Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment his Department has made of the credibility of the allegations made by ETS that people cheated in the Test of English for International Communication.

As previously set out to the Home Affairs Select committee in writing, a number of steps were taken to ensure that the ETS process for declaring test results invalid was suitably robust. This included commissioning an independent expert report from a leading Professor of Forensic Speech Science which concluded that the number of false matches would be very small, and that the system used were more likely to produce false negatives than false positives. The Courts have found that the core evidence we have is sufficient to establish a presumption of fraud.