges, some of which are accredited by the British Accreditation Council and some of which are accredited by a new body called the Accreditation Service for International Colleges, which provide other forms of course, mainly computing, IT and business studies, which also have international students. That is why I say the total number of students in private sector establishments over the last five or six years could be tens of thousands. Q15 Mr Winnick: Do you think there is a danger, it has been expressed here and there, that those who have been recruited to terrorism will use entry into the UK to one of these bogus colleges, or perhaps a college which is not necessarily bogus, in order to carry out acts of terror in the UK? Do you put any credibility on those fears? Mr Millns: I put credibility on it because it is perfectly possible. However, I do not think that it is anywhere near as prevalent as the simple fact that most bogus students are disguised economic migrants and that they are here to work illegally in fact. Q16 David Davies: Mr Millns, my question was: are these students coming over here under the impression that they are getting some sort of an education or are they simply economic migrants who sign up for the package? Mr Millns: Some will know that they are definitely the latter. One of the problems Nick and I were going to mention that "bogus college" is a bit of a portmanteau term and we do need to unpack it between the colleges which are totally bogus and are just fronts for visa fraud, basically, through to colleges which are very poor quality and are ripping off students who believe that they are coming for a genuine educational experience. Q17 David Davies: And undermining your members' good names? Mr Millns: The major
point that we would like to leave with you is that, internationally, the Chairman: That is very helpful. Mr Davies? Q18 David Davies: Again it is difficult for you to give me an exact figure, I appreciate that, but there are something like 15,000 of these institutions according to some of the figures that we heard earlier on, 1,848 private educational establishments and 13,200 institutions on the RETP, 15,000 in total. Let me just put a statistic to you that I was thinking about. There are 60 million people in this country that we know of, apparently. If you divide 60 million by 15,000 you end up with about 4,000 people. What that suggests is that there is one of these institutions for every 4,000 people. That is a village half the size of the rural town in which I live. Does that not suggest to you that thousands of these institutions are bogus, so it is not just tens of thousands of students? Mr Millns: I am not going to defend the Register of Education and Training Providers. It was a stopgap measure and it had many flaws, but I am afraid you need to dig around behind the statistics that you have just quoted to understand that it is not quite as you put it, I am afraid. For instance, if you look at the register there are somewhere around 40 or 50 institutions on it which are HM Prisons. These are unlikely to be recruiting international students, I would venture, and they are not the sort of place that you or I would go for our adult training, so you can look at the register and you can narrow down to a relatively limited number, probably between 3,000 and 4,000 I would venture, of private sector educational establishments, which is really what I think you are talking about which are the potentially dodgy ones. You then have to look at how many are covered by current accreditation schemes and on the register of sponsors and my very rough, back-of-the-envelope figures are that on the register of sponsors at the moment we have around 1,700 to 1,800 educational institutions so the gap there is 1,200 to 1,400, which is going back to my point that there are 450 which claim to do English language, the rest will be tertiary education colleges offering computing, IT and business studies, and those are the ones that I think emphasis should be focused on in terms of compliance with immigration. Q19 David Davies: So that is a total of 2,200 that we should be looking at? Mr Millns: A couple of thousand, very roughly. Q20 Martin Salter: Two technical points, Mr Millns, you stated that students go back and make a positive contribution to their own countries. Mr Millns: Registered ones do. Q21 Martin Salter: Given the amount of cases that I deal with, and I have a fairly large immigration caseload, I have an awful lot of people who come here on student visas who then apply for permanent leave to remain. I wonder if you had any figures on that. Secondly, could I ask another technical point. You talked about bogus students coming over as economic migrants to work here illegally. Surely students are allowed to work up to a point, are they not? Can you just clarify that for the Committee. Mr Millns: Students on what you might call full-time courses, typically degree courses, are allowed to work 20 hours a week during term time and full time in vacations. That is permitted. Q22 Bob Russell: Gentlemen, earlier you described a decade of government indifference
and failure to deal with issues that were raised with them. Mr Millns, I am going to ask, what advice
does the British Council offer to overseas students wishing to study in the Mr Millns: I think it is unlikely that the British Council would, shall we say, knowingly recommend a non-accredited college. If you look at the British Council website there is a list of accredited institutions, certainly for English language. There is a different arm of the British Council called the Education UK Partnership, which is, in effect, a commercial promotion arm, which relies on a subscription basis and recommends only the institutions which subscribe to it. Those are, however, all legitimate institutes, I have no doubt about that. Q23 Bob Russell: Does the British Council offer friendly advice to potential students who may say, "We prefer this other institution because it is a lot cheaper and then we can do a bit of work on the side"? Mr Millns: The British
Council offers a certain amount - and I have to tread carefully here because it
is in fact reducing - of counselling of students who wish to come to the Mr Lewis: If I may say
so, we would have no difficulty with the role that the British Council plays
here and I think that difficult path that they tread that Tony has described is
very useful to us. What I would like to
do is draw attention to the difference between a lot of people coming into this
country for English as a foreign language and the fact that many of our
institutions, universities and colleges are running full-time programmes for
higher national diplomas or diplomas in construction. We work with Q24 Tom Brake: Just on that question of bogus colleges, I was very happy to be one of the MPs who sponsored the early day motion in that respect, but given that some of these colleges are clearly willing to flout the law what additional security do you get by having the term "college" registered, in effect? Mr Lewis: I think that is a long-term impact. Clearly one would have to use any change and restriction in the longer term. That is a solution that will roll out over the next five, ten, 15 or 20 years and it is something that we would welcome because it would have a growing impact. I think at the moment the real issue is distinguishing between legitimate and non-legitimate activity. "Bogus college", as Tony suggested, is a strange phrase, it is a catch-all because you sometimes get some colleges setting up in one room doing some legitimate activity but having a sideline in issuing bogus qualifications, so the issue of bogus qualifications is wrapped up in all of this. I think we need immediate activity and I think that the UK Border Agency's measures they have put in place are a huge step forward, and we have been very supportive of them, and then we need this longer term perspective, which is our advocacy of the restriction on the use of the term college. Q25 Chairman: Is it your organisation that has suggested legislation to protect the use of the word college? Mr Lewis: It is suggesting the use of existing legislation, the 2006 Act. It is open to the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform to add the word "college" to their list of regulated words in the establishment of companies and that would be a long-term impact to restrict and slowly reduce the number of organisations that care to call themselves a college. Q26 Patrick Mercer: Mr Lewis, has Mr Lewis: It has. Q27 Patrick Mercer: What was your experience of the process of inspection and accreditation by the UK Border Agency? Mr Lewis: It was very good and we were very pleased with that. We watch the list very carefully as it is developing to see how many colleges that we know about do not appear on it. Some that we know about have appeared with a category B, which is basically that they are subject to further scrutiny, and it seems to me that as we watch this roll out my main concern is to ensure that the amount of checking being done is adequate. That is where I think that we have further work to do to ensure that the objectives set out by the Border Agency are going to be met. In other words, I think that there may be loopholes. We are very keen to advise on the closure of any loopholes, but we are in the early stages of the roll out. Q28 Patrick Mercer: Forgive me, I cannot picture the college. Whereabouts is it in Mr Lewis: It is in
central Q29 Patrick Mercer: Were you visited by the Border Agency? Mr Lewis: We were visited by the Border Agency, yes. Q30 Patrick Mercer: How many times? Mr Lewis: I do not know the answer to that question. Q31 Patrick Mercer: Could you let us know, please? Mr Lewis: I will. Q32 Patrick Mercer: It would be really helpful if you could say what aspects were looked at during each visit as best you can. Mr Lewis: I will provide a briefing note to the Committee. Chairman: That will be very, very helpful. David Winnick? Q33 Mr Winnick: We are having the Minister responsible for immigration matters in after you. How far do you believe the Government could do more, than indeed, it could be argued, previous Governments and certainly the present Government have done to stop these bogus colleges being set up, which obviously is a blot on our country? Mr Lewis: It is and in terms of setting up the foundation I think the work that has already been done to establish the UK Border Agency is an excellent step and we would want to continue to support that. If more is to be done, it is to make sure that that operation works successfully, that it does not allow loopholes to develop and that we have joined up government. It seems to me that we really here are looking at joining up issues for the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Education Departments and so on. We need these things to be tied together to make sure that loopholes are not created and developed. Q34 Mr Winnick: Recognising we are a free enterprise economy and every business person, bogus or otherwise, can get in on the act, what surprises me as a layman is that an educational establishment could be set up without the Department of Education, or whatever it is now called, inspecting it and being absolutely satisfied that it is a bona fide institution. That does not happen at the moment so far as I understand. Mr Millns: You are quite
right, it is indeed, and has been for many years, a national scandal that
anyone, whether a fit and proper person or not, can hire two rooms above a fish
and chip shop and call themselves a college.
It is almost unbelievable given that the world believes that Q35 Mr Winnick: It seems to me that it is not so much the Immigration Minister who we are going to have in in a moment but it should be the Education Minister or one of the Ministers in the Department who should be asked very tough questions. Mr Millns: I said something like that a few minutes ago, yes. Q36 Mr Winnick: Until this is done do I take it that the loopholes will simply continue until the Department says, "We must approve these establishments before they can function"? Mr Millns: It will, except that access to the register of sponsors and the ability to bring in international students who require visas will be more carefully policed than it has been. There is no doubt that there are still a couple of pretty obvious loopholes in the system. The Border Agency is proposing that new start-up colleges will be able to operate and be on the register of sponsors for six months before they need to get any form of accreditation. Even with the restriction on the number of students they can bring in they will still be able to bring in visa-ed national students. Q37 Bob Russell: Mr Winnick referred to this as a loophole. What words would you use to describe it, because a loophole is something small? Mr Millns: Well, first
of all, I do regard it as a national scandal that anyone can set up a so-called
educational establishment. The
Government has made serious moves now to tackling the immigration abuse side of
that but the educational damage which we have referred to in terms of the
reputational quality of the Q38 Chairman: And presumably it means that they can recruit people from this country? Mr Millns: Absolutely and anyone who does not require a visa, European Union nationals. Q39 Mr Winnick: It seems that the most appropriate word for those who run these bogus colleges is "spivs"? Mr Millns: Yes, I would not disagree with that. Mr Lewis: Very often these colleges are established by people who have come into the country as economic migrants of whatever origin they may have, and then, with family and relatives in certain parts of the world, they establish a balanced network with the sole aim of developing a pipeline, so that is how it develops. In many of these institutions you can see how the process works and what we have not had is joined-up government to deal with the various elements - Foreign Office, Home Office, Department of Education - and the departments need to all work together because that is the pipeline, we can see it, we can report it, we can explain our anxieties, but it is recognising how these things work and how therefore you can stop them. Q40 Chairman: Neither of you have mentioned any particular country, although The Times' report refers specifically to people of Pakistani origin. Is it the case that it applies to all countries and indeed, Mr Millns, you talked about EU students coming in, so it is across the board, is it not, it is not just one particular country? Mr Millns: It is. I do not think it would be right to single out any one nationality in this. The particular issue in relation to European Union students relates to junior students who can come on child visitor visas and then can go to non-accredited colleges and are at risk of child abuse. Q41 Mrs Dean: Although you have expressed some reservations are you fairly confident that the new register of sponsors under the points-based system will close the loopholes and ensure that only accredited institutions are able to sponsor students? Mr Lewis: I think that it is a good solution that has been worked up and implemented and I think the real issue now is making it work, and we want to work with the Border Agency to make it work. That is to do with the willingness to address issues as they appear and to deal with what we perceive to be the weaknesses in the system that has been created - and Tony has mentioned one of them. I think that it is a good solution to the major part of the problem but it is not an adequate solution to all of the problem, and we have mentioned some of the other things that it will not address. Q42 Martin Salter: It seems to me that this is a complete failure to regulate and this rush that we have had in recent years to portray all regulation as bad is fundamentally flawed. It was fundamentally flawed in respect of the bankers and it is clearly fundamentally flawed in respect of private education. Mr Millns: Let us not talk about bankers. In terms of private education, yes, I would agree with you and, in fact, probably the point you have to go back to is 1982 because the then Department for Education and Science had previously run an accreditation scheme for private colleges and in what in education shorthand are usually referred to as the "Thatcher cuts" in 1982 that scheme was dropped by DES. I have somewhere in our archives a yellowing news release from Sir Rhodes Boyson announcing that decision, and many of you Members here I am sure will remember that gentleman with great affection. Q43 Mr Winnick: Is that genuine? Mr Millns: As a sector we had to pick that up and with the British Council we set up a new accreditation system but that was voluntary so, yes, a mandatory system of regulation has not existed since before 1982. Mr Lewis: If I may just add to that. There is, in my judgment, a fairly heavy layer of regulation which bears down on universities and bears down on colleges of further education and further education public corporations. I would argue that we have a fairly heavy regulatory system. The problem we are dealing with here is where there is an absence of a regulatory system and it seems to me that that is a question of balance. Martin Salter: I just return to that, Chairman, with a supplementary. It would be very helpful for the Committee if you could send us the chapter and verse, in other words your yellowing cutting of Mr Boyson, because clearly the problem goes back to 1982. However, not wishing to let my own Government off the hook, we were surprised to receive a letter from Diana Warwick at Universities UK expressing serious concern back in 2007 about the decision of the then Immigration Minister to approve the Accreditation Service for International Colleges. This seems to be a shadowy organisation with very little transparency and it has clearly been massively ineffective. What more steps need to be taken? Q44 Chairman: Mr Lewis, is it a shadowy organisation? Mr Lewis: I do not know whether it is a shadowy organisation or not but I do know that further consideration needs to be given to these things because I think that we do rely too much on regulatory bodies setting themselves up and so on. It is back to this issue of joined-up government and taking a view across the piece. This is a complex subject. There is a lot of legitimate business taking place here. We should not forget that there are big companies which bring students in as well, there are big international contractors bringing students into the UK for certain training and educational purposes as part of big contracts and so on, a lot of legitimate business and it just seems to me that we need to be much more adept at actually spotting things and setting them up. It seems to me that these are falling between stools and that it is an inter-departmental issue. Q45 Chairman: Mr Millns, is it a shadowy organisation? Should they be more transparent? Mr Millns: If you look on Companies House I think it is difficult to see who the ultimate beneficial owners of that organisation are. To address the point of the question, it is certainly the case that the accreditation bodies that have been approved need to be reviewed and there needs to be a lot more rigorous work done on ensuring that they are making decisions based on the same standards, which I personally do not believe they are at the moment, and indeed you could pose a question as to why we have more than one or two accrediting bodies, because those of us who have been around education for some time will remember that when there were something like six A level boards in England there was a lot of suggestion that one board was easier than another, and you get that kind of competition. Q46 Gwyn Prosser: An area which we have not looked at yet is the trainee teachers who might be sucked into some of these poor quality or even bogus colleges under false pretences. What is your experience of that? Mr Lewis: My
institution runs teacher training programmes and programmes to train
trainers. I think that in terms of those
students, those adults retraining or training to become teachers of English or
teachers of technical subjects, then the university or the college that
actually runs that course is responsible for making sure that any work
experience is actually legitimate and high quality because we would have to
ensure that the supervision of teacher trainer in that particular workplace was
of a particular standard, so I am not too worried about that side of it. There is a very large market of people who
work part time in teaching English as a foreign language, as an example. I do not think there is a major risk
there. In terms of spotting what is
going on, rather than bringing the risk to our student teachers, we tend to
have very good intelligence in our geographical areas as to what is going
on. It is our business managers that
tend to spot that, as indeed Tony's network will be able to spot that. Generally speaking, I can tell you what is
going on in the Mr Millns: We do try to give advice to prospective teachers on our website and through the British Council as to what qualifications they require to work in a legitimate organisation but I am sorry to say there are some spivs, let us use that word, selling sub-standard courses in teaching English. I referred one a year or so ago to the Advertising Standards Authority for saying you can train over a weekend to teach English anywhere in the world. Q47 Gwyn Prosser: Do we give enough guidance and warning to would-be trainee teachers coming into these institutions about what to look out for? Mr Millns: We do what we can but I do not think there is any perfect way of warning teachers or prospective teachers to avoid less reputable organisations. Mr Lewis: Again if I
may add, this is a major problem because one has a market here. There is choice between universities, colleges
and providers of English language courses, and I think the saddest cases are
when people who are legitimate students from around the world find themselves
suddenly in the middle of a city at a bogus college. They think and their families think that they
have made all the right decisions, and with whatever advice our organisations
provide and the British Council provide, that is sometimes what happens. The market is extremely complex and very
large. It is a worldwide market. For us the main competitors are the Q48 Mrs Cryer: Could you just explain what you think the possible adverse impact may be on perfectly legitimate universities and colleges of the sort of adverse publicity that this is going to get and what sort of impact it might also have on perfectly legitimate students wishing to come here for very good courses? I have a certain involvement with Bradford University and I shall be going to one of their degree ceremonies, and I know that many of those kids that are getting their degrees have been through a very good degree course and they are very determined to do very well, and it will be dreadful for Bradford University if these sort of students were put off coming here. Could you comment on what sort of adverse impact it might have? Mr Lewis: The impact is
enormous because reputation is everything in this world. In the Prime Minister's initiative, the first
one and the second one which is still running, reputation is the critical issue
for our universities and colleges worldwide and word of mouth and student
experience is critical. We live in a world
whereby if there is an incident in Nottingham, we have parents of students in Q49 Tom Brake: Mr Lewis, you said that you have good local knowledge about what is going on in your area. Do your associations make any attempt to pool that information? Mr Lewis: We do tend to pool that information. The Association of Colleges has a regional set-up so that we have local intelligence across the cities and region. It tends to be pooling information in an informal way. We do not maintain a register of what we regard as bogus colleges internally, but we do network and we do have that information coming in, but it is not our business to do the regulation and we do not collect it systematically. Q50 Tom Brake: Would it not be to your advantage to collect it systematically and to make that information available? Mr Lewis: I think we are dealing with such large numbers. We started this discussion talking about large numbers of bogus colleges and large numbers of students. I think it is beyond our resources to do that. We can assist and we have been assisting, back to my earlier comments, in raising this issue many years ago. We have attempted to put in information and so on as best we can. The more systematic this can be done the more easily we can help. Q51 Tom Brake: On the question of being systematic then, do you issue guidance to bona fide colleges and schools advising what action they should take if they suspect that just down the road from them in the high street is a bogus college? Mr Lewis: Yes, we do
operate on a network like that so that if there is something taking place in Q52 Tom Brake: Do you actually issue
guidance so that if a college in Mr Lewis: We do not issue guidance at that level, no. Q53 Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr Millns and Mr Lewis, you have been extremely
helpful in giving evidence to this Committee and you have given us food for
thought. We may well decide to call an
Education Minister as part of this inquiry.
We were hoping that this would be a one-off session but it may be
slightly longer than we anticipated based on what you have told us. In summary, you have said that there are
hundreds of colleges and thousands of students who may well be bogus students
and bogus colleges in the Mr Millns: Potentially. Chairman: And therefore it is worthy of further investigation. You are welcome to stay to hear what the Minister has to say. Witnesses: Mr Phil Woolas MP, Minister of State for Borders and Immigration, and Mr Jeremy Oppenheim, National Lead for Economic and Family Migration, gave evidence.
Chairman: Minister, Mr Oppenheim, thank you very much for coming here this morning to give evidence to the Select Committee. May I begin, Minister, by expressing the gratitude of this Committee to you personally for all the work that you did in respect of the Gurkhas issue. When the Government was defeated in the House, you went to the House and you made a number of statements concerning working with this Committee. As a result of your personal initiative, the Committee had a session with the Gurkhas and with your officials and we were able to make recommendations which you and the Prime Minister accepted, so we are extremely grateful. We hope that that is a precedent for the future that all the recommendations of the Home Affairs Select Committee are accepted in full by the Government! Q54 Mr Winnick: Do we have a guarantee? Mr Woolas: Thank you, Chairman. I think that means I am in for a rough 45 minutes. Q55 Chairman: You guess correctly, Minister!
We have had some very shocking evidence this morning, Minister, about
the state of the entry clearance operation in that there are hundreds of bogus
colleges and thousands or tens of thousands of bogus students that are in this
country at the moment. We know that you
will say to this Committee that the points-based system is the most radical
reform of immigration policy since the Second World War, and we may or may not
agree with that because we have not concluded our own inquiry into the points-based
system, but as it stands at the moment there are these colleges and students
who are being admitted. Part of the
reason why we are holding this inquiry is because of press articles, especially
those in The Times written by Mr Andrew Norfolk.
Have you personally seen the dossier that Mr Norfolk produced about the
number of bogus students who have entered the Mr Woolas: Chairman, thank you very much indeed for your kind remarks. On the article in The Times, which we responded to by thanking The Times, we were aware of the issue, personally I have of course read the articles and I have had briefings from officials on the background to it, but I have not read the specific dossier that I understand exists. Q56 Chairman: You have not read it but your officials have seen the dossier; is that right? Mr Oppenheim: I have received it, yes. Q57 Chairman: Baroness Warwick wrote to us yesterday to inform us that she had
written to your predecessor, Liam Byrne, highlighting the problems that existed,
and we have heard from universities and colleges today to say that they first
raised these concerns with Ministers as far back as 1999. Are you embarrassed that in the last ten
years the Government has not done more in order to cope with the situation of
bogus students? At this moment in every
city and every town in Mr Woolas: I was reported also in The Times on 17 April of this year at a visit to Imperial College at the University of London as saying, if I may Mr Chairman just to answer your question directly and frankly, that: "The changes for colleges, universities and students in the points-based system are primarily aimed at stopping abuse of student visas - whether using non-existent courses to obtain one, non-attendance by students, or overstaying on a visa. Everyone who is honest in the immigration industry knows that students overstaying has been the immigration system's Achilles heel." I stand by that statement, Chairman. I think that the existence of colleges, or so-called colleges, either for exploitation of students or for visa reasons has been a problem in this country for many decades. You asked me whether I was embarrassed. I am proud that I have been able to oversee the implementation of a new regime, something that I personally have been campaigning on since the early 1980s. Q58 Chairman: On day one when you became Minister for Immigration presumably there
was a dossier presented to you of the key issues to do with your Department;
there usually is for new ministers. Was
this one of those issues that was flagged up by the Border Agency, or Mr Woolas: There was a
very comprehensive handover note, as you would expect knowing my predecessor,
which included advice that he in turn had got from officials. We think that this has been a very serious
issue. The reputation of Q59 Chairman: Yes, we are coming to that. Mr Woolas: I hope that answers your question. Q60 Chairman: We have had figures today of hundreds of colleges, and tens of thousands of students, and we know the figures from Pakistan have gone up from 7,000 to 26,000 in the last few years and we know this issue is not just about students coming from Pakistan, this affects students coming from all over the world, but do you have any figures to give this Committee on either the number of colleges or the numbers of students who are still here who need to be basically tracked down and removed? Mr Woolas: Chairman, yes I do. Clearly, the question that immigration ministers are asked often, which is how many illegal immigrants are there, is an unanswerable question to be certain, but I can give you the figures that I hope are helpful to you. We issue around 200,000 student visas each year. The duration of a student visa of course varies depending on the length of study, and one of the changes that I have been able to make as a result of the new regime is that a visa applies for the length of the course, and the universities find that very helpful. Of course now that we monitor student attendance we are able to back that up. We use the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills' register of providers. The precursor list that was used to recognise educational establishments listed 15,000 education and training organisations but of these about 4,000 of them consistently offered learning to foreign students. Over 2,000 institutions have applied for a sponsor licence under the new regime. There are just less than 1,600 educational establishments on the register of sponsors. So you can see, Chairman, that the number of institutions --- Q61 Chairman: --- has declined. Mr Woolas: --- that are licensed now under the sponsor regime is significantly less than our best estimate of how many colleges there were under the old regime. Q62 Chairman: So what is your estimate of how many were, to quote your predecessors as witnesses, dodgy? Mr Woolas: I do not want to besmirch colleges that are --- Q63 Chairman: We are not asking you to name any but we want some figures. Mr Woolas: Chairman, we estimated that under the old system around 4,000 consistently offer learning to foreign students. We have licensed 1,600. One could draw the conclusion from that that the difference is dodgy. I would caution against saying all of those are dodgy. Some have chosen not to apply perhaps for commercial reasons, but that would be my guess. Q64 Chairman: What about as far as the students are concerned? You gave us a figure of 200,000 getting visas to come here. What is your estimate? There must be some estimate as to how many you regard as bogus? Mr Woolas: I have researched this point in anticipation when you informed me of your intention to have this inquiry. These are the best figures that we can offer. Of the 120,000 students currently with permission to study which was granted in country, half must either leave the UK or make a further application under the new rules by December 2009, and by December 2010 all but 10% will have had to do the same. Of the 330,000 who applied from abroad, 60% will have to reapply under PVS or leave within the next 12 months, 85% within 24 months and 96% within three years. Any student who does not bring themselves within the new regime or does not leave the country when their leave expires will be subject to appropriate enforcement action. Q65 Chairman: As Minister, when this issue first came into the public domain, you must have had your senior officials in, Mr Oppenheim and others, and said, "Give us an estimate of how many of these 200,000 or these 120,000 who have to get leave to remain beyond 2009 are bogus?" You must have asked this question. Mr Woolas: I certainly did. Q66 Chairman: And what was the answer? Mr Woolas: If I could try to explain. Not only that but I examined the processes in
country and in Q67 Chairman: Did your officials give you an answer or not? Mr Woolas: There is not a specific figure that we estimate because it is best not to guess if we cannot be sure. Q68 Chairman: Is it best not to guess because the figures will be so high that everyone will be quite shocked? Mr Woolas: Chairman, as the Minister and the Home Secretary I have been very upfront and honest in saying that this is a problem and that you cannot have a managed migration system on the old basis of student visas. I said that honestly and openly, reported by the journalists from the Press Association who interviewed me and that was carried in national newspapers. I am not embarrassed by that. I think anybody who is honest about this system knows that there have been dodgy colleges. We are in the process of changing that. The new system is in force and that will make it better for genuine students and genuine colleges. Chairman: You have always been very open and honest with this Committee, for which we are extremely grateful. Patrick Mercer? Q69 Patrick Mercer: Minister, Mr Oppenheim, we spoke some time ago about the possibility of so-called bogus colleges being used to shroud terrorists. It would seem that Operation Pathway was based, at least partially, on that premise. You will have received privileged briefings about the threat that exists; can you give us a feel for that? Mr Woolas: Thank you, Mr Mercer. I am not a Privy Counsellor and I do not have access to all of the information, but of course those matters that concern immigration do cover my portfolio. Chairman, you will excuse me if I choose my words very carefully because I have to bear in mind that Operation Pathway individuals are still in immigration detention and have appeals going through, so my remarks are not related specifically to any knowledge that I may or may not have about them. Our experience is that terrorists are not going to draw attention to themselves, but the student visa route has been in the past, I believe, as I have said honestly this morning, subject to abuse. I personally have never seen any information or intelligence that suggests that terrorists or would-be terrorists have used that route. Commonsense says that you are going to get a valid visa if you are intent on criminal activity. Indeed, I would point out that the 9/11 bombers did study in this country previously, from what we can tell, on genuine student visas and there was the case of the doctors in Glasgow who were on legitimate visas, so our intelligence work does not depend on the idea that it is impossible to be a genuine student and a terrorist. Having said that, clearly if a college is only a college in name and it is in fact been being used to provide a backdoor route for student visas, then it does come to the attention of the security forces. I do think that our strategy of having a new regime does have beneficial impacts for security obviously and, critically, combining that with the electronic borders counting in and counting out we know if a student has overstayed and not left the country and we can then of course take enforcement action. Q70 Patrick Mercer: Following on from that, which regulatory bodies for further or higher education are approved by UKBA? Mr Woolas: Could I ask my expert? Q71 Chairman: Could you introduce your expert? Mr Woolas: Jeremy Oppenheim is the national lead on economic and family migration and he is one of our experts upon whom I depend. Mr Oppenheim: That is very kind of you. Q72 Chairman: Mr Oppenheim, come to the aid of the Minister. Mr Oppenheim: I will indeed. We ask Ofsted to undertake the overall accreditation for us and we use Accreditation UK, which is a British Council scheme which offers accreditation for English language schools; the BAC, the British Accreditation Council, which offers more general accreditation services; ASIC, that is the Accreditation Service for International Colleges, which also offers a general service; ABLS, which is the accreditation body for language services; and the Church of England Ministry Division. We use Ofsted and I meet regularly with the Director of Learning in Ofsted to make absolutely sure that those accreditation bodies are operating as firmly and well as possible. Q73 Patrick Mercer: How does the Border Agency decide which ones to approve? Mr Oppenheim: We are not academic experts and we particularly want to make sure that academic experts are involved in the accreditation of colleges so we rely on Ofsted in particular to be able to advise us about the best accreditation bodies. Patrick Mercer: Thank you, Chairman. Q74 Mrs Dean: Can I first of all clarify, you said that 2,000 institutions had applied to become sponsors and 1,600 are now on the list. Does that mean that 400 --- Mr Woolas: I am sorry, there were 2,000 who applied for a sponsor licence and there are just under 1,600 on the register of sponsors. Q75 Mrs Dean: Does that mean then 400 had been rejected or are they still in the process. Mr Oppenheim: Not every single one of them, Mrs Dean, because we will be working through a number of those cases, those applications and processing them over a period of 28 days or a little more if we want to take a bit longer over it, but we do know that out of the applications that we have received 280 have been rejected, 222 have been refused and 66 withdrew of their own volition. That is a continuing process. If you ask me in a week's time the figures will change because it is a live process. Q76 Mrs Dean: In 2006, this Committee produced a report on immigration controls and one of the recommendations was as follows: "The Department for Education and Skills should recognise that it has the responsibility for ensuring that colleges attracting overseas students are genuine and offer an adequate standard of education. It should own and maintain an improved register of colleges on which both students and the immigration authorities can rely ..." We also said that it seems that information about bogus colleges does not find its way to the DFES. Can I ask how the Border Immigration Authority has been ensuring that the DIUS have been working with you to make sure the system has improved? Mr Woolas: Thank you, Mrs Dean. The regime that we have in place for immigration purposes relies on sponsors, whether that is sponsor employers or sponsor colleges, or indeed sponsor individuals, and, consequentially, we are dependent on our partnerships with other departments, whether that is BERR or in this case DIUS. There are two levels. First of all, it is our requirement that the colleges must be registered as sponsors under the points-based system and then of course there is the work that we do with DIUS and DSCF and Ofsted, so that we rely on, essentially as Jeremy has said, their expertise to tell us whether they are proper colleges and we then say are they fit and proper to allow sponsored students in? Q77 Mrs Dean: And is that relationship working well? Mr Woolas: From my point of view with my colleagues works very well. I have confidence in the Joint Education Taskforce - JET we call it - which the key players such as Universities UK and others are involved in. We have had a lot of co-operation from that. Is it working well? I think so, but I am very conscious that there is a lot of fringe activity in this sector. We as the Home Office of course want to have a managed migration system. We are also conscious that we want to protect the reputation of the mainstream colleges. I think that is good. The evidence is that that is working. The number of students applying to mainstream is there. However, we also want to ensure that there is a good experience for the genuine student because of the importance to our economy. I believe that in clearing up the bogus colleges we are doing the country a service. Q78 David Davies: Minister, there are 1,600 colleges licensed to take foreign students at the moment; is that correct? Mr Woolas: Yes. Q79 David Davies: Have they all been inspected by UKBA by a personal inspection? Mr Woolas: The answer is yes but I just want to be very honest and clear with the Committee. Mr Oppenheim: To be clear,
nobody gets on the register without two processes going on: firstly, accreditation
by one of the academic accreditation bodies that I mentioned earlier and,
secondly, we need to assess whether the college is taking note of, understands
and applies the immigration rules as they are expected to do. That does not mean that we have visited every
single one of the establishments. There
is for me a difference between visiting King's College Cambridge and King's
College on Q80 Chairman: Sorry, what was the other college called? Mr Oppenheim: It is one I have invented but there are plenty of colleges with very similar names. Chairman: Are you already preparing for your retirement! Q81 David Davies: I appreciate your point. I have a couple of questions. You will be inspecting every single one and you are confident that you have inspected all the ones that would be of interest to us; is that correct? Mr Oppenheim: We have visited all the ones about which we have the greatest concerns and we will have visited all of the educational establishments by July of this year. Q82 David Davies: How many of these 1,600 institutions are offering courses other than English and have more than 50% of their students from other countries? Because I put a point to you, it is likely, is it not, other than English courses - and I can see why that would be popular with non-British students - that for anyone offering courses in IT, management or MBAs, you would expect there to be a high proportion of British students there, so are there any of these 1,600 which are non-English teaching which have more than 50% of their students from foreign countries? Mr Woolas: I think we will have to write to you about that. Q83 David Davies: Do you see the point I am getting at? It is a clear indication. Mr Woolas: To try to be helpful, what we find of course is that the colleges cover across a spectrum. Of the ones that we have rejected and the ones we have refused there are those who were providing legitimate courses in part of the college and non-legitimate courses in other parts of the college, some not at all, and some that we have suspicions about. Q84 David Davies: Can you see the point I am making? Mr Woolas: Absolutely. Q85 David Davies: That it is a fair indication of something we should be worried about. Finally then, we have been giving out visas to 200,000 students every year, about a million over the last five years. Do we have any knowledge about how many of those have gone home? Mr Woolas: Again, the figures that we provide to your Committee will cover that point, I believe. The issue of student visa overstaying - because students are entitled to stay for a period after their studies if they apply - is of course critical to our strategy. The electronic borders counting in and counting out, as it rolls out, now allows us to identify who has overstayed. My criticism of the past would include the point that, Mr Davies, you are asking about, I think that is right, in the past if a student overstayed unless we came into contact with them we would not necessarily know. Q86 Mr Winnick: Minister, the embassies and high commissions abroad, no doubt try and find out if colleges are legitimate or not, and Mr Oppenheim made reference to Ofsted, but we have had evidence from one of the previous witnesses who has said that anyone in Britain could open a so-called educational establishment above a fish and chip shop. I am just wondering what co-ordination do you have with the Education Department over such institutions? Mr Woolas: We will only
issue a visa, either in country or overseas, to a student who has received an
offer from a college or institution on our registered sponsor list, and we make
checks on that offer, because of course people forge letters of offer, and sometimes
they make up the name of the institution.
It has normally got " Q87 Mr Winnick: The Times article gave a totally different impression. If everything is fine and legitimate why are we having this evidence session today? The fact of the matter is that a lot of these students from overseas simply come to institutions which are totally bogus and, as I have said earlier today, are run by spivs. Mr Woolas: Mr Winnick, the system that I am describing is the new system. The story that you are referring to, which as I described before is a helpful story, related to students who had come under the old system. I think the story shows that we are right to be doing what we are doing. Q88 Chairman: Minister, what Mr Winnick is getting at is these students are actually in the country at the moment. Just because you have brought in the points-based system does not mean all these students who are bogus students suddenly got on a plane and went back, they are actually here now. That is the point he is making. Mr Woolas: That is right and if they are not in a sponsored institution and they are not attending courses we can and do revoke their visas. Q89 Mr Winnick: So The Times article served a useful purpose? Mr Woolas: We were very pleased with The Times article and the co-operation that we got from The Times. As I said before, we were aware of some of the intelligence that was reported. I personally know the college, it is in my part of the country, and it is part of a campaign to clamp down. Q90 Mr Winnick: Do I take it that there is going to be closer (indeed there does not seem to be any) co-ordination? I would like to see, and I am sure my colleagues take the same view, close co-ordination between the immigration section of the Home Office and the Education Department. Mr Woolas: I think so. I do not know if, Jeremy, you want to add any practical details. Mr Oppenheim: If I could just be helpful, Minister. Mr Winnick, we do have very close working relationships with both DIUS and DCSF, because, as you know, the points-based system deals with children over the age of eight as well as adults studying, and with Ofsted. Clearly, there is always more that we can do together to stamp out people who are offering courses that we do not think are legitimate. If I could add, as part of our enforcement work around the country, we do look at the colleges that are not on the list of sponsors under Tier 4 but do have students in significant numbers, and we have been undertaking a range of visits to those. Where we think they are not operating properly, we use our enforcement powers to close them down. Chairman: Thank you very much, that is very helpful. Gwyn Prosser? Q91 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Woolas, one of the specific charges made in The Times article was that for colleges which had been shut down in
the Mr Woolas: The gentleman in question regarding that college was arrested. The sponsorship scheme of course allows us to punish the sponsor if the migrant abuses the visa. That is one of the great advantages of the sponsor system. We are able to keep a record, as it were, of what you may describe in lay person's terms as a fit and proper person, and if that person has been running a college that has not been legitimate and we have discovered that, we will use that information if that name appears elsewhere. Of course people do use front people and so on, so this is an investigative exercise as well. Personally, I think that is the strongest advantage. In the UKBA we are always trying to be ahead of the bad guys. We are always trying to second-guess where they are going to go. Of course, your Committee is giving us advice on that and we are planning now where we think these people are going to go in the future. Q92 Gwyn Prosser: Finally, can you give us an assurance that as each bogus college is identified as such and closed down that the best lead you have on the proprietor is actually dealt with in a way that prevents him or her setting up further colleges? Mr Woolas: I think we can. I do not know if Jeremy wants to add. I have had correspondence and meetings with sponsor organisations and their representatives to complain about the amount of intelligence that we do ask them for. I think that you will find the University and College Union have debated this at their conversation just this week. We need that information to do what everybody wants us to do. Q93 Chairman: That is a different issue, is it not? That is about asking university lecturers to do what they regard as snooping on their students who are already there. This just affects people who are applying to come into the country, so it is a different issue, is it not? Mr Woolas: The amount of information that we require from the sponsor institution has been criticised by some. That is a separate issue and I recognise that. Q94 Chairman: In answer to Mr Prosser you said the gentleman who was behind these colleges in Manchester had been arrested, but we happen to know from the evidence given to us today that other people connected with that Times article (not the writing of the article but the subject of the article) have now set up other colleges in Manchester. What are you doing about that? Mr Woolas: Chairman, we deal with registering for immigration purposes accredited colleges. If individuals set up bogus colleges we will not issue a visa to students from them. Q95 Chairman: But there are no criminal offences? We will come on to this later but there are no criminal offences that have been committed here? Mr Oppenheim: As the Minister has already said, where an individual or group of individuals' names appear to be running a set of colleges that historically were bogus, if those names crop up again our intelligence system will flag those names up and we will do further investigations to see whether we think those colleges are legitimate or not. We do keep quite a careful track of the issues that are raised by institutions, organisations and newspapers. It so happens that issues raised by The Times were, as the Minister already said, subject to quite a lot of investigation by us. Mr Winnick: Private enterprise! Q96 Ms Buck: Is not one of the emerging loopholes that institutions to some extent have been but will get smarter in the way that they seek to get round some of these rules? For example, it seems that there was evidence that you are looking for attendance records and other information on students, but some of these colleges will simply fake the attendance records. Some of these colleges are simply changing students' designations of courses in their paperwork halfway through. How on earth are you going to find yourselves, in partnership with the education authorities, a system to stop them doing that? Mr Woolas: Chairman, on the issue of immigration enforcement, we face these battles every day in a whole range of sectors. This is not something that can ever be perfect. We believe, however, that the action that we take, our general approach to these institutions is that we will try and help them comply with the system, especially in its early days, but if we have evidence, and we do of course monitor and have enforcement powers, that they are playing the system, we will close them down. Mr Oppenheim: The other thing, if I may Ms Buck, is that we have also introduced a process of unannounced visits to deal with the issue that you rightly raise, so where we think that an institution is operating only in name but not in practice, we will visit that institution unannounced and if we are refused entry we will infer from that refusal certain things. Q97 Ms Buck: What is the red flag? Mr Oppenheim: We will do it at any institution about which we have got concerns. If our visiting officers - and we have got a network of them around the country - have got concerns or we receive information, whether it be from The Times or from a student. Many students have come to the country in the past wanting to study legitimately and have found that they were not engaged in institutions that are offering these things. Q98 Ms Buck: I certainly take Phil's point about the impossibility of being everywhere and the undesirability of being everywhere as well, that would be intrusive, but is it not really the case that the loophole in this system is more in terms of educational regulation of these colleges than Home Office regulation? Mr Woolas: I think that
the robustness of the accreditation is a necessary but not sufficient part of
the tools that we need to do the job. I
would add, just to add to Jeremy's point, that the intelligence that we are now
able to get from our overseas posts, because you can of course track what is
going on from there and you can check in the Q99 Mrs Cryer: Minister, can I ask a question following Mr Winnick's and Ms Buck's questions. There are perfectly legitimate universities and colleges who are bringing people in and doing a very good job. Are they obliged to let you know if a student does not turn up at all, so they may be in this country but no one is aware of where they are living or what they are doing? Mr Oppenheim: Under the points-based system indeed they are, not only to let us know whether they have turned up but that they have regular contact with the educational establishment. Mrs Cryer: Further to the points-based system, I understand that The Times gave you a dossier of information explaining how some of these dodgy or non-existent colleges were gearing up to exploit the points-based system in assisting and charging people to get them into the country. Can I also ask you a supplementary which has not got a great deal to do --- Chairman: Shall we deal with that first and then come to your supplementary? Q100 Mrs Cryer: It is related. My understanding is, and I have got masses of information on this, that the ability to provide evidence of knowledge of English to get indefinite leave to remain is also being exploited by people selling documents to say that a person does have English when they actually do not, so there is a really growing cottage industry here. Mr Woolas: It is a wider subject, Chairman, and I made reference earlier on to UKBA's ability to predict and be ahead of the game and that is the area that I had in mind when I made those remarks. The fact of the matter is that people go to desperate lengths to get into this country. We had an intelligence report recently that some people were chopping their fingertips off in order to avoid fingerprint detection as part of a people trafficking ring. That was reported in the Sunday newspapers two weeks ago and it was a true story. It never ceases to amaze me the lengths to which people will go to try to get into our country, and clearly the attempts to cheat on the English language test are now part of the attack upon us and our robustness in protecting ourselves from that is strong. It is of course in the regime straightforward to test somebody's ability to speak and write English. We have got the Citizenship Bill this afternoon in second reading and this will come up in that debate, but I think you know, Mrs Cryer, from our part of the country that there is a cottage industry that is attempting to abuse that system, and we are determined not to let it. Q101 Tom Brake: Once an organisation has been officially registered as a sponsor organisation, what sort of on-going process is there going to be to ensure that it remains a bona fide organisation and do you use triggers in the way that credit card companies do that highlight strange patterns, in other words an organisation that issues 100 student visas but only has three teachers or premises above a fish and chip shop? Mr Woolas: There are short-term and long-term answers to that question. The longer term is of course the student visa overstaying. If there is an intention to abuse the immigration system then that will express itself at the end of the period of the visa through overstaying. In the short term, Jeremy, do you want to add? Mr Oppenheim: We use a whole series of triggers, including the number of students, the courses being offered, physical location, and reports from visiting officers. We will continue to visit. We do not just license and then say, "Thank you very much, it was nice." We do follow-up visits on a regular basis. We have got a sponsor management system due to be rolled out in September 2009 which is an on-line system which will give us an increased level of intelligence of the nature you just described, Mr Brake. Q102 Tom Brake: You mentioned the unannounced visits. Can you give us a couple of examples of what these have revealed? Mr Oppenheim: They have revealed colleges that when visited the first time had students, teachers and all the technology one might come to expect in a small establishment operating legitimately and when we visited again we found none of those things there at all. As a result they did not get on the Tier 4 licence. Q103 Chairman: You have seen the concerns of Baroness Warwick from Universities UK about the ASIC and the fact that there appears to be a lack of transparency on its website, a lack of list of inspectors, and a lack of lists of those colleges which have been accredited. She has written to this Committee only yesterday to say she first raised these concerns with Liam Byrne in July 2007. Mr Oppenheim: If I may, Minister, Baroness Warwick was clearly busy yesterday because I met her as well. She has raised those issues. We are reviewing together with Ofsted the accreditation bodies. Most of the accreditation bodies' contracts are up for renewal in June of this year and we will be saying to the accreditation bodies not only do we want you to be doing the process of accreditation really well but we want you to publish on your website the outcomes of your visits. We want to make sure that you are far more transparent and that will be part of the contractual expectations that we place upon you. Q104 Chairman: How much do you give these accreditation agencies every year? Mr Oppenheim: Forgive me for not having the figure at my fingertips but I am more than happy to write to you about the amount we spend. Q105 David Davies: I misunderstood the answer to an earlier question. I assumed all of the visits to the 1,600 institutions were unannounced but obviously not. How many institutions have received unannounced visits? Mr Oppenheim: I cannot give you the answer to that, Mr Davies, because I do not know, and the number will change week by week as we do more unannounced visits. Q106 David Davies: Roughly how many out of 1,600? Mr Oppenheim: I would guess - and I apologise because I do not like guessing in committees - that around 10% would have experienced an unannounced visit. They will all have had an announced visit as well because there is no point in doing an unannounced visit unless you have already visited. Q107 David Davies: Of that 10% that received an unannounced visit, how many were found to be operating in an illegitimate fashion or raised further concerns? Mr Oppenheim: That is a very difficult question for me to answer, not because I am trying to be secretive but because I do not have those sorts of figures with me. We can easily get them. Mr Woolas: Do not forget
in terms of the 1,600 we are talking about that includes the mainstream, that
includes Q108 David Davies: Presumably Mr Woolas: I have thought about it but no! Q109 David Davies: How many people have been prosecuted under the Immigration Act for the offence of facilitating commissioning of a breach of immigration law by a non-EU citizen? Mr Woolas: Again off the top of my head I have not got that figure but I can get that figure for you. Q110 David Davies: Would it be a handful, a dozen? Mr Woolas: I can give figures on removals if that is of any help. Q111 Chairman: Removals of students? Mr Woolas: Let me just find the figures. To answer the question, the last set of published figures - and it covers all prosecutions in England and Wales - from Control of Immigration: Statistics 2007 (and figures subsequent to this have not yet been published), in total there were 253 cases presented to magistrates' courts in England and Wales between 2003 and 2007 and there were 518 cases sent to trial at crown court in England and Wales in the same period. Some of those were of course the same. Q112 David Davies: And how many were found guilty? Mr Woolas: They are not all complete yet so it is not possible to say. I am being very careful because of the caveats on the statistics of which I have been advised - some of them have not yet finished. Q113 David Davies: Would it be possible, Minister, for you to come back with further information? Mr Woolas: I would quite like to know myself. David Davies: And perhaps on the number of unannounced visits and the numbers that were found to be operating in an illegitimate fashion. Q114 Chairman: The concern of this Committee is that many of us have very large immigration caseloads, as you do Minister, and we have genuine cases we put to ministers and we write to the Border Agency, and then we look at these huge figures of people coming in as bogus students and that is what prompted this inquiry, our real concern about people coming to this country in a fraudulent manner to pretend to study here and at the same time the genuine cases that form part of an ever increasing backlog of the Border Agency are not being dealt with. That is why this Committee is concerned. Mr Woolas: Chairman, It is not an ever increasing backlog, it is a diminishing backlog and it is diminishing quite quickly. Q115 Chairman: Mr Prosser is raising this point because of course only last week he raised a case with you and your Department where the file went missing and answers were promised and they were not given. I do not want to raise this particular case because we can all do it, but what we are concerned about is that those who try to come genuinely are not being admitted but tens of thousands of bogus students are coming to bogus colleges in England and Wales and the first we have some action is when a reporter in The Times newspaper decides to have an investigation. Mr Woolas: Chairman, I do not accept that on behalf of the Government. I think it is the past tense, I think it is "had been". I was very upfront, as was the Home Secretary, in saying that we had recognised that this had been an Achilles heel, or a loophole, call it what you will, and that we are taking measures to close those loopholes. The Times article is part of that process and it exposed what the consequences of previous policy were, which I readily admit, and I have said this both as a backbencher and indeed as a Minister on many occasions. I think that the new Prime Minister put in place a new policy. Q116 Chairman: Finally on the issue of Ministers in the Home Office, not in respect of anything that is going to happen this week, we have expressed our concern previously about the absence of one Minister on maternity leave. She is of course entitled to maternity leave but the Committee felt very strongly because of the workload of your Department that there should be another Minister in there. The other Minister who covered for her has stepped aside two weeks ago. We seem to be struggling with Ministers in the Home Office at the moment. Is there any reassurance that this matter is going to be plugged in the near future? Mr Woolas: That step aside is temporary and I understand that period will end very shortly. I am coping. Thank you for your concern. Q117 Chairman: We are very concerned. Mr Woolas: The number of PQs and letters from Members has not diminished. On a lighter note compared to DCLG it is not half the workload! Chairman: Minister, Mr Oppenheim, thank you very much. The Committee will now sit in closed session to consider one issue. Thank you very much.
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