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Immigration and Nationality (Fees) (Amendment No. 2) Regulations 2008

The regulations follow the statutory instrument that your Lordships debated at the end of February, when the Minister explained how current fee levels were being determined on the basis of the value of the services provided to the applicants. The noble Baroness has asked certain questions about these calculations, which I would like to follow up. The intention is to make the aggregate total of fees charged for services connected with immigration and citizenship correspond with the money spent on securing our borders. The Minister gave the figure of £2 billion this year, and he expected £630 million to be generated from the fees. It would be useful to know whether that includes the amounts that are being generated by the applications under the regulations. If there has been any change in the arithmetic in the past four months, no doubt the Minister will let us know. The Minister also reeled off the various fees that are to be charged under the regulations, but he did not explain how the UK Border Agency calculates the individual fees. He explained that some fees are above cost recovery and some fees are below it, but not the total arithmetic, which it would be useful to know more about in the interests of transparency. I agree with the principle that certain fees should be charged more heavily than others because of the value of the services that are provided. That is particularly the case in tier 1 and to a lesser extent in tier 2, but we would like to know the extent to which some people are being made to pay over the odds for the services that are provided for others. The fees in table A are for tier 1 and for sponsorship licences where the sponsor is not a small sponsor for all tiers, which were already discussed on the previous occasion. The Explanatory Memorandum to the regulations says that in tier 2, for skilled migrants, the certificate of sponsorship will cost £170. That certificate has to be issued by the sponsor to a person so that he can present it with his application for entry clearance or for leave to remain in the UK. In the UKBA statement of intent on skilled workers under the points-based system, the calculation of points is given, and it is clear that an applicant who does not fall into one of the categories in the list of shortage occupations defined by the Migration Advisory Committee will stand very little chance of getting in. A person belonging to one of those categories gets 50 points towards the required 70, while a job that satisfies only the resident labour market test of being advertised for two weeks without attracting an applicant gets only 35. I am sorry not to have given the Minister prior notice of the point that I am now going to make. I tried to phone the Whips’ Office but no-one was there by the time I got around to it. My point concerns ministers of religion, who are included in tier 2. On 10 March, I asked a Question about the fees to be charged to unpaid Buddhist monks who enter the UK on short assignments, and asked what consultations the Government had undertaken with the Sangha on these matters. The noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown, the Minister who replied on that occasion, said that the entry clearance fee would be £200 under tier 2, but I do not see how a monk who is unpaid could possibly be dealt with under a scheme that is clearly designed only for employees. The Minister said that a monk could also apply under tier 5 as a temporary religious worker, but he did not respond to my question about the Sangha. I wrote to Mr Liam Byrne, the Minister for Immigration, on 3 April. I got a reply from the deputy chief executive of the UKBA a month later saying that they had consulted widely, including representatives of the Buddhist community, without mentioning with whom they had consulted. In a subsequent telephone call, I discovered that the two persons who were approached were both laypersons. If the Government are genuinely interested in consulting the Buddhist community, they should include the Sangha, which means the order of monks, just as in their consultations with Christians they would include ordained priests in the Catholic or Anglican Churches, and not just a couple of laymen picked at random. To ensure that there is no misunderstanding about this, a Buddhist monk is not paid anything and is not an employee. In the past, it has always been the practice for monasteries to bring in monks for short periods from their parent tradition in Sri Lanka or Thailand and I certainly hope that there will be some way of continuing that tradition under the points-based system. The chair of the Theravada Buddhist Sangha in the UK, the venerable Chao Khun Bhavanaviteht, whose letter I have passed to the officials, has written to confirm that there was no consultation with them and he fears that some temples may be forced to close. I ask the Minister to ensure that any future consultation on matters affecting religion and immigration, whether by the Home Office, the UK Border Agency or any other public authority, includes the Sangha. If the only way for a monk from abroad to enter the United Kingdom is under TFI, the language of the UKBA statement of intent for TFI should be amended in so far as it deals with religious workers to cover the occupation of a monk, who is not employed and who is not filling a vacancy and does not have dependants. I also suggest that the Theravada Buddhist Sangha be treated as a single sponsor for the purposes of issuing a certificate of sponsorship, notwithstanding the fact that Theravada temples and monasteries are autonomous, as it would otherwise be an expensive and burdensome task for individual monasteries or temples to obtain a separate licence. That is the kind of issue that could have been settled if the Home Office and UKBA had had proper consultations before the statement of intent had been issued. At the foot of table A, we find that the fee for registration as a British citizen under the British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act 1997 increases from £120 or £200 to £400. I wonder how the Government can justify that enormous increase. The person concerned is already a British overseas citizen, a British national overseas, a British subject or a British protected person. He has to satisfy the consul in Hong Kong that he is ordinarily resident in Hong Kong now and was so before 4 February 1997 and that he would have been stateless if he had not had one of these inferior forms of British citizenship. He has to produce documentary evidence proving each one of those requirements. The only problem that arises occasionally is where persons of Nepali ethnic origin have been issued with Nepali passports, notwithstanding their continued possession of BNO passports as adults and the provision in Nepalese law that a person cannot simultaneously hold Nepalese and any other citizenship. The British Consul in Hong Kong and the FCO demand the production of a certificate saying that the Nepalese document was issued in error. Their refusal to acknowledge the plain meaning of a Nepali statute in these cases has led to unnecessary correspondence and, previously, when they were equally pigheaded in the case of BNOs of Indian ethnic origin, they even went to the extent of sending a joint team of the Foreign Office and the Home Office to New Delhi to verify the interpretation of Indian law. No doubt, if the costs of trying to prevent anyone from entering the United Kingdom from Hong Kong who is entitled to British citizenship are loaded onto genuine applicants, they can double the fee. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain how the calculation was done. My concern about the points-based scheme, now that we see how it works, is its total lack of flexibility. Mr Jonathan Sedgwick, deputy chief executive of the UKBA, writes to me as follows: "““Requiring an application to be accompanied by the full fee before it is considered valid proves a more cost effective system to administer, and ensures a more robust application process. Waiving the fee for some applicants on the basis of their ability to pay would lead to an increase in the amount of administrative work to means test an applicant and chase any outstanding payments. If we apply the current principle of not considering an application until it has been paid, or a decision has been made on the applicant's ability to pay this could lead to long delays in our decision making process. Waiving the fee for some applicants would also lead to an increase in fees for other applicants to ensure that the costs of the Border and Immigration Agency are recovered””." Precisely the same argument could be applied to many other services provided by public agencies of one kind or another. For instance, if we did not waive the prescription charge fee for the elderly, children or pregnant women, no doubt a considerable amount of administrative work would be saved. I expect it costs the Mayor of London a lot of money to give the elderly free underground and bus travel, so charges to other users of London transport must be higher to cover the loss of revenue. The argument is spurious. As the noble Lord will be aware if he has seen some of my correspondence with the UKBA, serious hardship is caused to people upon whom these fees are imposed when they do not have the means to pay them. The scheme ought to have been made more flexible so that those who are not in employment or receiving income of any sort, such as many wives who come here to join their husbands, should be given some sort of concession so that they are not faced with the problem of borrowing money or getting it from a charity.