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UK Border Agency

I am delighted to have the opportunity to raise this important issue in the House tonight. I think that the Adjournment debate on Thursday is your selection, Mr. Speaker—if not, please do not disabuse me—and I am delighted that you have understood the importance of this issue. I shall make some rather critical remarks about the UK Border Agency in the course of this debate, so I should first say that I fully recognise the scale of the task that confronts it. I also recognise that it does its best to discharge that task and I have always found its staff perfectly courteous and as helpful as they can be within the rules that they operate. When one meets the immigration officers at airports, they are much more friendly than those po-faced mortals who seize manicure scissors from little old ladies on the rather improbable basis that they might be about to assist Osama bin-Laden. I do not want to suggest that I think for one moment that the agency is in any way useless or in some way hostile to proper judgments, but it does take completely the wrong approach. Anybody can see that, if they look at the sort of cases that the agency pursues with supreme strictness. In order to meet the multiplicity of targets that the Government have set, it aims at the softest targets, when it should be aiming at those who have eluded it for years, who have abused the system, who are in the country unlawfully, who do not comply with the conditions placed on their stay, or who do not observe their reporting restrictions. They are the people on whom the agency should concentrate. They are, of course, the hardest cases. They are not generally sitting around with their addresses on display. The agency does not pursue them. Instead it spends a disproportionate amount of its time pursuing people who have done the reverse—who have complied with conditions, kept their addresses notified to the agency and have circumstances that other people would recognise as reasonable. I have three particular cases in my constituency that have come up not over the course of the last year, or the last six months, or even the last couple of months. They have all come up within the last three or four weeks—two of them in a single day at my constituency surgery. That suggests a pretty concentrated effort to up the performance measurements by going for soft targets. When I served on the Select Committee on Home Affairs, one thing that we expressed considerable concern about was the sudden removal of settled persons—persons who had been at an address for a substantial period, had married or had other commitments in this country, were working, or in some cases had even obtained property, and whose whereabouts were beyond all reasonable doubt. The Committee felt that where people had become citizens of substance, so to speak, they should at least be given proper notice before being seized and deported. If the Border Agency deports somebody, that is a tick in a box, but there is a difference between deporting somebody who has been steadily eluding detection, and deporting somebody who has an appeal outstanding, who has been observing reporting restrictions or who has explained why he is still in the country. Suddenly removing that person will come as a considerable shock not only to them, but to their family. One of the cases I shall raise tonight is just such a case. It concerns a deportation order served on somebody who had faithfully observed his reporting restrictions. He arrived to report and was immediately arrested, put in a detention centre and deported soon after. I do not object to such action being taken against somebody who is, so to speak, underground or in deliberate defiance of an order, but I do object when it is done to somebody who is obeying orders. The second case concerns a woman who has been married to a British citizen for five years, has two British children and has been told that it is the opinion of the Secretary of State that not only she, but her husband and two British children, can continue their lives outside the United Kingdom. In the third case, we have an employment issue and a civil penalty. I strongly support, and always have done, both in government and opposition, the contention that the immigration authorities must be very vigilant about employers who take on people who are not entitled to work in this country. However, I again submit that they should be vigilant about employers doing that either deliberately or because they have been careless, and unjustifiably so, and not where an employer has taken reasonable steps to ensure that the person he is engaging is entitled to work. If that person gets indefinite leave to remain, the Border Agency sometimes says, "Ah, there was a gap between the two when the person was no longer entitled to work, so we will inflict the maximum penalty, and we will not reduce it, even a little, in recognition of the fact that the employer acted wholly in good faith." Given the economic position, £5,000 of civil penalty is quite an imposition on a small employer, so it should never be imposed unless the employer is genuinely and seriously culpable. I turn now to the detail of the cases. As I have already informed the Minister’s office, the person involved in the employment case does not wish to be named. I must therefore refer to him as Mr. K. He runs a small business in my constituency and employed a Mr. J. Mr. J had permission to work here and Mr. K checked the documents upon engaging him. Since that time, Mr. J has paid tax and national insurance throughout, and he has recently been granted indefinite leave to remain. He says that he has a letter that both he and Mr. K, his employer, interpreted as meaning that he could continue with his current status—that is, he was entitled to work—until 2011. I should give a little background to the case. When Mr. K took on Mr. J, he photocopied the documents. The Minister will know that it is a Home Office requirement that it is not enough just to look at documents and say, "Yeah, yeah, I saw that this man was entitled to work." Rather, the documents have to be photocopied. That is what Mr. K, being a law-abiding citizen, did. His solicitors explained the position to the Border Agency in a letter dated 26 March 2009, in which they enclosed all the documents that Mr. K had seen and copied before agreeing to employ Mr. J. One of those documents was a letter dated 26 April 2002, which gave Mr. J exceptional leave to enter the United Kingdom until 26 April 2003. The letter stated:""provided an applicant has permission to be in the UK when an application"" for employment""is made, he or she is legally entitled to remain here on the same conditions previously granted until the application is decided"." Mr. K, who had photocopied a driving licence, a national insurance record and that letter, understood the letter to mean that Mr. J could remain in the UK and continue to work after 26 April 2003. However, Mr. K did not leave the matter there. An employer with less of a conscience and less concern to protect his position would simply have signed off at that point, but from time to time Mr. K asked Mr. J how the application was going. He was assured that solicitors were dealing with it and that nothing had changed. He understood that to mean that Mr. J could continue to remain and work. However, it was as a result of making such an inquiry that Mr. J subsequently produced a further letter to Mr. K. Mr. K believed that, having secured copies of the letters, as well as Mr. J’s national insurance number card and provisional driving licence, he was acting wholly within the law. Mr. K then found out that although he can now employ Mr. J, because he has indefinite leave to remain, and was perfectly entitled to employ him when he took him on, there was a period in between in which Mr. J should not have been employed. Mr. K did not realise that. I am perfectly happy for there to be a penalty in that case, but I am not happy that it should be £5,000, with no remission whatever for Mr. K’s efforts to try to comply with the law. If we are to be bound wholly by the rulebook, with no exercise of discretion and no application of judgment by individual officials of the Border Agency, particularly at the senior level, frankly we might as well do away with human beings altogether. We might as well tap everything into the computer and come out with a mathematical computation of the penalty at the end. In fact, civil servants, whether employed directly in government or out in the agencies, are there to exercise judgment and discretion within the rules that they operate. I now come to the second case, which inspired me to ask for this debate. The Minister will be aware from our correspondence how very angry I am about this one. It concerns a constituent who is happy to be named; she is Mrs. Carpenter. My constituent, Mr. R. Carpenter, married an Indonesian national five years ago in her own country. Three years ago, they also married here, because he was particularly keen that the marriage should be recognised in both countries. It is worth pointing out that he did that precisely because he wanted there to be no doubt that this was a subsisting, genuine marriage. He did not want to rely on something that had happened on foreign shores; he made quite certain that he was married according to British law as well. Since that time, the Carpenters have had two children. One is now four, the other is 13-weeks-old. Both those children are British. There is also a 12-year-old Indonesian stepchild. In recent years, Mr. Carpenter has been working in Singapore and China, but, until July 2003, he was domiciled and working in this country, as he is now. He resides in my constituency. As far as I know, there is no law on earth that states that a British citizen who has chosen to work abroad for a few years of his life is obliged to continue to do so if his circumstances change. Any such citizen is fully entitled to return to live and work in this country. The sequence of events was that, in January this year, the Carpenter family had a major family celebration, which, naturally, they wanted Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter to attend. Obviously, Mr. Carpenter could come and go at will, but, because they had been ex-pats and Mrs. Carpenter had not yet settled here, she required a visitor’s visa. She got the visa; there was no problem with that. Before they left Singapore to visit Britain, however, Mr. Carpenter lost his job. They would not, therefore, have the life that they had been enjoying to return to. He has now found a job in this country, and I stress again that we are talking here about a British citizen with British children and a lawful marriage of five years’ standing. The Carpenters then applied for Mrs. Carpenter to be allowed to stay in this country. Let me say right away that the reaction of the Border Agency should have been to say, "No. If you are applying to stay here on the basis of marriage, you must leave and apply from outside the country." I have no queries about that approach at all. That is what the agency does, and, had it done so in this case, I would have explained to Mr. Carpenter that, although it might seem harsh, that is what happens. Indeed, I have on many occasions had to persuade constituents who were applying to stay here as spouses—sometimes with very long marriages behind them—that they would nevertheless have to leave the country in order to make the application. I once spent three years trying to persuade a lady to go back to the Cameroons. She eventually did so, and got permission to come back here to stay within a few weeks. I understand the rule that someone applying to settle permanently in this country as a spouse must leave the country in order to do so. I have operated that rule myself. That is not what the Border Agency said to Mrs. Carpenter, however. Its letter stated:""You have provided no evidence of strong ties in terms of private life and the Secretary of State is satisfied that it is reasonable to expect all four of you to continue your family life and private lives outside of the United Kingdom."" That is not only inhumane but outrageous. The agency says""you have provided no evidence of strong ties"," yet she is married to a British citizen. She has been married to him for five years. She is the mother of two British children who can stay in this country, yet, according to the agency, she has no evidence of strong ties in terms of private life. And the Secretary of State believes it reasonable that "all four of you"—British citizens as well—should continue their family and private lives outside the United Kingdom. Why should they? Are we saying, "Once an ex-pat, always an ex-pat"? The man has a job in this country. I say again that if the Border Agency had merely said, "You would have a good case for staying here as a spouse, but you will have to go outside the country to establish it", I would see no problem with that. The Border Agency did not say that, however. I am aware that Mrs. Carpenter applied to stay here on compassionate grounds, as she was about to give birth. Having given birth, the Border Agency naturally enough said that there were no more compassionate grounds. I understand that, but I will absolutely not accept—and I believe it to be highly challengeable under any human rights legislation, which the Minister knows I do not usually invoke—that any British citizen can be told that "all four of you" can""continue your… private lives outside of the United Kingdom."" That is provocative, cruel and not even particularly lawful. I turn to deal with the third case, the one I raised first in my introduction. It concerns Mohammad Ahmed, who arrived in the UK as a minor more than nine years ago. He claimed asylum, which was refused, and the appeal was dismissed. I view that as perfectly reasonable; I do not argue with it at all. Through various appeals, he has nevertheless managed to stay in the country and he has now been married to a British citizen for two years, living with her for five years before that. He also has a very stable relationship. As I mentioned in respect of the earlier case, it was understood that if he were to stay here now—not on grounds of asylum, but as a spouse—he would have to leave the country in order to do so. Unfortunately, the country he had to go to was Iraq, but they both accepted that that was the right way forward. They spent a great deal of time, which I am sure the Minister will find perfectly credible, trying to get a passport from the Iraqi embassy. One can understand the situation: this man has been in the country for nine years, having first entered as a minor, and the necessary documentation was not readily available, so he had to try to get recognised as an Iraqi national in order to get his passport. Investigations had to be made, which therefore took some time. The Border Agency recognised that these people were at last doing the right thing, so they simply imposed reporting restrictions. At first, it said Mr. Ahmed had to report weekly. As he was working, that was severely disruptive. After I made representations to the Border Agency, it was agreed that he could report monthly and as far as I know, he has faithfully reported monthly ever since. We should remember that he is trying to get a passport out of Iraq. Then, just a couple of weeks ago, he went to report and was immediately seized and taken to Colnbrook. His wife was eventually informed where he was and she began to visit him. Phoning up one morning, she was told that he was being deported that afternoon. He has since gone. I have no doubt that, once again, that is a tick in a box. A deportation has happened; a target has been reached: this is wonderful, and doubtless the Minister will report to the House that more deportations are taking place than ever before. Anyone who looks at those circumstances can see that that was an unreasonable deportation. The man was settled; he was married; he was working. The Border Agency knew where he was, where he lived and where he worked. What it should have done is to have served him with a notice, explaining that he would have to leave the country by such and such a date. Arresting him without any prior warning— when, as I say, the Border Agency knew where he was, where he worked and what was going on—was, in my view, heavy handed. The fact that I encountered three cases like that in as many weeks suggests to me that the Border Agency is having a drive, and that what it is driving at is not the difficult targets—the ones that the public really resent—but the easy ones: the people who have done their best to obey the law but find, like my Mr. K, that they are on completely the wrong side of it, despite being thoroughly convinced that they have done everything that was expected of them. I should be grateful to hear the Minister’s comments on those specific cases. I should also be grateful to hear his comments on what I now consider to be a campaign against soft targets.