Immigration Undercover-Dispatch Investigates UKBA Backlogs

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Morland Sanders writes about the making of Immigration Undercover

Ever wondered what a government agency looks like with just hours to go before the biggest deadline in its history?

Easter Saturday morning and the door swings open to reveal the United Kingdom Border Agency offices in Sheffield. We see nothing but empty desks, vacant chairs and a handful of staff. One of the few who did volunteer to come in was Pete, our undercover reporter.

There should be plenty for him to do: tens of thousands of immigration case need to be processed. This was a promise that senior civil servants made to Parliament 12 months earlier – that they would clear the entire backlog of outstanding immigration cases. Some of them date back years. The Agency has long been accused not just of shoddy work, but of obscuring the scale of its problems. So with a deadline of March 31st to clear a huge backlog of immigration cases, we sent in undercover reporters with secret cameras to see how the Agency planned to deliver on its promise.

Pete was one of around 800 temps paid near minimum wage and given five days' training to help bust the backlogs. The Agency has spent its five-year existence stumbling from one crisis to another, losing track of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, building backlogs and delaying crucial decisions, allowing those who should be removed from the country to strengthen their case to remain and extending the misery of those with a genuine reason to continue their life in the UK.

Some of the briefings that staff in the Sheffield office attend seem to be about not meeting this deadline. A manager briefs workers that 'we're going to shift the goal posts a little bit', and that 'the commitment made to ministers won't be met'. The plan appears to be two-fold: firstly, take 17,000 of the 60,000 cases in the family backlog and redefine them as 'frictional', meaning they're in the process of being worked on but crucially not stuck in the backlog.

Secondly, the family cases backlog will be segmented into four different categories. Three of them will contain cases that are reasonably simple to process. But the fourth – Category D – will be an enormous pile of 50,000 complex human rights cases that won't be cleared before the deadline. However, this could allow the UKBA to claim they have cleared three of the four categories by 31st March .

On 26th March 2013, just four days before the deadline, the Home Secretary announced that the UKBA would be scrapped, and its responsibilities folded back into the Home Office.

In response to our findings about the segmentation of the Family backlog, the Home Office told us: 'Dividing up work in this way and prioritising cases is a sensible way of tackling the large caseload so that, for example, a person with a straightforward application to stay in the country with their husband or wife would be dealt with more quickly than a complex Human Rights application from a person who had been refused under several other routes. We expect these human rights cases to be within service standards by the summer and the rest of the family cases within the next few weeks'.

They also said: 'It will take many years to clear the backlogs and fix the system, but the changes weve put in place will put us in a much stronger position to do so.'

Our reporters have been inside the Border Agency's dying days for nearly a month. The Agency may be no more, but change to the way we deal with immigration is undoubtedly needed, and it'll take more than a shiny new logo to solve the same old problems.