English tests scandal "These people have been put through years of misery'

There was one crucial statistic in the cheating allegations that the Home Office levelled against more than 35,000 overseas students that instantly alerted the Labour MP Stephen Timms to the likely existence of a huge miscarriage of justice.

- Amelia Gentleman

There was one crucial statistic in the cheating allegations that the Home Office levelled against more than 35,000 overseas students that instantly alerted the Labour MP Stephen Timms to the likely existence 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 said, in an interview this week in his Westminster office.

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, in order to get admission to the university; many had studied in English in schools and colleges before leaving their home countries.

"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 calls the biggest miscarriage of justice he has encountered in three decades as an east London MP. Although he is measured as he talks about what went wrong, he says he finds the subject "very, very, distressing".