“Summary of findings You claimed to have addressed our concerns in our meeting on5 August 2010 and provided evidence to support this. However, having visited your premises it is clear that whilst processes exist at the college they are not robust and you continue to pose a serious threat to immigration control. By failing to verify the current immigration status of your students you have contributed to students remaining in the UK beyond their permission to do so. By allowing agents to sub-contract work you have reduced the effectiveness of any agreements in place and you cannot be confident that these sub-contracted agents are undertaking the checks needed on student qualifications, English or intention to study. An additional area of concern identified during your visit is that you are not monitoring students on work placement. You therefore cannot be confident students are adhering to the conditions of their leave, nor can you accurately calculate their attendance levels. I note the current list of attending students as provided to us on5 August 2010 puts attendance between 80.7% and 100% - since you do not know whether students attend their placements and do not monitor their attendance during this work experience, the figures quoted are not an accurate reflection of overall course attendance. This has added an additional concern about your ability to operate as an effective sponsor and identified another area where you currently pose a threat to immigration control. Your verbal and written representations did not address all previous reasons for revocation. In particular you failed to provide an adequate explanation for the high rate of visa refusals. Whilst it is accepted, from the evidence provided, that 400 entry clearance refusals appear to have been subject to administrative review, you have not accounted for the large number of refusals in total. Your explanation of students re-applying for visas rather than seeking administrative review is not supported by any evidence. You stated that agents and students preferred to re-apply because it was quicker. There is no evidence to suggest this is the case and it seems unlikely that a student who was, as you claim, wrongly refused would pay a large fee for a new visa when this avenue was open to them. Given the visiting officers’ findings about your agent use, coupled with the high refusal rate it seems more likely that many of the refusals were a direct result of the student not meeting the requirements for entry clearance. This supports our previously mentioned concern that you were not correctly identifying students with a genuine ability and intention to study.”
“As explained previously, UKBA’s position is that a 35% refusal rate for students is not acceptable for any college. Entry clearance is based on a student’s ability to meet the requirements of the Immigration Rules based on their ability to obtain a minimum number of points under the PBS scheme. If students have been refused entry clearance it is because they have failed to achieve the points necessary and it is therefore reasonable to link this to the college failing to recruit students who are able and intend to follow a course of study, a requirement under paragraph 282 of the sponsor guidance.”
“The court recalls that the notion of “possessions” (in French: biens) in Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 has an autonomous meaning which is certainly not limited to ownership of physical goods: certain other rights and interests constituting assets can be regarded as “property rights” and thus as “possessions” for the purposes of the Convention.” 47. The touchstone here is whether the rights and assets can be regarded as constituting “assets”. 48. The Strasbourg Jurisprudence establishes that the mere fact that rights are contractual does not disqualify them from counting as property or possessions…..but the converse: is that all contractual rights are property or possessions, does not follow.”