TOEIC Visa Cancellations

Jim Fitzpatrick Excerpts

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree and will talk in some detail about those issues. The UK is highly regarded around the world as a country that has respect for the rule of law and an independent judiciary. It also has a Government who are supposed to respect that rule of law, but in too many cases I am afraid we have seen blanket decisions and people deported without an opportunity to defend their innocence. I believe the Government have acted unlawfully and I am afraid that this country’s reputation for respect, access to justice and upholding the rule of law is not warranted in this case.

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. He said that this issue has not commanded the media attention of Windrush, yet the numbers of those directly affected in recent years are well in excess of that scandal, and it has been going on for at least four years now. Given that there has been a “Panorama” programme, a Sunday Times exposé and a Guardian report, does he have an opinion on why it has not commanded media attention like the Windrush scandal?

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful for that intervention. There is some complexity—as I acknowledged, there is no doubt whatsoever that some cheating took place, which is clearly serious—but we must distinguish, and allow students to distinguish, between those who committed genuine wrongdoing and who deserve to be punished, and those who have been caught up in a scandal not of their making. That is the distinction I wish to draw in the debate, which the Home Office has failed to do. In the vast majority of cases, students were told that they had no right to appeal in the UK and that they should leave the country.

The experiences of students whose test results were deemed invalid by ETS varied considerably depending on when the Home Office took action and where those students were at the time. The hideous complexity I have alluded to is thrown into sharp relief by an excellent briefing by the National Union of Students, with the support of Bindmans. In some cases, it appears that the Home Office directed further and higher education institutions to withdraw students from their course of study and told students that they had 60 days to find a new sponsoring institution or to leave the country. Of course, having effectively been blacklisted by ETS and the Government, they invariably failed to do so. By handling cases in this way, the Home Office placed students outside the usual immigration processes without the right to appeal either in country or out of country.

That approach was found to be unlawful by the upper tribunal in the case of Mohibullah. The Minister should tell the House how many students fell into that category and what steps the Home Office has taken in light of the judgment in that case to contact other students who were similarly mistreated and, most importantly, to reassure the House that such an attempt to circumvent properly agreed immigration processes will never happen again.

Students who were outside the UK at the time of Home Office action, who received notices informing them of the allegations against them upon their return to the UK prior to 6 April 2015, were served with notices at airports and prevented from resuming their studies pending their appeal from within the UK. In some cases, students were subjected to interview and detention. For many students, that led to the end of their studies. However, the NUS,

“understands that in each and every case won by a student the Home Office appealed the outcome”.

The NUS also asserts that, where the appeals process led to a successful outcome for students,

“the Home Office has been slow to provide a remedy”

to the student concerned, effectively leaving them in “limbo”.

Is that right? Did the Home Office really drag every single case in this category through the upper tribunal and onward to the court of appeal? Perhaps the Minister can tell us how many cases we are talking about, how many appeals were successful and how much this lengthy process has cost the taxpayer. It is only reasonable to ask how long it takes, following the successful conclusion of an appeal, for the Home Office to ensure that successful appellants are given the right to remain in the UK.

For students who were in the UK at the time of Home Office action, their right to appeal varied according to when the action took place. From 6 April 2015, students were subjected to rules under the Immigration Act 2014, which removed the right to appeal, with only limited exceptions for human rights arguments deemed worthy by the Home Office. Prior to 6 April 2015, students were served with section 10 notices under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. Effectively branded cheats by Her Majesty’s Government, they were told to leave the UK immediately, and that they could only appeal from their country of origin. The students took their fight for an in-country appeal to the courts. In the case of Ahsan v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of students’ right to appeal in the UK, finding that an out-of-country appeal was an inadequate legal remedy.

How much did that cost the taxpayer? How much of the UK taxpayer’s money has the Home Office wasted in trying to stop students gaining proper access to the appeal to which they are entitled? Schools in my constituency are sending begging letters to parents to meet the cost of basic materials. I have countless examples of people having to fight tooth and nail to get social care for their elderly parents. I have community policing that only exists on paper and in the speeches of politicians because the Home Office has cut police budgets; but apparently the Home Office has a bottomless pit when it comes to dragging international students through lengthy, costly and pointless legal action.

In response to a written parliamentary question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the Minister’s predecessor, the right hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), claimed that he was unable to tell the House how much public money has been spent on court fees involving TOEIC cases,

“because Home Office data systems are unable to disaggregate costs”.

That tells us quite a lot about cost control and value for money deliberations in the Home Office. Ministers should know how much this has cost, and they should be accountable to taxpayers for it.

What we have seen through those cases has made it clear before the courts and tribunals that innocent students have been wrongly caught up in a scandal that was not of their making. I am enormously grateful to Garden Court Chambers for the thorough briefing it provided to hon. Members in advance of this debate, to give us some examples. When the scandal was exposed by “Panorama”, the Home Office’s response was to delegate the identification of those who used a proxy to ETS. The very organisation that had failed to properly oversee the test centres—the organisation the Government had deemed unworthy of Government accreditation—was none the less entirely trusted, it seems, to oversee this process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Bailey. I am pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting). I congratulate him not only on securing the debate but on his excellent introduction, which set the scene for why the debate is necessary. I join him in expressing appreciation of our right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and his role in making sure that the Government keep having to address questions on this issue.

I will speak briefly on behalf of several of my constituents who have emailed me and who have been living in limbo since 2014. They all have different issues. They have each experienced different reporting restrictions. One was detained at one point for eight days. They have been denied in-country appeals. They have all experienced stress, causing health pressures, and sometimes mental health pressures, which has extended to their families, who are uncertain about their futures and those of their children.

In addition, their inability to access the benefits system while simultaneously being refused a work permit is completely unfair. How are people expected to survive for years without access to work and if the Government are not allowing them to exist, given that the Government have decided to place them in such a position? This has been going on for four years. They risk being driven into the black economy and rely entirely on the charity of friends and family, with pressure then transferred on to the budgets, which are sometimes meagre, of those friends and family who try to look after people in this predicament.

The Library briefing was very helpful in explaining the background and the extensive and outrageous fraud exposed by “Panorama” and The Sunday Times. The cheats and the cheating obviously need to be addressed, and I entirely understand that the Government need to look at that, but it seems that, following those investigations and legal action, some Home Office responses have been questionable and even open to challenge. For example, the Library briefing says that

“the Home Office may have erroneously cancelled a significant number of visas”

and mistakenly deported thousands of people, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North said, and that the Court of Appeal found that out-of-country appeals were not adequate.

I will be grateful if the Minister addresses those criticisms and challenges and, more importantly, if she gives us a timeline for when those outstanding decisions, as a result of parliamentary questions from my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham, will be made. The Government clearly said that they are looking at these matters, but we are yet to hear a clear indication of when those decisions might be made.

My office has been contacted by a number of constituents who had their visas curtailed in 2014 and have since been denied permission to work and refused access to public funds. One told me that he could not complete his studies at Shakespeare College. A second told me that he was studying at the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, spending his entire life savings to do so in an attempt to better his future. Instead he now lives in poverty, debt and uncertainty. A third was due to study business and marketing at Anglia Ruskin University in London. A fourth came to study business studies at the London School of Commerce in 2010. The Home Office curtailed his visa in 2014 and, since that cancellation, he has lost the £20,000 he paid for his studies and more than £15,000 in legal fees.

Some advocate an open-door immigration policy. I do not subscribe to that point of view. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North outlined, our educational institutions are in the international marketplace trying to attract students. We want them to come here. We want their money. We want them to become friends of the UK, and if we need them for their skills and qualifications, we would hope to encourage them to stay. The least we want is for them to go home with a positive view of the United Kingdom. That is soft diplomacy in action and it will hopefully last.

We currently have the worst of all outcomes. Not only are people wrongly deported and denied basic liberties; they are also in limbo, with no hope, no means with which to live and/or provide for their families and no indication of when the Home Office will sort this out. There have been disagreements in Government for years about whether to count students in the immigration statistics, and this is partly a result of that indecision. It is surely time to get a grip, and I hope the Minister is the person to do so. I hope to hear positive comments from her on how the Home Office will sort out the decent people caught up in this mess and what it intends to do to help them and to allow them to get on with their lives.