April 04, 2004
Focus: Ministers lose control of Britain's borders
Last month The Sunday Times revealed how the government was ushering thousands of migrants into Britain without checks. Last week, after much bluster, the minister responsible resigned. David Leppard, the reporter who broke the story, analyses a crisis that could decide the next election
George Orwell would have been proud. As Beverley Hughes, the disgraced minister for citizenship and immigration, stood up in the Commons to announce her resignation on Thursday, immigration officials in Sheffield were cracking down. They had a suspicious character to investigate and there was to be no rubber-stamping.
He had bent the rules. He had a colourful background. Perhaps he had committed an offence. Should he be allowed to stay or should he be ejected? The man in question was Steve Moxon, one of their own caseworkers. His transgression: to have spoken out about the shambles in Britain’s immigration service that was letting thousands of people into the country with few or no checks.
Moxon had been suspended from his job for leaking damning details to The Sunday Times. Now he was being subjected to an interview under disciplinary procedures. It was a lot more searching than any investigation endured by his immigration applicants: as Moxon had revealed, most of them were being waved through without even the most scant of vetting.
“Rather than managing migration, the government has simply tried to hide the actual figures,” Moxon told The Sunday Times four weeks ago. “In doing so it has actually compounded the mess.”
The government had initially scorned the allegations. First it accused The Sunday Times of making them up. When that did not work, it tried to smear Moxon. He was a maverick with a racist agenda, the spin implied. Any lax controls in the Sheffield office were a local aberration. The system was fine.
The whitewash failed. Other leaks — provided by ordinary citizens outraged by Moxon’s treatment — flooded in. They spoke of mafia rings and crooked lawyers not acted against, sham marriages and bogus students ignored, ministers misleading parliament. The catalogue of corner- cutting went far beyond the little bit of local difficulty claimed by the government.
So for Moxon there was more than one consolation when he faced his grilling last Thursday: not only was Hughes out of a job but the lid had also been blown off the shambles that is Britain’s immigration system.
“They must be jumping up and down with joy,” Moxon said of his colleagues in Sheffield after Hughes resigned. “They just can’t stand her. They are absolutely livid with the way she has treated them.”
This weekend further leaks suggest even more serious fiddling of the system at ministerial level. According to several sources in the immigration service and an internal memo, the Home Office condoned a policy of not pursuing illegal immigrants who were already working in Britain for fear that, if caught, they would simply claim asylum. David Blunkett, the home secretary, has staked his reputation on reducing the number of asylum claims.
It is true, as Blunkett points out, that most migrants are genuine and skilled workers. But it is now clear that thousands of people, including possible terrorists, have been allowed to enter and stay in Britain without proper checks. It is little wonder then that Blunkett, the man with ultimate responsibility for immigration, said Hughes’s resignation marked the “worst personal day” of his career. His own job is now on the line.
IN 1997, the year when Labour came to power, net migration into Britain was a little under 50,000. Within 12 months it had nearly tripled to 140,000. The latest available figures show that 153,000 more people arrived than left the country in 2002 — and that does not include the unknown number of illegal migrants.
This extraordinary surge was a political time bomb that ticked slowly. When William Hague, then the Conservative leader, attempted to make an issue of it in the 2001 election, he was cast as a xenophobe and Labour slapped him down.
If voters were not overly concerned then, 9/11 and the war on terror have changed the context of the debate. Faced with the threat of terrorists crossing into Britain to bomb shopping centres, trains and airports, immigration and the government’s ability to control it has become a key election issue - and Labour’s record is not good.
Blunkett, who became home secretary after the 2001 election, came up with what appeared to be a sensible solution. He decided to get tough on bogus asylum seekers and other “illegals” who created the awkward headlines — but at the same time he aimed to introduce a properly “managed” scheme for economic migrants.
On the surface it appeared to be a neat answer to competing pressures: Tony Blair in No 10 wanted shot of the political embarrassment of asylum seekers, but Gordon Brown in No 11 was happy to have a flow of cheap labour and new skills to keep his economy humming.
In a white paper called Secure Borders, Safe Haven published in February 2002, Blunkett set out both the clampdown on asylum and the encouragement of “managed migration”. Two months later Hughes, an old friend, took charge of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND). All they had to do now was translate policy into action. But it was far more difficult than they had imagined.
Asylum claims appeared to spiral out of control. In February 2003, amid a blitz of headlines, Blair was forced to intervene personally. He promised to halve the number of asylum claims by September and Blunkett was ordered to submit weekly reports to No 10 detailing his progress.
It is not known what Blunkett and Hughes agreed between themselves after Blair’s intervention but asylum claims, which had peaked in October 2002 at about 9,000 a month, began to plummet. Each week thereafter Blunkett triumphantly sent figures to Blair showing a sharp downward trend in asylum claims until the target was met in September.
The Tories and other critics now suggest that the whole process was an elaborate charade cooked up by Blunkett and Hughes. The Tories say that the government simply diverted, inadvertently or otherwise, would-be asylum applicants to so-called “managed migration” schemes where their applications went largely unchecked.
Certainly there is good evidence to show that many applications lodged under Blunkett’s management migration schemes were being processed with minimal scrutiny.
In October 2002 James Cameron, consul at the British embassy in Bucharest, Romania, wrote to an immigration officer at Heathrow complaining about the ease with which people were passing through managed migration schemes. Applicants who claimed they were running businesses “rarely know what is in their business plan, cannot speak English and have absolutely no knowledge or experience in the type of skills needed”.
He cited examples of a man who said he was roof tiler but who had only one leg, an electrician who had lost his fingers and a number of “builders” who knew nothing about bricks and mortar. Yet immigration officials in Britain were letting these applicants through. There was no proper managing of managed migration.
Ministers were warned, too, that lawyers were aiding dubious applicants in return for cash. The scale of the problem was still evident last week when an undercover reporter approached visa advisers in London and Bucharest.
“You provide us with the documents we need and for £1,400 we will draw up a polished business plan and send it to the Home Office,” said Cristina Roman, a Romanian at LBC UK, a London firm offering visa advice. “In less than two weeks we think the visa ban (imposed last week) will be lifted because it’s just politics and will blow over.”
In Bucharest, Silvia Cosma of the Expert Advantage Group said: “Once you are in England it’s easy enough to switch profession from the one we put on your business plan.
“We also know where you can get an impressive English language proficiency certificate for just £10, which is always good to throw in.”
If Blunkett and Hughes and their top officials did not know about these practices two years ago, they should have done. Plenty of evidence was circulating in Whitehall. In October 2002 the British vice-consul in Sofia, Bulgaria, wrote to the IND warning about “well organised migration on a large scale”.
He cited the example of 48 people who had gone on “holiday” to Britain with a company called Delfi Tours; 37 had promptly stayed. They applied for business visas under the European Community Association Agreement (ECAA) which covers a number of countries due to join the European Union this year and in 2007. It was a scam, warned the vice-consul.
The next month Sir John Ramsden, an official at the Foreign Office, wrote to a senior figure at the Home Office on the same issue. After visiting the Sofia embassy, Ramsden reported that there was “an organised scam that completely undermines our entry control procedures — and indeed makes a bit of a nonsense of having a visa regime”.
Applicants were paying lawyers to prepare business plans and paperwork — which officials in Britain were letting through despite the warnings of embassy staff.
Ramsden copied his letter to three other Home Office civil servants and four other officials. A few months later Bob Ainsworth, a minister at the Home Office, wrote directly to Hughes alerting her to the abuse of ECAA immigration applications. He told her that the officials in Britain “invariably” granted applications “despite (the embassy’s) reservations about the individual”.
WHILE failing to tackle the obvious shortcomings of the new system, Hughes and Blunkett were simply throwing money at the problem.
To cope with the numbers of migrants passing Britain’s ports, the IND was expanding at a vertiginous rate, doubling its staff from 5,800 in 1997 to more than 11,500 today.
Moxon was one of those who joined a new centre established in Sheffield. In spring 2003 it began to progress all managed migration cases lodged under the terms of the ECAA, but backlogs persisted everywhere. What happened next can be seen as conspiracy, cock-up or both — none of which reflects favourably on ministers.
With pressure still on Blunkett to reduce the asylum figures, corners and checks started to be cut across the board. In July 2003 two senior officials at the IND in Croydon issued a memo instructing that immigration applications that were more than three months old should be cleared quickly. The applications were to be granted, based on existing information, with no further questions asked. The memo added: “This exercise has been agreed by the minister of state Beverley Hughes.”
In Sheffield managers adopted the system, known as Brace (backlog reduction accelerated clearance exercise), so that ECAA applicants no longer had to provide bank statements to support their business plans. The managers discussed their ideas with the director, general group, of the IND.
Were their short cuts approved from on high? An inquiry into the affair last month concluded that there had been an “element of misunderstanding” and that no senior figures had sanctioned the rubber-stamping. If so, it was another example of shambolic management.
A few months later officials in Sheffield cranked up the pressure by ordering visa checks to be reduced even further. Moxon said: “It meant that you opened the plastic pouch in which the application was held and without any consideration whatsoever the case must be granted.”
Even the IND’s own inquiry later admitted that the new guidelines “went too far”. But when Moxon, aghast at what was happening, tried to raise his concerns he got nowhere.
Like Moxon, Cameron was increasingly appalled at what was going on. Well-preened with a military moustache, Cameron is, according to a friend in Bucharest last week, “a Queen-and-country man with Scottish stubbornness”.
On Sundays he normally attends the service at the Anglican church near the centre of Bucharest before lunching with his wife Angela at the Hilton’s English club. On a working day he would arrive at the white colonial-style villa that houses the embassy at 8.30am sharp. While his wife registered visa applications in one section, Cameron would check them in another. As a former army intelligence officer, he was skilled at spotting forgeries.
It was to no avail. His advice was ignored by officials in Britain. Then on March 1 a new system came into operation which meant that applications could be made straight from Romania and Bulgaria to Britain, bypassing checks at the embassies.
Yet Cameron knew fraud and forgery were endemic among the applications. He knew that Reflex, a secret anti-mafia police unit in Romania, had broken up 48 crime rings profiting from visa scams and people trafficking.
As one Romanian intelligence officer in Reflex said last week: “If you have money to spend in Romania then it is often possible to buy real documents rather than forgeries.”
Others pay lawyers to provide suitable paperwork. In London last week Mitko, a Bulgarian who runs a small restaurant, explained how he had got his brother into Britain late last year. “I went to see a solicitor and he explained that I only need to give him some basic information about my brother and £1,600 and he would do the rest,” he said.
“So I gave him my brother’s name, date of birth and information like that and he prepared everything else. When I came to England in the 1990s it was very difficult, but now it is easy.”
AS the civil servants brooded, it was Moxon who took action first. He rang The Sunday Times and started talking about the malaise at Sheffield. The day after the paper published Moxon’s initial allegations, David Davis, the shadow home secretary, raised them in the House of Commons.
Cameron was not the sort of man to blow the whistle to a newspaper, but he would to parliament. He e-mailed Davis saying that what had been uncovered so far was “only the tip of the iceberg”.
While ministers blustered and backtracked, Davis, a former SAS territorial soldier, played a cunning game, drip-feeding revelations in the Commons to pile on the pressure. Last Monday he sprang the surprise of Cameron’s damning e-mail.
He waited until late in the day at the end of a routine Home Office debate; then the Tories switched the following day’s opposition debate to immigration. Among Home Office civil servants there was panic: they had to prepare new briefs for ministers.
Davis took his revelations to the Westminster television studios and Hughes, surrounded by close aides, had to decide whether to respond. She has always seen attack as the best form of defence and promptly went on Channel 4 News and Newsnight.
She denied any knowledge of the problems with visas that Cameron had raised. Was it a genuine mistake or a cover-up? If Hughes did not recollect any warnings, Ainsworth, the former Home Office minister, did. After seeing Hughes’s denials on television, he contacted her and reminded her of the letter he had written about visa problems in Romania and Bulgaria.
At first Hughes did not perceive the significance — or did not want to — but asked officials to check through the relevant papers. In the Commons the next day she and Blunkett were defiant. She would not resign; he would not let her go. “I want to make something clear,” said Blunkett. “The Sunday Times, the Tory party and anyone else can keep throwing mud, but my right honourable friend is not resigning.”
Later that day Hughes learnt that there was indeed a letter from Ainsworth warning of visa problems, just as Cameron’s e-mail had said. It was her 54th birthday and that evening she, her husband and Blunkett went out for dinner at London restaurant called La Poule au Pot. The conversation revolved around politics, not about many happy returns.
Blunkett tried to make light of the contradiction between Hughes’s interviews and Ainsworth’s letter. “There must be some way round this, Bev,” he said. “Let’s have a look at all the documents in the morning and take it from there.”
Downing Street, thought to have been tipped off by the whips office, wanted sight of the documents too. Blair had backed his minister when the story first broke four weeks ago, but he was taking no chances now. He asked Clare Sumner, his private secretary, to get copies.
As aides prepared Blair for prime minister’s questions on Wednesday morning, they agreed the line on Hughes: Blair would say all the documents would be handed over to the Home Office inquiry already under way. Ominously, however, he did not openly back his minister.
On Wednesday afternoon Blair, Blunkett and Hughes met in the prime minister’s office in the Commons and reviewed the situation. Blunkett thought Hughes could tough it out, say it was a simple mistake, that she had genuinely forgotten about Ainsworth’s letter. “I can’t afford to lose you now,” he told Hughes. But Blair was ruthless. “It looks pretty bad on the face of it,” he told Hughes.
The official Downing Street line is that the three agreed to decide what to do in the morning. In private, others say Blair was already moving towards sacrificing his minister.
When he returned to No 10 he asked his close aides, including Jonathan Powell and Sally Morgan, to study the paperwork. “What do you think?” he asked. They agreed the evidence was damning.
At 8.15am the next day Hughes arrived at No 10 to tender her resignation. She still maintained she had done nothing deliberately wrong.
Even the Tories, who had thought the story had died down, were surprised. Why resign over an honest mistake? Had Blair sacrificed her to stave off electoral damage? Blunkett was shell-shocked and resentful over Blair’s intervention. As he entered the cabinet room on Thursday at 10.30am he was sombre. “He looked very drained, pale and gaunt,” said a colleague. “He’s been a bit of a law unto himself in recent months, but he has been humbled by what’s happened this week.”
Perhaps Blunkett was beginning to realise that he, too, was vulnerable.
TAKING their lead from Blair, Downing street insiders appear now to have finally woken up to the scale of the crisis left behind by Hughes. There was nothing left this weekend to disguise how Moxon’s original leak to The Sunday Times had exposed the immigration sham.
As a leaked e-mail from John Gieve, permanent undersecretary at the Home Office, put it: “The furore of the last few weeks has been very damaging to the reputation of the IND and the Home Office.”
That was hardly new to staff. As one former Home Office minister told The Sunday Times: “The mood in the immigration service is one of depression and keeping your head down. Even senior ranks, people with immense brainpower, are getting overruled.”
Other sources inside the immigration service complained of bullying by superiors. There was an attitude, said one, of “just f****** do it” even if the policies seemed wrong.
Another decision came back to haunt Blair last night as it emerged he had concluded a deal with Adrian Nastase, the Romanian prime minister, to lift visa requirements by this spring for Romanians coming to Britain.
It was reported that Blair had agreed to this as a payback for Romania cutting the large numbers of asylum seekers travelling to Britain.
The change to visa arrangements was agreed publicly, but Downing Street strenuously denies it was any kind of “reward” to Nastase.
Blair is to hold an emergency immigration summit on Tuesday. Ministers will be called to No 10 work out what has gone wrong with the policy and how it can be fixed before the election, expected in May next year.
Downing Street also circulated the idea that Blair was backing rapid introduction of high-tech identity cards to combat terrorism and immigration abuse — a scheme previously delayed for a decade.
Such changes will do nothing to solve the immediate problems. Blunkett not only needs to appear tough on illegal immigration, he needs genuinely to clamp down on it. He must also get a grip on the country’s managed migration schemes, ensuring that all those who apply to enter Britain under them are properly processed and vetted. If backlogs emerge, so be it.
“Blair is going to have to crack heads on Tuesday,” said one source close to Downing Street. “It is not enough for Blunkett simply to generate headlines. Someone must get a grip on the detail.”
If not, say critics, there will need to be more managed migration — of someone into the department who can run it properly.