In early February, Charles Clarke announced a five-year strategy plan for immigration and asylum. It came hot on the heels of the Tories' announcement of their own immigration strategy, based on a quota system. The highlight of the Labour proposal was an Australian-style points system. Thanks to this and a raft of other rule-tightening measures, said Clarke, immigration control would be "transformed"—the fourth transformation of Britain's border regulations since 1997.
So whoever wins the election, the goalposts of immigration will shift once again. What both parties seem to have overlooked, however, is the fact that the effectiveness of their new policies will depend on the ability of civil servants to apply them. There is no point in changing the tyres on a racing car if the engine is leaking oil or about to blow a gasket.
The engine in this case is the immigration and nationality directorate (IND), a branch of the home office with headquarters at Lunar House in Croydon. Lunar House is infamous. It used to feature on television news as a backdrop to queues of immigrants and asylum seekers, and is still perceived by the public as the front line of Britain's immigration service. Its profile is lower these days because Labour has had some notable successes in tackling the crisis, particularly its asylum aspect. Removals of failed asylum seekers have almost doubled since 1997: last year over 12,000 people, including dependants, were sent home. The backlog of asylum seekers awaiting an initial decision is under 10,000, down from 24,000 at the end of 2003—its lowest level in a decade. Best of all, from the government's point of view, the total number of asylum applications in 2004 was 33,930, down 60 per cent from its 2002 peak.
These statistics do not tell the full story, however. Reducing the backlog of asylum decisions is less of an achievement if the decisions themselves are faulty. Unfortunately for the IND, statistics also tell us that 19 per cent of the 56,000 appeal cases that were heard by independent adjudicators last year were upheld. This is perhaps the most serious criticism that can be levelled at the IND. We are not talking parking tickets here. For a significant number of appellants, the success or failure of their bid for asylum is potentially a matter of life and death. Yet last year the IND's initial decisions were just plain wrong in over 10,000 cases. Deciding who merits asylum and who does not is not easy, but surely we can do better than this.
The Immigrant Advisory Service (IAS), an NGO that offers free legal advice to those affected by British immigration law, has logged its own examples of how egregious the IND can be. A recent IND letter of refusal concerned a Zimbabwean who had applied for asylum on the grounds that he was a member of the opposition MDC party and had been persecuted by Mugabe's Zanu-PF. The IND did not believe him. "It is considered that you would be well aware that the Zanu-PF indiscriminately rape, torture and murder people perceived to oppose their actions and beliefs," its letter read. "Therefore it is not accepted that you would have been foolhardy enough to 'sing, distribute T-shirts, tell people that the MDC could change the country and campaign for the party.'"
The IAS complained about this Kafkaesque piece of reasoning. To be fair, the IND's management acknowledged that the "speculative arguments" of the letter "undermined the integrity" of the decision in this case, and promised a review. But as the IAS pointed out, the author of the letter appeared to have little understanding of the 1951 refugee convention or, indeed, of the British government's position on the political situation in Zimbabwe. The MDC supporter was lucky that the IAS took up his cause. How many more such cases are slipping through the net?
The IAS says the IND is failing to recruit the right staff, to train them adequately or to supervise them properly. The IND, while acknowledging the occasional mistake, broadly rejects the allegations. But there is no doubt that recruitment is a problem. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the IND's decision-makers—"asylum caseworkers," as they are called—are among the lowest paid in Europe. They have in the past been recruited internally, from the lowest civil service grade; recruits at this level seldom ask to become asylum specialists but tend to have those posts assigned to them.
There are other difficulties. Although they are called "caseworkers," decision-makers at Lunar House do not follow an assigned case through to its end in the logical way. Instead, in the interests of speed, asylum cases are pooled, so that anyone phoning in to see how a case is progressing is likely to get a different caseworker each time. Duff technology—that hoary millennial story—is partly to blame. In one of the great public sector IT debacles, the home office signed a contract with Siemens in 1996 to deliver a computer system that would speed up processing times. But the project was hit by delays and was scrapped in 2001, only partially installed. The home office, under pressure to tackle the backlog, had staked its reputation on the new computers. According to one Lunar House insider, pooling the casework was the IND's only chance of hitting its required targets. And the targets are as high as ever: today, Lunar House is expected to process some 180,000 applications for asylum, visas and citizenship each year.
The pooling system has had other adverse consequences. The most obvious is Lunar House's startling ability to lose vital documentation. It is a "well of lost passports," in the words of one asylum solicitor. Ian Knowles, a Catholic priest at St Dominic's Church in Croydon, has dealt with the IND on behalf of his parishioners many times over the last ten years. He was first made aware of its vagaries when he intervened on behalf of a family from what was then Zaire, whose right to receive benefit was inexplicably withdrawn one day. The family had been waiting for a decision on their immigrant status for eight years. Knowles telephoned Lunar House several times a day for a week, at the end of which an explanation was found for the family's eight-year wait: its papers had been filed in the wrong room.
On at least two other occasions, parishioners have solicited Knowles's help in retrieving "lost" documentation that, following a pithy letter to the director of Lunar House or to the local MP, mysteriously turned out not to be lost at all. In his view, documents are bound to get lost when staff members are denied individual responsibility for cases. It is a tell-tale sign of a bureaucracy with no proper public "interface."
The legal specialists at the IAS tell a slightly different story. They say that Lunar House's record of "losing" documentation has improved recently—a claim supported by the latest home office statistics which show that processing times have definitely speeded up in the last 18 months. "The problem is not the new cases," said Colin Yeo, head of higher appeals at the IAS. "It's the old ones that often seem to have disappeared down the back of a sofa."
Another common complaint, related to the lack of individual responsibility for cases, is that despite employing 6,000 staff, there is no one to speak to at Lunar House. Or, indeed, to write to. The IND has no dedicated press or PR department. My approach to Bob Eagle, director of asylum casework, was bounced back to a press officer at the home office who knew little about immigration. Such opacity stands out. Private Eye recently reported that a note issued to Lunar House staff, explaining how they would be affected by the Freedom of Information Act, was preceded by the warning: "Staff should on no account disclose any parts of this document to anyone outside of a government department."
If Lunar House's culture seems unduly closed and defensive, that is partly because its unloved staff are genuinely beleaguered. It has a long history of low staff morale, and a reputation within the civil service as the office with the highest number of staff suicides. For some years now, the IND has been squeezed from two directions—its impatient masters in Whitehall above, and thousands of frustrated immigrants and asylum seekers below. The staff's work is repetitive yet often difficult, and the computerised case-pooling system makes it next to impossible to feel much job satisfaction.
Moreover, the government's constant tinkering with the rules of immigration since 1997 means that no one is an expert; all officials are working on shifting sands. There has also been talk recently of job cuts, or of jobs being relocated to different places around the country. None of this serves to bolster Lunar House's already fragile esprit de corps, or to create a culture of duty of care towards the people it is supposed to serve. (The IND's budget for 2003-04 was £1.9bn; the home office anticipates an annual cost of about £200m less for each of the next two years. In the context of such sums, improving the quality of initial decision-making at Lunar House would cost very little. It might even be possible to recoup the extra expenditure by squeezing the expensive appeals system, which could be more modest if the initial decisions were better.)
It does not help that Lunar House is not a pleasant place to work. Croydon, with its trams and pedestrianised shopping zone, may have its civic charms, but the business district on the east side of town is not one of them. When I went there on a snowy day in February, Lunar House and the other office blocks clustered along Wellesley Road looked like East Berlin before the wall came down. The fence on the central reservation of the carriageway that cuts Lunar House off from the town centre carries a sign directing pedestrians to use an underpass, or risk being killed. It is a planning disaster. Perhaps this explains why the IND—easily Croydon's biggest employer—has such trouble attracting recruits.
If the staff do not like it, how much worse must it be for the poor customers? In theory, the desperate queues for which Lunar House is notorious should soon be a thing of the past, because management has at last decided to move towards an appointments-only system. For the time being, however, the queues are still there, snaking through a semi-covered waiting area. Crowd barriers are painted a jaunty purple, but it still looks and feels like a cattle shed. There are posters explaining that the £250 application fee for an express asylum claim will only be waived if the applicant is seeking indefinite leave to remain on the grounds of domestic violence, and appears to be destitute at the time of making the application. This is not a welcoming place for anyone.
The IND has been castigated so consistently and for so long by the refugee lobby that it cannot but be aware of its shortcomings. The central criticism levelled by the Refugee Council, Britain's largest refugee agency, is that initial decision-making on asylum cases is still neither accurate nor fast enough. They are right to focus on this, because good decision-making should be the bedrock of any asylum system. And IND's directors are trying to improve their organisation's decision-making. They have concentrated hard in recent months on the training of caseworkers, and launched a drive for more and better educated recruits. Minimum qualifications have been raised to two A-levels and five GCSEs. Decision-making workshops have been introduced for all caseworkers. Since last summer, external assessors—typically, solicitors from the treasury or from UNHCR—have assessed a random sample of around 50 initial decisions each month. Managers report that the accuracy of initial decisions has improved as a result. But the percentage of successful appeals against negative IND decisions dropped only slightly from 20 per cent to 19 per cent between 2003 and 2004. IND caseworkers are still getting it wrong in one in five cases. Instituting change at Lunar House is like turning an oil tanker.
An organisation called South London Citizens is trying a different tactic: a "citizens' inquiry" into the service provided by Lunar House. It has commissioned a panel of bishops, QCs (notably Eleanor Sharpston) and professors to hear evidence from anyone with a grievance against the IND; it plans to publish recommendations for change in the autumn. What distinguishes this inquiry from the usual attacks on Lunar House is that IND staff are being urged to take part. By acknowledging that the government's immigration and asylum policies are also tough on the people who have to implement them, the inquiry is cleverly showing compassion towards a bureaucracy with a reputation for lacking it. The inquiry enjoys the tacit support of the main civil service union, the Public and Commercial Services union, and if enough PCS members testify, the inquiry may create sufficient noise to reach the home secretary.
Nicholas Sagovsky, canon theologian at Westminster Abbey and one of the inquiry's commissioners, insists that the exercise is not about taking sides. The impulse behind it, he says, is simply a desire to help. Like many of the other commissioners, he has seen for himself what it is like to be on the receiving end of Lunar House's ministrations. As a professor at Liverpool Hope University College, he once helped a foreign student whose visa application with accompanying passport had gone "missing" no fewer than three times. "I was struck by the intense anguish this person went through… I became genuinely concerned about his mental equilibrium." He added that the human cost of bureaucratic mismanagement is seldom considered because it is so hard to measure. Part of the purpose of the inquiry, he said, is to redress that.
Ian Knowles, the Croydon priest, echoes the sentiment. He counts a handful of Lunar House staff among his congregation, none of whom are very happy at work, and intends to speak at the hearings on their, and others', behalf. He describes the way people are treated in Wellesley Road as "mechanistic"—the inevitable result, he thinks, of following the lead of a government whose policies are driven more by a craving for publicity than by a desire to do the right thing.
Labour politicians would take issue with that and argue that, in order to win public consent for asylum and for reasonable levels of immigration, abuse of both systems has to be minimised. They would also presumably acknowledge that this means sending out a rather mixed message. The thrust of Charles Clarke's five-year strategy is in the same rule-tightening direction as his party's legislation of 2000, 2002 and 2004. His proposed scrapping of the automatic granting of indefinite leave to remain (ILR) to refugees is particularly noteworthy. In the past, successful asylum seekers, and in most cases their dependants, have been given the right to remain in the country for as long as they wish. But in future, even genuine refugees—people who may have been tortured or seen their families killed—will be granted only temporary leave to stay for five years, and if circumstances have improved in their home country after then, they will have to return. So they must live through five years of uncertainty before the government will confirm that they can stay. And yet, within a week of launching his new strategy, Clarke was insisting that we should be offering refuge to more, not fewer, genuine asylum seekers, and that Britain's economy "utterly depends" on migration.
Just after introducing his strategy, Clarke remarked that the current system of managed migration was "complex and difficult to understand." For that reason, he thought the IND's 14,000 staff would welcome his "clarifications." Yet the thinking behind the new policies has not been clarified. The scrapping of ILR is a case in point. It sounds suitably tough in an election period, but is it workable? Determining whether a country is "safe" is a notoriously thorny business. At present it is primarily the responsibility of the country information policy unit (CIPU), also based in Croydon. Concentrating on the main countries of origin for refugees (an ever-fluctuating list, but currently headed by Iran, China, Iraq, Somalia and Zimbabwe), CIPU disseminates the "country information" on which caseworkers and appeals adjudicators base their decisions. CIPU's role in creating a fair immigration process is therefore crucial. Unfortunately, the unit's performance has been desperately poor in the past. It has also been accused of peddling the government line on the safety of certain countries, such as Afghanistan.
CIPU's output is said to have markedly improved over the last 18 months, since the establishment of an independent advisory panel with oversight of its reports. There are also plans to make the unit's policymaking more politically independent, so that the people who write country reports are not the ones making asylum judgements on the basis of those reports. However, whether a country is "safe" or not almost always depends on the circumstances of the individual, as I discovered through my involvement with a family of Afghan refugees over many years (see "Asylum fixers," Prospect, August 2001 and "Afghan in the dock," May 2004). A humane system must therefore judge each case on its merits—something the IND at present is not set up to do. In five years' time, Clarke's new strategy will therefore place more responsibility on to machinery that is already overloaded.
Not long ago in Kabul, I came across a neat illustration of what happens when you do not have the resources to judge each case on its merits. I met a thoroughly despondent young man, an ethnic Tajik, who had recently returned to Kabul from Liverpool. He had applied for asylum in Britain on the grounds that his family had been killed by the Taleban, and that he was next on their list. Or maybe it was the Uzbeks who wanted to kill him, or the Hazaras. It does not much matter: the point of the story is that the IND turned him down not on the grounds that his fear of persecution was unfounded—which they might justifiably have done, I am not taking sides here—but on the grounds that he was not from Kabul, as he had claimed. They accused him of being—dread insult—a Pakistani pretending to be an Afghan. They had come to this conclusion by asking him a series of set questions, one of which was: what is the name of Kabul airport? This stumped the Tajik, because Kabul airport is known by Afghans as… Kabul airport. "Wrong," said the interviewers. "It is called Khwaja Rawash!" Technically the interviewers were right: Kabul airport is located in an outlying district of that name. But their question was tantamount to expecting a Londoner to know that Heathrow is in the borough of Hillingdon.
Such stories are not uncommon. Set questions are a key part of the armoury deployed by immigration officers when an applicant's true nationality has to be established. Pakistanis and even Iranians pretend to be Afghans, while in the past there has been a lot of trouble with Albanians pretending to be Kosovans. There is a postscript to the tale of the ethnic Tajik. Just after he was turned down, he met a Pakistani in Liverpool who had managed to fool his interviewers into thinking he was an asylum-deserving Afghan by answering the Khwaja Rawash question, and others, correctly. He had managed to do so, he said, because he had been "prepped" by his solicitor. It turned out that the IND's list of set questions had not changed in months. Every immigration lawyer in London knew what was on it. The Pakistani, a bogus asylum seeker if ever there was one, is still living in Britain.
Britain once had a reputation for fair play. This is worth preserving; it is better, at any rate, than a reputation for its opposite. Ian Knowles is surely right when he describes Lunar House as "Orwellian, opaque and unaccountable," and right again when he says it should be "something authentically British; something we can be proud of." Fixing Lunar House should be placed at the centre of the immigration and asylum agenda, whoever wins the election.
