Friday, November 04, 2011
The UK Border Agency now has to suspend not staff but its OWN BOSSES! And it STILL dumps hundreds of thousands of cases in a skip; and STILL has a 'no checks' policy.
The (sub-)Ministry of You-Couldn't-Make-it-Up strikes yet again. Yes, the UK Border Agency – the bit of the Home Office that so totally embarrassed the rest of it (and that is some feat) that they had to tow it out into the English Channel, sink, and re-name it (again) … it's STILL, even now, taking the files of hundreds of thousands of immigration cases they've lost all track of and dumping them in a skip.
I love the name of the skip: the 'controlled archive'.
[Hilarious euphemism has long been the main work officials perform there. The 'no checks' application dumping regime was – and so far as I know still is – called the Backlog Reduction Accelerated Clearance Exercise, and therefore enjoys the seemingly robust acronym of BRACE.]
We now await a journalist to find the skips in which the un-shredded documents have been relocated in such carefully controlled fashion.
AND .…. oh yes, get this: this same numptiedom, that used to be called the Immigration & Nationality Directorate (because from way back it had form embarrassing the Gnome Office) … it's STILL suspending people.
But wait, everything stays the same and everything changes: they're now suspending the UK Border Agency BOSSES … for ordering staff to tear up immigration law and simply not do any checks!
Wow!
Now, if you recall, in my day they suspended (not to mention fired) the junior STAFF for pointing out that the bosses were tearing up immigration law and forcing staff to not do any checks.
Hang on though: this is not for telling staff to forget hundreds of thousands of 'lost' cases: this is for telling staff not to check people at airports, so as to cut down queues. An additional and quite separate crazy business. So they HAVEN'T suspended anybody for the ever-ongoing mass case-dumping nonsense; despite this having been going on for about a decade now.
So nothing changes after all.
The Home Office's immigration sub-department remains the complete and utter joke it has always been. Unless you've worked there you can have no idea just how – and to use again the words of former Home Secretary John Reid – dysfunctional and not-fit-for-purpose an organisation could actually get to be. I still even now have difficulty in believing it really could be that bad. But it truly is. Nothing this bad exists in theory, but exist in practice it very much does.
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 11:21 pm 
