Wednesday, December 17, 2014 The backlog of people in Britain who have overstayed their visa and whose whereabouts are unknown has swelled to more than 300,000 after the discovery of piles of unopened boxes left for years in basements and meeting rooms in Home Office buildings in Sheffield. John Vine, the chief inspector of borders and immigration, revealed the existence of a further 223,600 records of foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas, all dated before December 2008, in a report published on Wednesday. The report said that, despite considerable efforts by the Home Office and its contractor Capita, the size of the post-2008 backlog of cases of overstayers against whom no action has been taken had remained almost static at 173,562. Vine added that, of the 120,000 cases sent to Capita for them to contact, fewer than 1% had left the country as a result of their intervention. Wednesday’s figures follow the release last week of Vine’s report on citizenship, which showed that even killers had been given British passports because of lax Home Office character checks. Vine is leaving the chief inspector’s job at the end of this year, seven months early, after a row with Theresa May, the home secretary, over delays in her decisions to publish his reports. He has secured assurance from her that in future she will aim to publish them within eight weeks. He said had been proved right that May’s decision to take control of publication might mean his reports were not published promptly, reducing their impact. In a damning conclusion to his final annual report, Vine, a former Strathclyde chief constable, said he still found too much evidence that the Home Office did “not get the basics right” on immigration and asylum. He said improvements in passport checks at airports had sometimes been at the expense of customs activity and that there needed to be more effective identification and removal of those who had no right to remain in Britain. “There is an ongoing need for the Home Office to maintain a management grip of the quality, consistency and fairness of its work,” he said. In his report on overstayers, Vine said it was only at the start of his inspection that he had been told of the pre-2009 backlog of 223,600 records which had not been previously included in the total known as the migrant refusal pool (MRP). “The number of additional pre-December 2008 MRP records that the Home Office provided means that the total MRP figure has almost doubled, although this information had not been reported to parliament at the time of our inspection,” Vine said. He said Capita had identified 45,900 records of people who had left the country or were duplicate files amongst the 223,600. Further “data cleansing” reduced the size of the hidden backlog to 168,300 by January 2014. The Home Office claimed on Wednesday that it was down to 89,000 cases of people for whom no trace can be found in the UK. However, the Home Office is believed to accept that there is currently an estimated 300,000 overstayers in Britain whose whereabouts are not known. This combines the size of the backlog of pre-2009 cases with the more recent backlog of those who have overstayed their visas whom Capita was given the task of trying to contact. Vine also reported a dismal record in tackling the declared backlog of 170,000 overstay cases that have accumulated since 2008 without action being taken. Capita was able to identify duplicates and close records for 22% of migrants who were found to have already left the country. He said that, while the decision to outsource the work had produced the benefits that the Home Office claimed would result, there had also been significant inaccuracies in the classification of records. He found that 16 cases from a sample of 57 were wrongly counted as having left the country. “Any failure to take action against foreign nationals who overstay their permission to be in the UK has the potential to undermine public confidence in immigration control,” Vine said. “Considerable improvements in the Home Office’s capability to monitor, progress and prioritise the immigration enforcement caseload will be needed to deliver its strategy for reducing the level of irregular migration.” James Brokenshire, the immigration minister, said the government had inherited an immigration system in complete disarray, which had turned a blind eye to hundreds of thousands of people with no right to be in the country, and made no attempt to remove them or even to properly identify the scale of the problem. “Under the UK Border Agency, there was no systematic plan to deal with illegal migrants other than failed asylum seekers and foreign criminals. We scrapped the failing UK Border Agency and brought its work back under the control of ministers partly in order to sort out that mess,” he said. “New powers in the Immigration Act are restricting access to work, housing, benefits, healthcare, bank accounts and driving licences of illegal migrants, making it far tougher for those with no right to be in the country to stay here.”
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 07:09:26 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015