Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps his Department took to validate allegations made by ETS that individuals had cheated in their Test of English for International Communication; and if he will make a statement.

Further to PQ 140550, 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.

Where a result was marked as questionable, nobody was refused immigration leave on that basis without first being given the opportunity to re-sit a test with another provider or attend an interview.