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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I agree. I speak from experience when I say that the right of appeal is fundamental. Those proposals will not help the Home Office to deal with immigration problems. Unrealistic deadlines are contributing to the present confusion. We need only think of the concession on indefinite leave to remain which, although it was supposed to be completed by May 2004 and then in December 2004, has still not been completed in July 2005. People contact Members of Parliament because they hear about the deadlines, and assume they have missed out because they have heard nothing from the Home Office. The upshot of all the delays and the uncertainty is that people feel that it pays to disappear—and some of them do. That makes effective removals difficult, and leads to headlines about illegal-immigrant numbers such as those that appeared in the press last week. I am also concerned about the quality of entry clearance officers’ decisions. Since 1992, I have seen thousands of standard refusal notices from ECOs that do not seem adequately to reflect the complexities of many cases. The stereotyping of questions and of circumstances and the way in which interviews are conducted, especially in the case of applications from the Indian sub-continent, are extremely unhelpful. The system of interviewing needs to be modernised to meet the changing and varied realities of visa applications. ECOs enjoy enormous power, but are not currently subject to proper scrutiny by the Foreign Office. Consequently, in many cases genuine applicants for visits are refused visas. While we have been admirably flexible in many of our dealings with European migration, we make applicants from countries such as India jump through hoops. That, I feel, is a sad way in which to treat a Commonwealth country where so many people have such personal ties to our population in the United Kingdom. As I said earlier, there has undoubtedly been some progress, both in attitudes and administratively, as a result of reforms in the previous three immigration-related Bills passed by the last Government. Further progress has been made in dealing with immigration cases at the Home Office. But although I am a strong supporter of much of what this Government have done, I also have a duty to my constituents to raise concerns on their behalf, and to act as a voice for the frustration that many of them feel daily. We have it in our power to make the system work, but we need to show that we have the will to follow through on our promises. Let us not waste the progress that we have made on community cohesion and economic prosperity. Instead, let us show that a well-managed, efficient and flexible immigration system can be a truly great asset to our country’s prosperity. I support the Bill.