Conclusions and recommendations
1. The decision to break up the Agency was prompted
by its troubled history. The Agency's responsibilities for immigration
operations were passed to three directorates within the Department:
UK Visas and Immigration decides on applications to visit and
stay in the UK; Immigration Enforcement detects and removes those
people who break our immigration laws; and Border Force polices
the border. These three directorates, which collectively spend
some £1.8 billion per year, are responsible for dealing promptly
and effectively with over 100 million people that arrive in the
UK each year.
2. The Department has failed to get a grip
on the long-standing problem of asylum backlogs with older cases
remaining unresolved and the number of newer cases awaiting a
decision increasing. The Department has still not resolved
some 29,000 asylum applications dating back to at least 2007.
In 11,000 of these cases people have not even received an initial
decision on their claim, something the Department has now committed
to provide by the end of 2014. The Department is also missing
its targets on newer asylum claims for how long a caseworker should
take to process an application. As a result, the number of claims
awaiting an initial decision increased by 70% to 16,273 in the
first quarter of 2014 compared to the first quarter of 2013. The
Department admitted that one of the reasons for these problems
had been "an ill-judged decision" by the Agency, subsequently
reversed by the Department, to downgrade the caseworkers in this
area which had resulted in 120 experienced asylum caseworkers
leaving.
Recommendations: The Department should ensure
it has the right number of staff, with the right skills and the
right incentives, to resolve outstanding asylum claims promptly
and prevent any new backlogs being created. The Department should
report back to us in early 2015 on what progress it has made in
communicating decisions to all outstanding pre-2007 applicants.
3. IT limitations mean the Department cannot
track people through the immigration system, or ensure people
with no legal right to remain are removed from the UK. At
the end of 2013-14 there were over 175,000 people whose application
to stay in the UK had been rejected. These cases are placed into
a migration refusal pool to await removal. The number of such
cases has not been reduced over time. Some applicants may have
left voluntarily, but the Department does not know how many have
done so because it does not have a system to check departures
from the UK. In 2012 the Department employed Capita to confirm
the records of the people in the pool. By the end of 2013 Capita
had checked over 250,000 case records. It is particularly disturbing
that Capita had been unable to contact over 50,000 people listed
and the Department admitted that they did not know where these
50,000 people were.
Recommendation: The Department should as
a matter of urgency take more steps to identify people that remain
in the UK illegally and expedite their removal.
4. The Department lacks good quality data
on cases, preventing it from efficiently managing the backlogs
and the overall workload, and hindering effective accountability.
The Department's internal management reports are based on poor
quality data that is often stored in old, legacy IT systems. A
sample check of data on the Department's Casework Information
Database found that for 84% of cases where people were being removed
from the UK the Department did not hold the minimum necessary
information, such as the person's address or postcode, prior to
their removal. This is a long-standing issue that the Agency and
now the Department have failed to address. The Department claims
that new IT projects would have allowed management information
to be automatically compiled from data held on individual cases.
However, the failure of these projects means the Department has
to do extra work to cleanse data and reconcile conflicting datasets
in order to produce summary management information that is accurate.
This makes it extremely difficult to hold it to account for its
performance. For example, in a subsequent note the Department
provided covering figures it did not have to hand in the evidence
session, it still could not say how many of the asylum claims
in the system are not currently being worked on.
Recommendations: The Department should immediately
take steps to improve the quality of the data it collects and
holds through cleansing and regular sample checks, and improve
the presentation and clarity of data.
5. The failure of major IT projects has prevented
the Department from streamlining its work processes and left it
reliant on out-of-date IT systems for day-to-day business.
The Department has had direct control of the immigration directorates
for 18 months, yet it has still not established better processes
for dealing with different types of cases. The Department had
expected large-scale IT projects like the Immigration Case Work
programme to transform its processes and allow it to produce better
information and substantial financial savings. However the Department
has now cancelled both the case work programme and the e-Borders
IT programme, which was intended to provide information on people
leaving the UK. Cancelling these two IT projects has meant that
close to £1 billion has been spent and wasted. The Department's
revised IT approach is to replace large-scale IT projects with
a number of smaller, more flexible contracts, in order to increase
flexibility.
Recommendations: As a matter of priority,
the Department should identify the future IT capabilities it requires,
so it can develop a comprehensive, system-wide IT strategy that
will deliver the required capabilities.
6. We are not convinced that the Department
has a robust plan to improve performance and meet its targets
with fewer resources. The Department allocated £249 million
of savings across the three immigration directorates, to be achieved
by the end of 2014-15, and requires them to live within the budgets
they are set. However, the Department does not track individual
savings or efficiencies or identify whether they have been achieved.
Nor does it always know the cost of its activities: for example,
it could not tell us the impact on the asylum support budget of
delays in meeting its targets. This relaxed approach to financial
savings carries risks if the Department is asked to find large
efficiencies in the future while improving services, or if another
crisis emerges.
Recommendation: The Department should gather
accurate data on the costs of all its activities and develop a
robust financial plan that sets out how it will achieve both the
necessary level of savings and the improved performance required.
|