Sir Bernard Jenkin
MP for Harwich and North Essex · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Despite long and historic disagreements between successive UK Governments and Israel, it has remained a steadfast ally in counter-terrorist efforts to keep our people safe in this country. We are now embarked, it seems, on a full diplomatic dispute with Israel and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.”
“I would very much have liked to have discussed the medical devices questions arising from the Bill. The Minister made an incredibly short speech about that important matter. It is quite clear that these provisions are part of the covert dynamic alignment with the EU and the covert rejoin agenda being pursued by the Government.”
“I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it.”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon.”
“The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries.”
“I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon.”
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“It should be possible to discuss the practical arrangements we have with each other without being impugned as some kind of right-wing xenophobe, but I am afraid that my right hon. Friend fell into that trap. Another striking point about this debate is that although the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the former Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), and the Chairman of the Justice Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), each expressed support in principle, they were a great deal more chary about the consequences and effects of signing up to these arrangements than either of the Front-Bench speakers. I take on board what my right hon.”
“The lesson of that case is precisely the opposite of what my right hon. Friend suggests. We should take control of our own laws by enacting laws from this place rather than abdicating authority to other places, least of all to foreign powers. I was struck in this debate by how my right hon. Friend wanted to caricature the objections to the provisions, saying that anybody who is obsessed with the issue of Europe will stand up and object to anything. I am a trustee of the Parliament choir and last night we sang alongside our German counterparts, the Bundestag choir, in Westminster Hall. I stood shoulder to shoulder with a fellow bass from Germany and that is the kind of unity, brotherhood and friendship with our European partners that we want to demonstrate.”
“I am grateful to have the opportunity to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry). The burden of his case appears to be that the efficacy of any extradition arrangements should override any other balanced argument about what might be affected by them. He demonstrates how easy it is to be seduced by expediency, convenience, efficiency and pressure from the police, who have only one objective, and that is not to create more of the stronger human rights or protections for citizens that they feel obstruct their task of maintaining law and order. That is why this House does not abdicate decisions on matters of constitutional importance or human rights to ACPO. The Abu Hamza case took so long because we had lost control of our law and because we no longer control the human rights jurisprudence in our courts.”
“She would certainly have had the support of the Conservatives in that—if we were a majority Government, I doubt she would have had the support to act in the way she is acting now—but in this coalition, the quad would have vetoed that policy. It is, therefore, hardly surprising, four years since her appointment, that little work has been done on any alternative policy.”
“The civil service is enjoined to serve the Government as a whole, not individual party agendas or the different agendas of individual Ministers. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that no serious consideration has been given to any alternative policy of negotiating a permanent bilateral agreement on these matters, like the 170 or so sovereign states that are not members of the EU. If my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary had been minded to ask for credible submissions to support such a policy and then to act on them, it is not only the status quo in her Department, the Foreign Office and elsewhere that she would have had to fight.”
“Friend the Home Secretary’s blank denial that there could be any alternative to the European arrest warrant underlines that she may well have fallen prey to such pressures. Notwithstanding the fact that the main party in power has a different policy and was elected having opposed Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon, Whitehall appears to be continuing to implement those treaties according to a policy of business as usual. More powers are being transferred from the UK to the EU, with EU legislation encroaching ever more on our justice system, as though there had been no change of Government. I do not doubt that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is acting on advice and with complete integrity, but it may help if I, as Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, remind the House how advice to Ministers works in a coalition.”
“Surely not that he intended to do exactly the opposite a few weeks after the close of poll. This year’s Conservative European election leaflet stated: “We stand for a new relationship with the EU, bringing power back to Britain and away from Brussels”, by, among other things, “taking back control of justice and home affairs”. If the UK intends to bring powers back in our renegotiation after the next election, it is a strange way for the Prime Minister to begin setting out his stall by giving up the very powers he said he would not give up. That raises the question about the pressure on Ministers to continue supporting the process of EU integration because of coalition politics. My right hon.”
“It was based on a speech the Prime Minister made when in opposition, in which he promised to negotiate the three guarantees, one of which was “limiting the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over criminal law to its pre-Lisbon level, and ensuring that only British authorities can initiate criminal investigations in Britain.” Why have we abandoned that? Much more recently, the Prime Minister wrote in The Sunday Telegraph on 16 March 2014 that one of the key changes he would seek in a renegotiation with the EU was: “Our police forces and justice systems able to protect British citizens, unencumbered by unnecessary interference from the European institutions”. Why have we abandoned that already? What did he intend to convey to voters in advance of the European elections?”
“175.] The Foreign Secretary, as shadow Foreign Secretary, chided the previous Government for not keeping their promises on the EU when he said: “Time and again they have made promises that they would not hand over powers to Europe, particularly on justice and home affairs, and time and again they have done exactly that, not least through the treaty.” —[ Official Report , 4 March 2008; Vol. 472, c. 1684.] My right hon. Friend now has to eat those words. The Conservative party manifesto of 2010 promised “three specific guarantees—on the Charter of fundamental rights, on criminal justice, and on social and employment legislation—with our European partners to return powers that we believe should reside with the UK, not the EU.” Why have we abandoned that?”
“and learned Friend the Attorney-General, as shadow Justice Secretary, said in 2008 that “once such things are subject to the European Court of Justice and the Commission…the Government will lose all control over standing up for United Kingdom interests in these areas”. —[ Official Report , 29 January 2008; Vol. 471, c. 176.] He also pointed out that the European arrest warrant “is very different from…an international treaty obligation that the United Kingdom could decide not to follow if it infringed the human rights of those affected. We will be surrendering the final say about that entirely to a supranational body.” —[ Official Report , 29 January 2008; Vol. 471, c.”
“I agree with the Prime Minister and with my hon. Friend on that point. The Prime Minister recently told the “Today” programme that he wants to pursue a relationship with our European partners based on “trade and co-operation” and on being “an independent nation state”. I have to say that I cannot find any strand of consistency between the measures in this Command Paper and the aspirations expressed by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. May I remind my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, who is not in her place at the moment, of what we said in the House about the European arrest warrant when we were in opposition? My right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary, as shadow Home Secretary, said in 2009 that it “undermined civil liberties”. My right hon.”
“I am not suggesting for a moment that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is not sincere in her belief. All I am saying is that the incentives against obtaining alternative advice are massive. If someone goes against the grain of the coalition, they are likely to be stopped at the end of the process anyway, so what is the point? And so we finish up in this position. That episode highlights how impossible it is to put any political will behind the Prime Minister’s stated aim of a renegotiated relationship with the EU as long as we remain in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who take a fundamentally opposite view to ours.”
“In these circumstances, it would be impossible for any leader of the Conservative party to campaign to vote to stay in the European Union, either in a referendum or at the next general election, without making it clear that he had a clear bottom line in the renegotiations that our new relationship with the EU must be based on the supremacy of our national Parliament, at least, and that otherwise we would have to leave the treaties and seek that new relationship from outside.”
“The point in the final Ypres conclusions about the need for “strong and credible” EU institutions but no more than “closer involvement of national parliaments”, underlines the fact that the EU is set against anything that seeks to reassert the supremacy of the UK Parliament in the European Union. It is beyond any doubt that such a proposal would even be considered, because it would take only one other member state to veto any such proposal.”
“This reflects the political reality, which we Conservatives spelled out at the time, that the Lisbon treaty is the EU constitution in all but name. This justice and home affairs decision demonstrates that the Government are doing nothing of practical value to challenge that. The lack of any specific constitutional provision in the Lisbon treaty to make it autochthonous—that is, dependent on its own provisions for its authority, like a constitution—does not prevent the majority of EU states or the EU institutions from behaving in that way. This question of constitutional supremacy has now reached a critical point.”
“Many subsequent treaties, and measures such as these, have been adopted by Act of Parliament, but the fundamental and ultimate role of the UK Parliament has never been vitiated. Had the UK adopted the EU constitution, that might have changed, but for now at least, the European Communities Act 1972 remains the foundation Act, and every EU law in the UK is subject to the constitutional principle of voluntary acceptance by the UK Parliament. Those final conclusions of the European Council, along with so many other statements from other EU leaders and from European institutions such as the Commissioner and the European Parliament, do not accept our view. They speak and act as though the European Parliament is paramount, and attribute only a subsidiary role to national Parliaments, including our own.”
“That is because the EU treaties are not consistent with the UK’s constitutional position, or with the Prime Minister’s stated desire for the UK to be an independent nation state. The practical importance of addressing the issues set out by the Prime Minister—they include immigration, freedom of movement, the single market and energy prices—is self-evident. However, any concessions that we obtain will be nugatory in their effect unless we also obtain recognition of the main principle at stake—namely, that of the supremacy of the United Kingdom Parliament. In the UK, all EU laws and treaties rest upon the UK Parliament, which voluntarily agreed to the 1972 Act. This took place in the context of the unambiguous assurance that national sovereignty would be maintained after we joined. That was set out in the 1971 White Paper.”
“Since Maastricht, we have seen that opt-outs, subsidiarity and talk of different degrees or speeds of EU integration make no difference to the direction of the EU. Consequently, the legal protections concerning disproportionality and dual criminality are potentially meaningless. Incidentally, the removal of the words “ever closer union” from the preamble of the EU treaties would make no change at all to how the European Commission, Court and Parliament behave. It would not remove a single treaty base of a single EU legal instrument or court ruling, and I emphasise that it would not prevent the European Court of Justice from setting aside any domestic protection that we may enact in respect of the European arrest warrant.”
“We saw not only how the ambiguity in the treaties will continue to be exploited by those who want to carry on the process of centralisation, but how the UK’s attempt to boost the role of national Parliaments—the fourth principle from the Bloomberg speech—was all but eliminated from the final conclusions, as was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash). There should be no need in this House to reiterate the importance of our national Parliament to our democracy, or to point out that under the UK’s constitution Parliament is, and must remain, supreme. However, the Ypres summit and its decisions underline how EU treaties and institutions deny such an essential element of the UK’s constitutional autonomy under the present terms of membership.”
“I admire the stand made by the Prime Minister over Mr Juncker, but it just shows that although the Prime Minister may get permission within the coalition to make what amount to grand gestures, he cannot get permission for any policy of substance that purports to advance the objectives he has so ably set out. The decision on the justice and home affairs opt-ins should be seen in that very serious context, because there are very serious implications. The way in which my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister’s challenge to Mr Juncker was dismissed at the Ypres summit indicates that the EU will resist any fundamental reform. That could not be clearer from the events at the summit.”
“On some occasions, Ministers have asked for papers or legislation to be prepared on their behalf, and there has been a blanket refusal because it is not Government policy if it has not been approved by the coalition; that is a fact. The episode demonstrates that another year of coalition is another year of paralysis and inertia on EU policy, because the machinery of government is hostage to the coalition. That is another reason why we should either end the coalition in the run-up to the election or, indeed, call an earlier general election. I believe that we will rue the day that we voted—I did not, but the House did—for fixed-term Parliaments. The present paralysis also makes nonsense of the Government’s current policy on the EU.”
“It has been made clear throughout the civil service that there can be no policy except Government policy, and Government policy is filtered through the coalition arrangements, over which there is a mutual veto in that unless there is agreement, there is no policy. If the Home Secretary had started out on the premise of an alternative policy—of multilateralism or of a simple bilateral arrangement on such matters—she would have been up against not only the vested interests in the EU, with their determination to block this kind of thing and the residual resistance of the status quo, but the added pressure against attempting to do such a thing that exists in the way the civil service operates under the coalition. I am afraid that that is just a fact.”
“It seems from the stance adopted by the Government that we are being invited to believe that the European Union is a deeply unreasonable institution that holds very hard and fast positions on which it is not prepared to compromise even in its own interests, let alone the interests of its member states. Does my hon. Friend not think that we should have tried a bit harder?”
“I admire my hon. Friend’s intellectual honesty in admitting that in respect of the European arrest warrant the activities of the European Court of Justice may lead to judicial creep, which may lead to a “wheelbarrow situation” and so on. If such were to occur, who would be accountable?”
“If a wayward British court makes a judgment that is clearly not intended by Parliament but has arisen because of a perfectly legitimate and understandable interpretation of one of our own statutes, we can hold a Minister accountable, we can ask them to bring forward an amendment to the law and we can change the law. If the same happens in respect of European legislation, how do we hold the law accountable?”
“I am very grateful for my hon. Friend’s generosity in giving way. I have served in this House for more than 20 years and I have seen court judgment after court judgment from the ECJ, or indeed from our own courts—in the Factortame case, famously, even a political agreement reached between the member states about our fisheries was overturned by a decision of the court—where the Minister here says that nothing can be done about it. That has been the case time after time. We are moving these decisions, and their consequences, beyond the democratic accountability of the national Parliament.”
“I welcome my right hon. Friend’s announcement of the overarching inquiry, which is important because if we wish to empower children to resist and report child sex abuse, we need to demonstrate that as adults we are prepared to talk openly about these things. Will she give her view on whether it is correct that no Government record should be destroyed without a record of its being destroyed being kept? If that is what has happened in these 114 cases, is she confident that it is not still happening, and is she satisfied that the Lord Chancellor’s code of practice on the management of records— to which I think the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) referred—is actually being complied with and, indeed, that it is adequate for the purpose?”
“Unsurprisingly, migration estimates based on the international passenger survey are subject to a large margin of error, known to statisticians as the confidence interval: that is, the degree of confidence that it is possible to have about a particular margin of error. As we all know, the Government have stated that they intend to bring net migration—the difference between annual immigration into and emigration out of the UK—down from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. That is not a 90% cut; in fact, it amounts to about 50%. On the ONS calculations for net migration as measured by the unadjusted IPS estimate, the 95% confidence interval is plus or minus 35,000, meaning that we can only be 95% certain that the true figure lies within 35,000 of the estimate either way. In other words, the error range is 70,000.”
“The method is called the international passenger survey. The number of non-UK citizens identified from the sample as migrants entering or leaving the UK each year is fewer than 5,000. Most of the numbers that we hear in the immigration debate are based on that tiny sample of people, many of whom might be reticent, to say the least, about giving full and frank answers about where they have come from, who they are, why they are here and where they are going. To be clear, that group includes people entering and emigrating from the UK, so the sample number of immigrants in the survey may be as small as 3,000.”
“The current sources of migration statistics were established when migration levels were much lower than they are today. Those sources are not adequate for understanding the scale and complexity of modern migration flows, despite attempts in recent years to improve their accuracy and usefulness. Most people are astonished when they learn how the inadequate estimates that we do have are compiled. When a person checks in or out of the country, their passport is scanned, but they are not counted in or out of the country, even if they are a foreign national. The headline immigration, emigration and net migration numbers are annual estimates based on interviews of about 800,000 people stopped at random at ports and airports each year—a tiny fraction of the overall flow of passengers and people in and out of the UK.”
“How can the public trust politicians’ promises on immigration if we do not have reliable numbers on which to base our policies? One reason why the debate on immigration has become so toxic is that people no longer believe they are being told the truth; they do not even believe that Governments understand what is happening to their own country. We conducted our inquiry last year and came to a conclusion that everybody in the know about immigration has understood for years, but been loth to say too clearly for fear of the consequences: the immigration statistics produced by the Office for National Statistics and the Home Office are but blunt instruments for measuring, managing and understanding migration to and from the UK, and they are not fit for purpose.”
“Thank you, Mr Walker, for the opportunity to present to the House the Select Committee on Public Administration’s report of the 2013-14 Session on migration statistics. It has proved one of the most controversial that we have produced during this Parliament. Migration statistics are of supreme importance to public policy and the debate about immigration in this country. National and local government depend on those estimates in planning public services. For reasons of security, we need to know not only how many people are arriving in and leaving the UK, but who they are. Migration statistics help us understand what is happening in British society and the British economy. Accurate and reliable migration statistics are also important for public trust.”
“That is, the IPS sample under-represented airports such as Cardiff and ports such as Newcastle, where more immigrants are coming in than was previously understood. As a result, this April, the ONS published a revised set of net migration estimates for the United Kingdom for the period 2001 to 2011. Total net migration during that period is now estimated to have been 346,000 higher than previously thought; the original estimate of 2.18 million has been revised to 2.53 million, plus or minus 35,000.”
“The shortcomings of relying on the IPS were highlighted when the 2011 census showed that the population of England and Wales was 465,000 higher than expected, given the recorded number of births and deaths and the estimated level of net migration during the decade since the previous census. The ONS identified several possible causes for the difference but considered that the “largest single cause is most likely to be underestimation of long-term immigration from central and eastern Europe in the middle part of the decade”, which of course was not picked up by the international passenger survey. The ONS concluded that the underestimation came partly from taking samples of people from the wrong airports.”
“It is clearly a completely inadequate measure of net migration, but we must be careful before dismissing it, because it is all we have. That degree of confidence applies only to the headline numbers. The ONS estimate simply does not provide sufficient detail to judge properly the social and economic consequences of different types and origins of migration, and the effects of immigration policy on, for example, students or people from particular countries. Nor does it provide any useful idea about international migration in and out of local areas. Efforts to achieve a blunt net migration target are therefore bound to have unintended consequences, such as skills shortages and effects on universities.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I said, the survey relies on full and frank answers from those being interviewed even to include them. If people say that they are just visiting a relative for a week, they are not counted as migrants. To that extent, the 70,000 range for potential error within the 95% confidence interval is of significant size for the estimate. If annual immigration is 120,000 or 150,000, there is only a 5% or one in 20 chance that the official figures are on target. The figures could say that the Government are missing their net immigration target by tens of thousands when in fact they are meeting it, or they could show that the UK is meeting its target when in fact it is missing it by tens of thousands. We do not have enough confidence to know.”
“The UK Statistics Authority agrees with us in that respect, saying in its response to our report: “The limitations of the International Passenger Survey (IPS) in particular and UK international migration statistics in general, especially for local areas, have long been known and debated. The Statistics Authority believes that action must now be taken to address this.” As I mentioned, when we look at smaller groupings within the 3,000 immigrants identified, such as immigrants from the EU or from specific countries, the system becomes even less reliable, as the 95% confidence interval becomes larger relative to the size of the sample, eventually becoming larger than the sample itself.”
“Many people in the country do not consider themselves to be “residents” and thus decide not to complete the census form. Many others, who have overstayed or are in the country illegally for other reasons, are most unlikely to complete the form. Immigration will thus have been even higher in the last decade than was estimated by the census. The PASC concluded that the UK’s immigration statistics are not fit for purpose. There was some pushback from the Home Office in reaction to our report last summer, but I think we have to regard that as a natural reaction of denial about the failure of the system of immigration statistics that has been building up for decades.”
“The underestimation of net migration was identified only by the census on a 10-yearly basis, so the ONS is unable to revise its annual estimates of immigration and emigration as components of migration during the same period, even though it knows that they must be wrong. As a result, for the years from 2001 to 2011, our best estimate of net migration each year is not equal to our best estimate of immigration minus our best estimate of emigration. We are into an Alice in Wonderland world of numbers in which we know that our official figures for each year are wrong, but they cannot be changed, as we have no other sources to use. In all probability, the actual population of the country will be even larger than that recorded in the census.”
“My hon. Friend highlights the complexity of moving purely to a counting in and counting out system. Only two countries in the world base their immigration and emigration estimates entirely on counting. One is Australia, which is a good example. A less encouraging example is North Korea. However, every other country in the world bases its migration flow estimates on samples, measuring and estimating or a population register. Germany, for example, keeps an up-to-date population register—the equivalent of a census kept constantly up to date—to monitor its migration flows. We are in a no man’s land at the moment. We neither count effectively nor sample effectively, and even though we have the decennial census, which has provided the correction of 346,000, that does not resolve the problem between censuses.”
“The leader of Westminster more or less told us that the only way it can find out the nationalities of the people in the borough is to go around and count them itself. That may be a responsibility that it should take on, but— [Interruption.]”
“The UK Statistics Authority also stated: “The IPS sample size is too small to enable the production of reliable international migration estimates at a local authority level, and cannot realistically be made sufficiently large to achieve robust local estimates.” The census, which is designed to count every member of the population, provides the only reliable data on the number and characteristics of migrants at local level, but we get it only every 10 years, which is why it was so full of surprises. In evidence to us, Westminster city council said that the current methodology for estimating migration was not robust enough to support accurate local-level estimates, so that “the measurement of migration from the perspective of an LA user and as reliable information on our residents is failing”.”
“For the other 180 or so countries, no figures are published, so we cannot tell from the data how many Russians, Iranians, South Africans or Romanians are coming to this country. For the same reason, the ONS migration data cannot provide anything meaningful for local authorities that are trying to work out how migration flows affect their area or to plan for population changes.”
“I do share that concern, but if the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will deal with that issue later. I was talking about the 95% confidence interval in respect of smaller samples relating to individual countries. The ONS will publish estimates of immigrants by country only for the top 15 source countries, because for all the other countries the sample is too small to provide a meaningful estimate—in other words, the number of people from Iran or Afghanistan is actually smaller than the 95% confidence interval itself, so the number is meaningless. We have vague estimates of the numbers coming in from China, India, Poland, the USA, Australia, Spain, Pakistan, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Nigeria, New Zealand, Lithuania and Hong Kong. Those are the countries for which figures are published.”
“The politicians of the main parties are arguing about policies, the effects of which they cannot measure, in relation to numbers of migrants that they cannot determine. That can only undermine trust and confidence in political life, and it will provide an avenue for extremist parties to exploit at the expense of the proper government of this country. We owe it to our voters to deliver more accurate migration statistics as soon as possible.”
“The Home Office told us: “There will be some possibility to link e-Borders data in the future, in due course”, but we have not yet received any clear commitment that that will happen, let alone a time scale. That is not adequate. The issue requires urgent action. Estimates based on a survey alone are no longer fit for purpose. Instead, we need to make proper use of the electronic data from the border systems programme. The public need and deserve to be given accurate information about migration to the UK, using the latest technology and methods available. We are now in an election year, during which the issue of immigration will be hotly contested, but that debate is likely to do no more than produce despair in the minds of our voters.”
“It is vital that work on immigration be fully co-ordinated and that Departments share intelligence. That our official immigration and emigration estimates do not match our official net migration figure for a whole decade underlines the Committee’s main finding that the current system of relying solely on the IPS for migration statistics is not fit for purpose. Although the IPS provides useful information about the characteristics of migrants, it cannot be relied on to give us accurate numbers of those migrating into and out of the United Kingdom. There is no reason why the Government cannot use border systems programme data dramatically to improve the accuracy of migration data.”
“They say only that that “may be feasible in future”. We believe, however, that it should be done as a matter of urgency. To be clear, we have not recommended that the Government should stop using the IPS by any means, but the Public Administration Committee recommended that the Government plan to end their reliance on that survey as the sole basis for estimating migration flows. The IPS was not designed for the important job that it now has. It was never intended to be used for the purpose of estimating international migration; it was designed to support the work of the then British Tourist Authority by providing economic data on travel and tourism. The next five years will see much work in Government on developing new data sources that will eventually replace the decennial population census.”
“As things stand, we simply do not know how many visa nationals are currently in the country; we do not know how many comply with the rules and how many overstay; and we do not know how many of the people migrating to and from the UK on a long-term basis entered the country in each visa category. That makes it hard to work out whether changes in visa policy are having the intended effect on migration flows and almost impossible to establish the scale of the problem of people who stay here illegally. There is no reason for the situation to persist now that the Government have committed to reintroducing exit checks, but in their response to the Public Administration Committee the Government made no commitment to track the entries and exits of visa holders once that becomes possible, even though it is fully within their power to do so.”
“I think that most of the British travelling public would be astonished to find out that passports are scanned but not even people who are on a visa are recorded as they pass into or out of the country. The Home Office should move as rapidly as possible towards integrating visa information with border systems programme data, so that an accurate measurement can be made of immigration, emigration and net migration by people in different visa categories. That would also provide data on the number of people in different visa categories currently living in the UK, and it would enable the Home Office to gather detailed information on the characteristics of migrants who are subject to migration control.”