There was one crucial statistic in the cheating allegations that the Home Office levelled against more than 35,000 overseas students that instantly alerted Labour MP Stephen Timms to the likely presence of a huge miscarriage of justice.
A dossier of evidence revealed that 97% of all international students who took a Home Office-approved English language test between 2011 and 2014 were suspected of cheating.
“The figure of 97% seemed absurd. It was completely implausible. When I saw that the Home Office was saying that virtually everybody had either definitely or probably cheated, it crystallised my understanding that something had gone very badly wrong,” Timms says, in an interview this week in his Westminster office, overlooking the Thames and the London Eye.
He was amazed that no one within the department had questioned whether it could really be true that 97% of the 58,000 students who sat a government-approved test, advertised on the Home Office website, could all have cheated. Almost all of them would have sat and passed an English language test previously to get admission to the university; many had studied in English medium schools and colleges before leaving their home countries and had good English.
“Surely somebody in the Home Office seeing that should have said: ‘Hang on that can’t be right, that over 97% are cheats.’ So you have to conclude there must be people in the department who just think: ‘Well, they’re foreign, therefore they cheat.’ And I think that’s part of what went wrong here.”
For the past eight years, Timms has been trying to persuade the Home Office to take responsibility for what he describes as the biggest miscarriage of justice he has encountered in three decades as an east London MP. Although he is calm and measured as he talks about what went wrong, he admits to finding the subject “very, very distressing”.
The Home Office revoked about 35,000 student visas in response to a BBC investigation that revealed widespread cheating in English language tests run by Educational Testing Service (ETS), one of four official providers of a mandatory test required for visa renewals.
There was initially no mechanism for students to appeal against the accusation. At least 2,500 were deported and more than 7,200 left the country voluntarily after being told they faced arrest and detention if they stayed. Thousands have spent years fighting the accusations in court, and over 3,700 have won against the Home Office.
Timms does not contest that there were criminal groups accepting payments and ensuring candidates passed the test; at least 21 people received prison sentences for helping students cheat. But he believes that rather than 97% of students being involved a more likely figure is between “maybe 10% and 15%. It’s only a hunch.”
He is optimistic that eventually the government will be forced to acknowledge that it made a huge mistake. Two Home Office ministers have admitted to him privately that they know something went wrong, but the department has failed to take steps to allow students to challenge the allegations against them without having to enter into prohibitively expensive legal proceedings.
The logical step initially would have been to allow all the students to retake the tests, rather than instantly revoking visas. Now he wants officials to help those people who were expelled from their colleges to be allowed to return to study.
“At the moment the Home Office is still in full denial, but once the truth is fully understood I find it difficult to see how applications for compensation can be avoided. And given the scale of the number of people involved, we could be talking about hundreds of millions. There’s an inevitability about it. These people have unjustly been put through years of misery.”
A decade after the Home Office first made a blanket accusation of deception against tens of thousands of students who had travelled to the UK seeking a British university education, Timms is perplexed by how few people understand the huge scale of what went wrong. “It’s an absolute tragedy,” he says.
He notes that there has been none of the public expression of dismay that the Post Office scandal provoked, despite close parallels between the two issues: large numbers of innocent people accused of deception on apparently flawed evidence. “I think there’s a lack of empathy for people from different backgrounds and cultures. There isn’t a sense of identification with the hardships that they’ve endured,” he says.
He has a dossier of 46 students he has tried to help challenge mistaken accusations of cheating, with mixed results. Even in bare skeleton summary form, the cases make upsetting reading. Some students have been deported and subsequently let Timms’ office know that they are still fighting to clear their names from abroad. Some describe racking up over £30,000 of debt in wasted tuition fees and legal fees. Some describe finding basic errors in the evidence presented against them by ETS – mistaken names, nationalities, errors in the dates when and location where they are meant to have taken the test.
Despite having been stabbed several times in the abdomen during a constituency surgery in 2010, Timms has continued to hold appointments every Friday afternoon in East Ham (with security just slightly improved by the addition of a bigger desk separating him and his visitors). In late 2015, he began getting visits from panicking students, mostly from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The students were both puzzled and horrified to have been accused of cheating.
“It didn’t make sense. They clearly spoke English well enough to study in the UK,” he said.
“They felt their world was at an end. They had pinned their own hopes and their family’s hopes entirely on securing a degree in the UK. But then there was an allegation of cheating, the money spent on fees was gone and they had no qualification. None of these students got any of their fees reimbursed.”
One student from Bangladesh told Timms that his parents had put their entire life savings into his UK college fees. “Then he got a conviction from the British government for cheating. He said he couldn’t bear the shame of going home to face his family, having inflicted this absolutely shameful humiliation on them.”
He is very critical of ETS for its mismanagement of the tests and blames Theresa May’s Home Office, which was working to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands and which introduced a series of hostile environment policies at the time that students were being accused of cheating. Her department maintained an attitude of scepticism towards students’ protestation of innocence, he says.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The 2014 investigation into the abuse of English language testing revealed systemic cheating which was indicative of significant organised fraud. Courts have consistently found the evidence was sufficient to take the action we did. We completely refute any allegations of racism, decisions were taken solely on the basis of the evidence provided to the department.”
ETS said that at the time of the allegations its UK operations were contracted out to a subsidiary organisation ETS Global BV. That office was subsequently closed. The Home Office was paid a £1.6m settlement by ETS Global BV in 2018.
Timms remains struck by the intensity of the betrayal the students felt. “These are young people who entrusted their future to Britain and, in reality, Britain has proved utterly untrustworthy and has wrecked their lives. All of them have had the start of their careers blighted for years. And many of them will never ever fully recover from what happened, some have permanent mental health problems. We treated them appallingly.”