THE Government has failed in its bid to get a tribunal judge to overturn a decision to allow a man who it accused of twice cheating on English speaking tests to remain in the United Kingdom.

The Upper Tribunal was told how the Home Office claimed Pakistani national Muhammad Imran Khan, 40, used a ‘proxy’ to take the tests at Burnley Training College in October 2011 and November 2011.

As a result of that accusation former Home Secretary Amber Rudd refused to grant him leave to remain as the spouse of a British national. That was on the grounds that his ‘presence in the UK was not conducive to the public good because his conduct, character, associations or other reasons made it undesirable’.

But Khan successfully appealed against that decision under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights on the grounds that Mrs Rudd had not successfully made her case.

The tribunal heard that the educational testing service had kept a record of Mr Khan’s Test of English for International Communication and used voice verification software to detect that a single person was undertaking multiple tests.

The service confirmed to Mrs Rudd that there was sufficient evidence to conclude that Mr Khan’s certificates from 2011 were fraudulently obtained by the use of a proxy test-taker and they were therefore cancelled.

In a statement to a First Tier Tribunal in August 2017 Mr Khan said that he failed the test twice and he had only passed it on his third attempt. On his third attempt he had obtained 170 marks, and he had thereby been able to obtain a student visa. He took the exam for the third time at a different location

Mr Khan said the Home Office had not objected to his “third test results” or to other results which he had obtained when taking English language tests.

The conclusion of that hearing was that a judge accepted Mr Khan’s claims that he had genuinely sat the tests himself in 2011 and failed them both, and that he sat the test for the third time and passed.

The Government had appealed against that decision on the grounds that there had been an error of law.

But that was rejected by Deputy Upper Tribunal Judge Monson.

Judge Monson added: “The fact that the claimant did not rely on the two “failed” tests in support of his application for further leave to remain as a student would not, in itself, negate the proposition that he had used a proxy test-taker on the first two occasions. Similarly, the fact that the first two tests did not yield a high enough result for the claimant’s purposes does not necessarily entail that he did not use a proxy test-taker.”