The scene: the entrance to the Home Office.

Home Secretary enters stage left, shows security pass to guard at the desk and walks past him, muttering, “Where’s the illegal immigrant?”

Audience responds, “Behind you!” because yes indeed, the person checking security passes at the front desk of the Home Office is an illegal immigrant.

I think the boffins here at Home Office Watch have worked out the Home Office’s new PR strategy. It’s to make mistakes that are so absurdly over the top that no-one will believe the stories are true.

After all, it would be pretty amazing wouldn’t it if it turned out the Home Office had cleared illegal immigrants work as security staff wouldn’t it? Particularly if some of them then got jobs at the Met Police.

I mean who could possibly believe that?

“Mistakes made by the British Home Office” is key element of our remit, and sometimes it’s just too easy. Take Jacqui Smith. (Please.) As The Guardian reports:

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, apologised for underestimating immigration figures after it was revealed that the increase in foreign nationals working in the UK since 1997 was 1.1 million, 300,000 more than previously stated.

Unfortunately, that still doesn’t agree with the Office of National Statistics, which puts the figure at 1.5 million.

What’s the solution? Leave running the system to the Home Office (and, in the case of the Home Office, we use the word “running” in its loosest sense), and pass the job of keeping all immigration statistics to the Office of National Statistics.

But if the Home Office is going to carry on looking after immigration figures, perhaps we can help them with this video:

OK, this is petty.

But what is up with the Border and Immigration Agency’s website?

Is the banner section a logo? Is the white line supposed to be representing Britain’s border? If so - why are there two big gaps in it? Are they trying to tell us something about the state of our border control?

I wonder if they paid anyone to design this…

Update: They didn’t. Phew.

Here at Home Office Watch, we wanted to give Jacqui Smith a fair chance. OK, so she might be in favour of identity cards, but hey, nobody’s perfect, and in the spirit of fairness we’ve held off since her appointment.

But this statutory instrument has brought us back into the fray.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mauritius, Montenegro, Peru and Serbia are to be added to the government’s White List, along with Gambia, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali and Sierra Leone for male applicants. That means asylum applications are assumed to be unfounded unless they can be proven otherwise. Any rejected applicants have no in-country right of appeal - so they have to go back to their country of origin (pretty dangerous if your application was valid) to lodge their appeal.

Now, it’s not for me to second guess conditions in any of these countries. But since 2004, nearly 500 people from these countries whose asylum claims were rejected have made successful appeals.  Surely that is evidence enough that claims from these countries are not all “clearly unfounded”?

Is it too much to ask for the government to understand their own policies?

Given the number of UK businesses who employ migrant workers, you would think it was important for, say, the Department for Trade and Industry to understand employment rules. How then, can we explain this:

Mr. Clegg: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many work permits were applied for by his Department and its agencies in each of the last five years. [127712]

Jim Fitzpatrick: The Department of Trade and Industry and its agencies do not apply for work permits. However, it is part of our standard pre-employment checks at recruitment stage to ensure that staff applying to be employed within the Department and its agencies have a work permit, where appropriate, before they are employed. Information on how many staff may have work permits is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.

Shocked? No? Well, remind yourself of the Home Office explanation of work permits: (more…)

Worth a read:

John Lettice explains in The Register why the new chip-enabled passports could, for the moment at least, give people a quick and easy way to cross borders with a forged passport.

So much for extra security.

Spiralling self-harm, overcrowding, hunger strikes, wrongful detention - sadly just another day in the prison service thanks to the government’s mishandling of last year’s foreign prisoners crisis.

The whole sorry affair is exposed today by Ann Owers, chief inspector of prisons, in a report cheerily entitled:

Foreign National Prisoners – Ineffective Systems, Rising Self-Harm And Population Pressure

Basically, after the Home Office revealed 1,000 foreign national prisoners had been released without being considered for deportation (if you’ve forgotten, the BBC explains it here) they panicked and started locking up everyone they could think of, including some British people who, it is to be supposed, looked a bit foreign.

We think there are now about 1,300 foreign nationals who have finished their sentence but are still locked up. It costs about £150,000 a night to keep them there - and many are actually desperate to go home. All in all, a sorry state of affairs.

We’ve known for a long time that the government doesn’t have a clue how many illegal immigrants there are in the UK. This makes a certain amount of sense - the whole point of being illegal is you try to stay out of the way of officials, even official statisticians.

But now John Reid claims he hasn’t the faintest idea how many people are in the country legally either, saying:

“It is not possible to say with accuracy how many legal immigrants are present in the country, because there is currently no means of counting those who leave the country of their own accord without informing the immigration authorities.”

OK, so it might not be possible to give an exact figure - but not even an estimate? Can they not make an educated guess? How are they going to get all these people to register for a biometric immigration document (aka foreign national ID Card) if they don’t know how many there are?

The Immigration and Nationality Directorate is still dealing with a complaint 465 days after they promised to resolve it.

The IND complaints department seems to be overwhelmed with the volume of work.

But don’t worry - the Home Office promises it is “taking steps to reduce waiting times”. Wow.
Isn’t it about time the Home Office actually did something instead of just hiding behind the agencies it created?