Q. How many people are living in Britain illegally?A. I haven't the faintest idea
Q How many failed asylum seekers are not removed?
A. I haven't got that figure.
Q How many people have been told to leave the country?
A. I don't have that information.
Any Minister appearing before a Select Committee is briefed up to the hilt. To do as Mr Roberts did yesterday demonstrates an appalling arrogance and if John Reid has anything about him he will demand his head on a platter. Mr Roberts did however say one thing of value. He told the Committee that the embarkation controls in 1997 (one of Labour's first acts in power) meant that it was "impossible" to say whether a person who entered the country had left and "tracing indiviudlas at the level of individulas is not an effective stragegy". The answer is simple. Reintroduce embarcation controls, something David Davis has been calling for for some time. According to another witness yesterday, Jonathan Portes from the DWP, NI numbers are not leant to prove entitlement to work, so Job Centre staff issuing them make no checks about the applicants' immigration status. It simply beggars belief that illegal immigrants are handed a National Insurance number without any check on their entitlement to be in the country. Is this what Tony Blair meant by "joined up government"? John Reid faces a huge challenge to sort out the Home Office and get rid of the endemic institutionalised attitudes displayed so graphically by Dave Roberts yesterday. We'll soon find out if he is up to it.
To be fair, I don't see how anyone could give a definite assessment of the number of people in the country illegally, because if you could, you would surely be rounding them all up to deport them. Or perhaps the Home Office under its present administration would simply sit back and ignore them...
ReplyDeletepoverty is thrift,are you the popes underpants in disguise
ReplyDeleteAs a pie ce in the Grauniad said the other day, this is what happens when the civil service is ignored in favour of a bunch of McKinsey & Associate type "consultants". Their kind has wrecked many a company and now they can add a government.
ReplyDeleteIs there even one ministry that hasn't suffered from the collective incompetence ?
To be fair, the Immigration Embarkation controls were being phased out from 1994 onwards, with sea ports the first to lose them. There was no embarkation control at Waterloo when the Eurostar service started in 1994.... but this is irrelevant. Dave Roberts (CBE) is just making excuses. The embarkation control only recorded the departure of people with longer term grants of leave to enter or remain (students, work permit holders etc) or people who the Immigration Service were slightly suspicious of when they arrived and so 'coded' their landing. The vast majority of passengers arriving in the UK are given visit stamps which were not recorded. Furthermore, those who entered the country on false documents or who entered clandestinely would obvioulsy not have had their arrival recorded. An embarkation control was therefore of limited value in assessing the level of illegal entrants.
ReplyDeleteAnyone who saw Panorama on Sunday night could hazzard a guess at which senior manager it was who ordered officers to ignore criminal cases in favour of removing enforcement cases.......
He couldn't, by definition, have a definite number but he bloody well ought to have a "faint idea".
ReplyDeleteReid does strike me as perhaps the one minister who will not stand such nonsense.