Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Official: UK Borders Agency is the basket case to end all basket cases
The Home Affairs Select Committee chairman, Keith Vaz, sounds more like me as every month passes. Published today is yet another report into the UK Borders Agency so damning it is hard to conceive of how it could be more so. And at last the Committee is calling on the Home Office Permanent Secretary, Helen Ghosh, to account; pointing out that agency status does not mean that the UKBA is separately accounted from the Home Office. Specifically they ask: how is she going to clean up the statistics? Statistics? How about any sort of even vaguely honest answer to any question asked about the UKBA?
Just as I have been repeatedly pointing out for years, the committee states that the UKBA is failing even in the most "basic" responsibilities, has a "bunker mentality", and deliberately gives out "misleading" data even to the Government.
Vaz: "UKBA appears unable to focus on its key task of tracking and removing illegal immigrants, overstayers or bogus students."
We learn that the 'controlled archive' – that's the lovely euphemism for the skip outside the Home Office where all the files of migrants who can't be found are dumped – is actually still growing, and is now bigger than when it was first identified (in November 2011). And, of course, the backlog owned up to back in 2006 was bigger even than the 450,000 at the time revealed.
Now get this: the agency is explicitly criticised for "refusing to recognise" the very notion of the bogus college! It still makes its visits pre-announced!
I was regularly commenting in detail on the blind eye to the enormous wholesale abuse of the student visas 'system' eight years ago, shortly after I 'whistle-blew' from the Managed Migration arm of the Home Office, where I had tried in vain to find anybody tackling the issue.
We also now hear that even the 2014 (December 2014) schedule for the introduction of e-borders cannot possibly be met. But 2014 was in any case a ridiculously long time to wait for this. Is it ever going to happen?!
And then there is the headline-catching issue of the ex-prisoners still awaiting deportation several years on. It is symbolic of the total disdain of the Home Office for the law let alone for public opinion that it does not even bother to tackle the most obvious sources of egg on its face.
As ever, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the Home Office has no political will ever to get to grips with immigration in any way whatsoever. It is, after all, the 'political-correctness' (the political-Left 'hate the masses' backlash) heart of UK government. So why would it?
The Home Office will carry on being lame even in news management, increasingly not bothering even to cover its back that the whole immigration system in all its aspects is nothing more than window dressing.
