01 April 2004

Beverley Hughes resigns over immigration 'scam'

Immigration Minister Beverley Hughes has resigned over allegations that her department had allowed a "scam" to continue for 18 months over the handling of migration applications from Romania and Bulgaria.

Ms Hughes departed this morning after telling the Prime Minister that she considered some of her responses on the issue to be "inconsistent". At a lunchtime Downing Street press conference, Tony Blair paid tribute to Ms Hughes's "integrity" and "courage" in offering her resignation.

Previously, the minister had been offered reassurance by No 10 that she "absolutely" enjoyed the support of the Prime Minister. She had also received the backing of, and recently a warm embrace from, Home Secretary David Blunkett during a tense debate in the Commons yesterday.

Ms Hughes had previously told the House that she had no intention of resigning and had not acted dishonestly and was not complicit in the processing of bogus migration applications. But clearly, the minister was subsequently convinced that her position had become untenable.

The Government will be hopeful that today's resignation is the final chapter of a row in which leaves the immigration service accused of granting migration status to unsuitable applicants from Romania and Bulgaria, filed under the European Communities Association Agreement system (ECAA). Tony Blair will be hopeful that Ken Sutton's probe into the issue will provide the epilogue to an uncomfortable episode for the government. Opposition parties are already switching their focus toward the role Home Secretary David Blunkett played in the affair.

The ECAA system is designed to allow entrepreneurs from outside the EU to migrate to the UK to set up their businesses. However, according to emails sent to the Conservatives by a British consul based in Bucharest, some obviously fraudulent applications were being accepted by the immigration service.

The diplomat behind the emails, James Cameron, has been suspended from his post, and all migration applications from Romania and Bulgaria have been suspended while an investigated is launched.

Allegations and criticisms of policy contained in the Cameron emails were drip fed from Conservative Central Office all this week, so maintaining political pressure on the minister inside the Westminster village, and concentrating the minds of headline writers in the national press.

Ms Hughes is the first minister to leave the Blair cabinet since the departures of Robin Cook and Clare Short, who both quit in protest at the Iraq war last year. Tony Blair has now been presented with an opportunity for a frontbench reshuffle – and he may wish to make wider changes, to put the right team in place to argue the government's position as the parties slip into election mode.

(gmcg)