UK Borders Bill

It is absolutely sustainable. I do not believe that immigration has caused this country any problems. The presence of the immigrant community has benefited Britain. There is an economic case for it. I am a product of that system, having come to this country as a first-generation immigrant. Legal and lawful immigration to Britain has created communities that have helped our country and made it, I believe, the best country in the world to live in. The recent arrival of the east European people, following the enlargement of the EU, has benefited our country enormously. It is therefore not right to say that immigration has caused problems. On the way in which the Government have dealt with IND, there is a commitment to act, but the problem is the way in which IND operates—how constituency cases are dealt with, how cases are processed and the speed with which they are processed. It is not enough for us to say to our constituents when they come to our surgeries that the backlog is getting smaller. I want this Minister to be the first Minister in 10 years to tell the House of Commons that the backlog has gone. The way to get rid of the backlog is not to move resources from IND to the Prison Service. It is madness that there is a proposal to cut the IND budget by 9 per cent. in order to increase the Prison Service budget. That just will not wash. We need sufficient resources to allow people of calibre and ability to be able to judge cases. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the civil servants who administer immigration policy; they are just demoralised. There are some fantastic people working in IND, but they are working in very difficult circumstances and there is a lack of leadership from the top of the management board as to the way in which things operate. I write at least 50 letters a week to a woman called Lin Homer. I have met her, and I am sure that she is a dedicated civil servant, just as she was a dedicated chief executive of Birmingham city council. The fact is, however, that Lin Homer and her colleagues—her deputy directors and the higher management of IND—are simply not solving the administrative problems that need to be solved. They should not write letters to our constituents telling them that it is the IND’s ambition to address their problems and to give them a decision within 28 days, or that its target is that 70 per cent. of its cases are going to be solved within a 28-day period. Our constituents come to our surgeries clutching those pieces of paper, and they believe what they read. Many of those people have been waiting one or two years for a reply. At the same time as we ask people to go through the misery of waiting for a decision, we also ask them to pay fees. We ask them to pay for a service that we would not be satisfied with if it were provided by the private sector. An application for a work permit now costs more than £300. Do they get a decision quickly? On balance, if they apply from outside this country, no. The service inside the country is actually pretty good, but anyone who applies from abroad under the new scheme instituted by the previous Immigration Minister—known as managed migration—will have to wait a very long time. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister, representing a seat such as his in Birmingham, has a big constituency case load. I say to him in friendship that the only way to solve the problem in IND is to get people of talent into the service. He is giving a shadow agency the powers to get things done—not under the Bill—and creating a completely new agency. Moving the problems from the desk of the Immigration Minister and putting them on the desk of the chief executive of a new agency will not solve the problems that we face. There needs to be a fundamental review of the way in which the decision making process works. To be perfectly frank, when right hon. and hon. Members write to Ministers asking for meetings about difficult constituency cases, those meetings should be granted. In my 20 years in the House, I have written to Ministers of all political persuasions to ask for such meetings and those meetings have been granted. We need that ministerial focus. Create an agency by all means, but do not take away accountability to Members of the House or the Minister’s ability to scrutinise those cases.