Lord Hylton – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Hylton on 2016-03-07.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the reply by Lord Bates on 2 March (HL Deb, col 824), what qualifications they consider to be adequate for persons conducting the substantive interviews of asylum applicants, with authority to recommend acceptance or rejection of their claims; and what assessment they have made of whether gap-year and undergraduate students, after five weeks of training, have sufficient maturity and empathy to take such decisions.
Lord Bates
Decision makers working on asylum casework are graded at Executive Officer level except in the suspended Detained Fast Track operation where the predominate grade is Higher Executive Officer due to the requirement on some decision makers to also present appeals. The general entry requirement for direct recruitment to either grade is a minimum of 2 GCE A Level passes A-C and 5 GCSE passes including Mathematics and English. We have also employed staff on temporary contracts but have required them to have a minimum 2:2 Degree, preferably in law.
We recruit high performing students from various universities as asylum decision makers on fixed term appointments and since 2009 have employed 11 law undergraduates of whom 2 are still employed. Applicants send in their CVs, and these are used to inform an initial sift of applications. Successful candidates are then invited to a competency based interview with Home Office staff which tests their maturity and suitability to carry out the role.
At the end of the 5 week training, that all decision makers receive, there is a six month period of mentoring, continued assessment and quality analysis of newly qualified decision maker’s work that identifies whether an individual is performing the role to the required quality standards. Before any individual is signed off their initial probationary period and confirmed in role they must be considered to be performing the role to the previously referenced quality standards.
