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UK Border Agency

Thank you for that guidance, Mr. Speaker. I shall not speak for very long. As I have said, I did not intend to speak at all, but I happen to have become very interested in the actions and activities of the UK Border Agency over a considerable period. A couple of years ago, the Home Office produced a league table—which was remarkable, given that it is generally not very good at producing proper statistics about anything, particularly immigration—listing the Members of Parliament who had received the most immigration inquiries. I was ranked No. 1 among Conservative MPs, which did not surprise me a great deal, as at any one time there are between 700 and 800 immigration cases on my book. Speaking as a constituency Member, I share all the concerns raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald. I do not have details of many specific cases with me, so I shall refer to only two. About 18 months ago I visited the UKBA’s offices at Lunar house in Croydon, which were, I believe, in their current configuration. I think that the staff were a bit surprised to find that a Member of Parliament wanted to go to see them. I too was surprised, and disturbed, by what I found. First, I found a young and dedicated team of staff who impressed me a great deal. I thought that they were probably quite poorly managed, and they were certainly struggling under the work load. Their work had been computerised, and they could take me to their computers and show me the latest computerised file on one of my constituents. At the same time, however, they were unable to do anything without resorting to the voluminous physical file that was retained in another room. The other room, at the back of Lunar house—it was like a conference room—was packed with physical files, which were enormous and held together with string and rubber bands. The superficial impressiveness of the computer system was unfortunately rather undone by that. My right hon. Friend spoke of pursuing those who had complied. I have come across such cases on a number of occasions during the four and a half years in which I have been a Member of Parliament. Let me cite one which, although it dates from a while ago, illustrates the phenomenon well. The events that I am about to describe took place in the summer of 2006, six months before Bulgaria and Romania became full members of the European Union. Although I concede that there are restrictions on citizens of those countries in terms of where they can work and the requirement for them to have work permits, their entitlement to be here was not in doubt after 1 January 2007. My constituent worked at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a development bank dedicated to improving the lives of those in central and eastern Europe, and indeed out in the former Soviet Union. She was the case officer for Bulgaria. It is probably a good idea for such a person to be a Bulgarian national, as there are unlikely to be enough United Kingdom subjects with a sufficient level of competence or expertise. It seems entirely reasonable that she was in this country working for the EBRD. She had clearly complied, almost precisely to the letter, with everything she had been asked to do. However, she was asked to produce within two weeks an astonishing 30 or 32 documents including fairly obvious things such as her birth certificate and payslips, but also her school reports from Bulgaria. It was entirely unrealistic to expect the production of such documentation from someone who, it seems to me, was perfectly justified in being in this country. I contrast that with other cases where clearly the person should not be in this country. I have raised a particular case at Prime Minister’s questions. I was astonished to receive a pro forma letter on an immigration case, addressed to me as an MP. The letter stated that, unfortunately, the agency had been unable to determine the case because the person concerned was a member of or was aligned with the beliefs of the al- Qaeda organisation. That was in an immigration letter sent to me as the constituency Member of Parliament. The letter went on to apologise not only to me but to the person concerned and his family for any distress and inconvenience caused by taking so long to consider his case. The case is complicated, but this did not seem to me to be someone to whom we should be apologising. I contrast that with the treatment of some of our constituents whom I think have been treated badly.