Blake Stephenson is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Mid-Bedfordshire. He is the Shadow Treasury PPS and has worked in the City.
Walk around any city in the non-English speaking world and, before long, you will find adverts for English tutoring and testing. Industry leaders, including IELTS, PTE, TOEFL and others, jostle for attention. These are high-stakes qualifications that act as gateways to employment, education and migration to Britain.
This multi-billion-dollar industry, which underpins some of the most dynamic parts of the UK economy, faces a serious threat: Industry experts have raised serious concerns that remote testing systems can be manipulated by fraudsters and organised criminal networks.
The Government is right to insist that those who come to live and work in Britain should speak English. A shared language is essential for integration and social cohesion. Public support for immigration rests in part on confidence that such basic standards are both set and enforced.
The Home Secretary has been clear about the need to raise language requirements, declaring that “it is unacceptable for migrants to come here without learning our language, unable to contribute to our national life.”.
That is precisely why the Home Office’s latest plans for English language testing are so troubling. So troubling in fact, that senior Home Office civil servants were called by the Public Accounts Committee last week to provide assurances on procurement and value for money. And the answers given – in private – were far from reassuring.
Under proposals being taken forward, the Home Office intends to replace supervised English language exams for visa applicants with a new “fully remote” test without in‑person invigilation. This change, which sits at the heart of a procurement reportedly worth £816 million, risks undermining the integrity of one of the most important controls in the immigration system.
The Home Office’s insistence on fully remote testing exposes the immigration system to new vulnerabilities. Would-be migrants will be allowed to sit these life-changing tests in unsupervised locations of their choosing, rather than under direct invigilation having passed digital and human security checks.
It is telling that Ofqual, the UK’s exams regulator, does not allow teenagers to sit GCSEs from their bedrooms. We don’t even allow driving theory tests to be taken from home. Yet the Home Office is proposing to accept a lower bar for a test that directly affects how we control our borders, and which will be taken by people around the world who we know nothing about.
Wherever there is a test – especially when the stakes are high – there will be incentives to cheat. But industry experts tell me that the opportunity to do so in remote testing is many times higher. By removing human supervision, rather than augmenting human oversight with digital technologies, the Home Office is gambling with national security.
The world’s leading professional accounting body, the ACCA, has stopped remote testing to combat cheating. In the US, the Law School Admission Council has announced it will stop accepting remote LSAT tests, citing security and AI-enabled cheating concerns. Australian and Canadian immigration authorities have rejected fully remote online English tests. With much stronger borders than our own, we should frankly be listening to our allies rather than pretending we know best.
Perhaps most worrying of all, a leading provider of secure English language testing has decided to withdraw altogether from the Home Office’s tender process, citing serious concerns about the security shortcomings of at-home testing for high-stakes purposes.
These warnings should not be dismissed lightly.
Why, then, is the UK Government pursuing this? Ministers have argued in answers to Parliamentary Questions I have asked that they expect the new test to deliver a “net positive benefit to the public purse”. Alarmingly this sounds like the government trading the security of our visa system to raise cash for the Home Office. More alarmingly perhaps, the Ministerial response was news to the officials we questioned during the Public Accounts Committee session last week.
In any event, apparent efficiencies will surely be short‑lived. Once organised fraud – which will thrive under new remote testing – exposes the system’s vulnerabilities, the costs of enforcement, reform and reputational damage will far exceed any short-term financial savings.
And the political consequences may be even more serious. Public confidence in immigration enforcement is fragile. The Government has repeatedly promised to “smash the gangs” that exploit weaknesses in border controls. It is difficult to square that promise with a policy that will open new opportunities for organised gangs to exploit entry routes into the UK.
The contradiction is stark: tougher rhetoric on immigration on the one hand, and an easier system to manipulate on the other.
This is a total mess, and there are very legitimate questions about why the government is pursuing this, and the role played by Peter Mandelson’s firm, Global Counsel, in lobbying the Home Office on behalf of one of the interested commercial parties, Duolingo.
We have seen that Peter Mandelson gets exactly what he wants from this government, and it seems this could be yet another example. We should all be very concerned about whether political access and money have been prioritised by the Prime Minister and Home Secretary over national security.
English language testing is one of the many tools the Home Office must deploy to ensure our immigration processes are robust. My recent report, Backdoors to Britain, makes an emphatic recommendation: that the UK Government should not move to remote and digital-by-default English language testing for visas.
Blake Stephenson is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Mid-Bedfordshire. He is the Shadow Treasury PPS and has worked in the City.
Walk around any city in the non-English speaking world and, before long, you will find adverts for English tutoring and testing. Industry leaders, including IELTS, PTE, TOEFL and others, jostle for attention. These are high-stakes qualifications that act as gateways to employment, education and migration to Britain.
This multi-billion-dollar industry, which underpins some of the most dynamic parts of the UK economy, faces a serious threat: Industry experts have raised serious concerns that remote testing systems can be manipulated by fraudsters and organised criminal networks.
The Government is right to insist that those who come to live and work in Britain should speak English. A shared language is essential for integration and social cohesion. Public support for immigration rests in part on confidence that such basic standards are both set and enforced.
The Home Secretary has been clear about the need to raise language requirements, declaring that “it is unacceptable for migrants to come here without learning our language, unable to contribute to our national life.”.
That is precisely why the Home Office’s latest plans for English language testing are so troubling. So troubling in fact, that senior Home Office civil servants were called by the Public Accounts Committee last week to provide assurances on procurement and value for money. And the answers given – in private – were far from reassuring.
Under proposals being taken forward, the Home Office intends to replace supervised English language exams for visa applicants with a new “fully remote” test without in‑person invigilation. This change, which sits at the heart of a procurement reportedly worth £816 million, risks undermining the integrity of one of the most important controls in the immigration system.
The Home Office’s insistence on fully remote testing exposes the immigration system to new vulnerabilities. Would-be migrants will be allowed to sit these life-changing tests in unsupervised locations of their choosing, rather than under direct invigilation having passed digital and human security checks.
It is telling that Ofqual, the UK’s exams regulator, does not allow teenagers to sit GCSEs from their bedrooms. We don’t even allow driving theory tests to be taken from home. Yet the Home Office is proposing to accept a lower bar for a test that directly affects how we control our borders, and which will be taken by people around the world who we know nothing about.
Wherever there is a test – especially when the stakes are high – there will be incentives to cheat. But industry experts tell me that the opportunity to do so in remote testing is many times higher. By removing human supervision, rather than augmenting human oversight with digital technologies, the Home Office is gambling with national security.
The world’s leading professional accounting body, the ACCA, has stopped remote testing to combat cheating. In the US, the Law School Admission Council has announced it will stop accepting remote LSAT tests, citing security and AI-enabled cheating concerns. Australian and Canadian immigration authorities have rejected fully remote online English tests. With much stronger borders than our own, we should frankly be listening to our allies rather than pretending we know best.
Perhaps most worrying of all, a leading provider of secure English language testing has decided to withdraw altogether from the Home Office’s tender process, citing serious concerns about the security shortcomings of at-home testing for high-stakes purposes.
These warnings should not be dismissed lightly.
Why, then, is the UK Government pursuing this? Ministers have argued in answers to Parliamentary Questions I have asked that they expect the new test to deliver a “net positive benefit to the public purse”. Alarmingly this sounds like the government trading the security of our visa system to raise cash for the Home Office. More alarmingly perhaps, the Ministerial response was news to the officials we questioned during the Public Accounts Committee session last week.
In any event, apparent efficiencies will surely be short‑lived. Once organised fraud – which will thrive under new remote testing – exposes the system’s vulnerabilities, the costs of enforcement, reform and reputational damage will far exceed any short-term financial savings.
And the political consequences may be even more serious. Public confidence in immigration enforcement is fragile. The Government has repeatedly promised to “smash the gangs” that exploit weaknesses in border controls. It is difficult to square that promise with a policy that will open new opportunities for organised gangs to exploit entry routes into the UK.
The contradiction is stark: tougher rhetoric on immigration on the one hand, and an easier system to manipulate on the other.
This is a total mess, and there are very legitimate questions about why the government is pursuing this, and the role played by Peter Mandelson’s firm, Global Counsel, in lobbying the Home Office on behalf of one of the interested commercial parties, Duolingo.
We have seen that Peter Mandelson gets exactly what he wants from this government, and it seems this could be yet another example. We should all be very concerned about whether political access and money have been prioritised by the Prime Minister and Home Secretary over national security.
English language testing is one of the many tools the Home Office must deploy to ensure our immigration processes are robust. My recent report, Backdoors to Britain, makes an emphatic recommendation: that the UK Government should not move to remote and digital-by-default English language testing for visas.