Migrants backlog ‘spiralling out of control’

[dutchman]

The UK Border Agency is struggling to deal with a backlog of a third of a million migrants that is growing at an “alarming” rate, a committee of MPs has found.



The backlog, which includes migrants who cannot be traced and former offenders, is “spiralling out of control” as it rose by 25,000 in three months, the home affairs committee said in a report published on Friday.

The committee said it doubted whether the agency was adequately equipped to deal with an increase in new asylum applications and was concerned about the quality of the agency’s decisions on who was allowed to stay in the country.

“There are now about the same number of cases awaiting resolution by the UKBA as there are people in Iceland,” said Keith Vaz MP, the committee’s chairman.

“Entering the world of the UKBA is like falling through the looking glass. The closer we look, the more backlogs we find, their existence obscured by opaque names such as the ‘migration refusal pool’ and the ‘controlled archive’.”

Mr Vaz said no senior staff at the agency should be paid bonuses until performance had improved, criticising bonuses paid to five senior staff last year.

In the UK, 174,000 migrants who have been refused permission to remain cannot be traced. Almost 4,000 former offenders who should have been deported at the end of their sentence remain in the country, 63 per cent of whom were released more than two years ago.

The report warns that a “significant” number of people could be granted “effective amnesty” in the UK without the agency considering the merits of their case, as the agency tries to assess another pool of about 190,000 migrants and asylum seekers by the end of the year.

The committee said it could not see how the 149 agency employees charged with assessing the remaining 90,000 cases within three months would be able to do so when only 29,000 were checked in the previous year.

The MPs also called on the government to exclude student visas from its net migration target, saying it was unclear how it would otherwise reach the target without drastically reducing the number of student visas issued.

The report criticised the border agency for not knowing how many students from London Metropolitan University did not have leave to remain in the UK, after the institution was stripped of its right to sign off on visas for foreign students in summer.

“It is important that prompt action is taken both to help genuine students and to identify and remove bogus students before they are able to melt away into the woodwork and add to the agency’s extensive backlog,” the report said.

Mark Harper, immigration minister, said the report raised some “legitimate concerns”. But he said the Home Office was taking “robust action” and that it was getting harder to live illegally in the UK.