Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the statement of 24 June 2014, Official Report, column 206, on student visas, on what date her Department first became aware of the systematic cheating taking place in the tests of the Educational Testing Service.

Since the last election, the Government has taken action to reduce and control
immigration and to crack down on the abuse of the system which the previous
government failed to address. We have kept the main immigration routes to
Britain under review and remain vigilant against abuse of the student visa
system. Around 750 education sponsors have been removed from the register of
those entitled to bring overseas students to the UK. We now know that almost
400 of these were linked to the sponsorship of people who obtained invalid ETS
certificates. Abuse of the student visa route has been the subject of various
lines of inquiry for some time, but Immigration Enforcement officers, together
with officials from UK Visas and Immigration and with the support of the
National Crime Agency, began conducting a detailed and wide-ranging
investigation into actions by organised criminals to falsify English language
tests provided by ETS at the start of February.