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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

moved Amendment No. 6:"Page 3, line 9, at end insert ““, or" (   )   entering for any other purpose prescribed by order for the purpose of this subsection”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I hesitate to destroy the harmony which has been enjoyed on previous amendments and begin by expressing our gratitude to the Minister and her officials for the briefing which they gave us last week on the points system. The knowledge that the principle of having lists of approved employers and academic institutions whose offer of jobs or study would be treated as conclusive is a great improvement on the present situation, where subjective judgments on those matters are taken by the entry certificate officer. As we understand it, the ECO will not be able to refuse an application on the grounds that a person may not comply with the immigration conditions since his offer, if from an academic institution or employer, will be treated as satisfying that particular requirement. However, we still have concerns since we do not consider that the prevailing culture of disbelief among entry certificate officers will vanish overnight. There is still scope for discretion to be used against the applicant, particularly in assessing his ability to support himself without recourse to public funds. It was acknowledged, in our discussion last week—which might have gone on much longer had it not been for the interruption, halfway through, of the Division Bell—that much of the detail still remained to be worked out, particularly on how numerical values would be assigned to attributes and how that would be calculated. The person is assigned points for the rating of the sponsor, availability of funds, previous compliance with Immigration Rules, and so on—according to the notes that I took at the time. It was accepted, for example, when we put it to officials, that a person who had never been in the United Kingdom before would be given zero points for compliance with the immigration laws, so he would need to score much higher in the other factors to reach whatever threshold of points is specified to be given entry clearance. An undesirable side-effect of that may be that someone with plenty of money who intends to study in a class B college could gain an unfair advantage by coming here for a brief visit before applying as a student and getting some points to offset the lower rating of the college at which he intends to study. We are also concerned because we must judge the Bill as it stands and have no opportunity to deal with the present system, which is so catastrophically unreliable, as everyone acknowledges. Dozens of recommendations for putting it right have been made by the independent monitor. They have lain on the table, ignored, from one report to the next and the Government have not yet published the final report of the independent monitor, more than two months after it was submitted. They arranged that there would be no monitor in post all the way through Second Reading and Grand Committee in your Lordships’ House. How can we trust, not the Minister but the Government, who have failed so conspicuously to run the existing scheme fairly and effectively, to produce the new one to meet our needs, to be consistent, reliable and economical? We have seen only the headlines of the points-based system; the full scheme will be published long after the Bill has received Royal Assent. That is the political equivalent of the classic 18th century scam of a stock market flotation of a company carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but no one is to know what it is. Parliament should not be asked to sweep away appeal rights without even a roll-out, let alone the thorough testing of the processes that are said to make those rights unnecessary. We are now being asked to approve the points system for visitors and students on the basis of a seven-page PowerPoint presentation, plus whatever we managed to scribble down when the Minister and her officials were talking last week. We note that the consultation on the paper, Selective Admission: making migration work for Britain, finished on 7 November last. The Government are to publish the results shortly, but the moles from the IND tell us that that means as soon as the Bill gets Royal Assent—probably around Easter. I notice the Minister shaking her head and I should be grateful if she corrects me when she comes to reply. It is less than encouraging that the Government are so keen on preventing us seeing the full details of the points scheme while there is some possibility of doing something about it during the Bill’s remaining stages. That is why we tabled Amendments Nos. 76 and 77, which would defer the coming into operation of Clause 4 until sometime after 2010, by which time I hope that we would have had an opportunity to make a full evaluation of the points scheme—even, in the interim, putting right some of the many things that the monitor has recommended that we do about the existing unfair and chaotic asylum entry system. The idea of sponsorship by an approved academic institution or employer and the elimination of entry certificate officers’ discretion to challenge acceptance of a student or worker could be implemented by a change of the Immigration Rules. That would eliminate a large number of the refusals that are overturned on appeal, especially those of students as described by the monitor, who said in her report of February 2005:"““The overwhelming majority of refusals are made for reasons which address the requirements of the Immigration Rules that visitors and students (who are not studying at degree level) . . . should not intend to work and that students should intend to follow their course””." Why have the Government not addressed that problem by amending the Immigration Rules so that the number of refusals—hence the number of appeals—in respect of bona fide colleges could be reduced accordingly? They might then be able to save a great deal of money, not only on the appeals themselves, but by continuing the part-time appointment of Ms Lindsley, who is doing a great job, rather than replacing her with three full-time workers, as I understand they are doing. As I have already said, Ms Lindsley came to the end of her term of office on 1 December. Presumably she submitted the final report before then. Why has that report not yet been published?       Before I sit down, I should briefly refer to our Amendment No. 6, which allows the Secretary of State to prescribe purposes for which the rights would be restored. It does not require the Secretary of State to do anything unless he thinks that necessary in the future. We still believe that chickens might come home to roost when a totally unexpected but perfectly reasonable case is made for some group to have its rights of appeal restored. If not, nothing is lost by having the provision in the Bill. I beg to move.