Chief Inspector publishes 'An Inspection of How the Home Office Tackles Illegal Working' and 'An Inspection of Removals'
David Bolt, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, yesterday released two new inspection reports.
Image credit: UK GovernmentThe 54-page An Inspection of How the Home Office Tackles Illegal Working can be read here (and the Home Office response to the report is here).
The 52-page An Inspection of Removals is here, with the Home Office response here.
For An Inspection of Removals, the Chief Inspector examined the efficiency and effectiveness with which the Home Office removed or encouraged the voluntary departure of individuals and families who had no legal right to remain in the UK.
The inspection included in its scope refused asylum-seekers, and those who had remained beyond a period of limited leave or had breached the conditions of limited leave, but it did not consider deportation.
The report summed up its overall findings as: "Enforced removals are difficult and costly, and the Home Office's efforts to encourage and support voluntary departures made good business sense. These efforts appeared to be increasingly effective in terms of numbers departing. Efforts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of enforced removals had been less successful, in part because of a failure of internal communication and co-ordination so that different business areas had different views on what worked and, as a result, different priorities."
"Notwithstanding these differences, some risks to a more efficient and effective removals process had not been managed, for example not resolving the casework barriers to removal in failed asylum cases in a timely manner and not systematically pursuing absconders. Some factors were not within the Home Office's control, such as last-minute further submissions, which disrupted planned removals including Ensured Returns of failed asylum families. While efforts were being made through the Family Returns Process, for example, to encourage reasons for non-removal to be raised at an earlier stage, in practice, families and individuals notified that they were about to be removed were unlikely to see it as in their interest to do so."
For the report An Inspection of How the Home Office Tackles Illegal Working, the Chief Inspector examined the efficiency and effectiveness of Home Office actions against illegal working, including action to locate and detain immigration offenders working illegally, and action to encourage employers to comply with their obligations to check an employees' immigration status and, where appropriate, to penalise non-compliance.
According to the Chief Inspector, there are no reliable estimates for the numbers of migrants working illegally in the UK.
The report notes that since 2014 there has been a "shift from a strategy of locating, arresting and seeking the enforced removal of illegal workers towards one that sought greater engagement with businesses to encourage employers to comply with measures to curb illegal working (as exemplified by Operation Skybreaker)," and the report says this approach "was consistent with the Home Office's wider encouragement of voluntary departures as a less expensive and less resource-intensive means of achieving volume removals."
The Chief Inspector notes: "The comparative effectiveness of this 'new' approach was hard to assess. However, the Home Office's interim evaluation of an operation in the areas with the highest known numbers of illegal workers indicated that it had increased voluntary departures."
The inspection confirmed the need for improvements and the report makes eight recommendations with an emphasis on operational training, supervision and assurance.
The Guardian covered the reports here, highlighting how the report on removals found the 'Home Office loses track of more than 10,000 asylum seekers' for its headline. The Telegraph went with the same for its article 'Immigration officers give up hunting 10,000 missing asylum seekers' here.