Ministers were poised five years ago to offer a route to a reprieve for thousands of international students who may have been wrongly accused of cheating, but the plan was derailed by a government reshuffle, the Guardian has learned.
The former home secretary Sajid Javid had asked officials to devise a system whereby students who believed their visas had been cancelled in error as a result of unfair cheating allegations could request a one-stop internal review of their case, sources have revealed.
Officials had hammered out a possible solution for those who had been wrongly caught up in the Home Office’s decision to issue a blanket visa cancellation to 35,000 students. However, they were left waiting for Downing Street approval in July 2019, when Theresa May was replaced by Boris Johnson as prime minister. Javid was replaced by Priti Patel as home secretary, and the proposals were mothballed.
Details of how tantalisingly close the government came to resolving this simmering immigration scandal emerged as students continue trying to clear their names, a decade after tens of thousands were thrown off their courses.
In 2014 a BBC documentary revealed widespread cheating at test centres offering the language tests that international students were required to take to renew their visas. As a result of these allegations the Home Office revoked the visas of about 35,000 students and told them they were ineligible to continue studying in the UK, meaning that they had wasted thousands of pounds on fees; 2,500 students were deported and 7,200 left the country after being warned that they faced arrest and detention if they stayed.
Many have spent the last decade trying to get immigration courts to review the Home Office’s cancellation of their visas so they can return to their studies in the UK. The process is very expensive and time-consuming, but at least 3,700 have won appeals.
In 2019, the department’s then permanent secretary, Philip Rutnam, told MPs that officials were aware there were people who “may have been treated harshly in this whole process”, adding that the existence of individuals “who continue to protest their innocence is a subject of real concern to us”.
In a written statement on 23 July 2019 Javid told MPs that he was aware some students had been unfairly accused.
