UK Borders Bill

My Lords, I will have to be satisfied with what the Minister said in his concluding sentence. I honestly think that, when he and his officials look at this in detail, he will find that we are not driving a coach and horses through the system and allowing everyone to appeal at a late stage. We are trying to deal with a situation that he must acknowledge exists, which is that people can make genuine mistakes on the applications. For example, they can miscalculate the number of points that are required or they can misconstrue the criteria and therefore get something wrong in the application form. I hope that our amendment would allow those kinds of mistake to be corrected. I recognise that we should not open the door to appeals by all and sundry. We should confine this, as I suggested, to those people who are not able to take advantage of the Minister’s suggestion that, if they have made these mistakes and the application is incorrectly formulated, they should start again with a new application and pay the second fee. My objection to that, as the noble Lord is aware from the previous occasion on which we talked about it and from what we have said this afternoon, is that someone who is applying for an extension of leave would, by the time that they put in a fresh application, be out of their permitted leave to remain. This is of particular interest to people such as students or work permit holders who would not only forfeit their right to put in another application, but be effectively denied all future rights to remain here as students or workers, as the case may be. This is such an extreme penalty, as I hope the noble Lord will agree, that we ought to do something to correct it. If he can discuss the matter with officials and come back to us by Third Reading with suggestions on how we can deal with this evil, I shall be very satisfied. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendment No. 20 not moved.] Clause 20 [Fees]: