By Chris Bradley
A selection of MP’s have criticised the UK Border Agency, saying that it is not coming up to scratch. The agency has been overhauled, but it is felt that it is still not good enough. The home affairs committee have reported that they have not had good information from the agency. They have requested information with regards to immigration and asylum from 2006 onwards and because there is such a backlog it will take four years before they get up to date. They are also concerned about the amount of foreign prisoners awaiting deportation.
Damian Green, the immigration minister explained that they were working on dealing with past mistakes. The border agency was set up in 2008 because previous immigration directorate was seen as not fit. Charles Clarke, who was home secretary at the time was sacked when it was found that 1,013 foreign nationals had been released from prison with no consideration made as to whether to deport them. It has been found that since then only 397 of those prisoners have been deported and 57 cannot be located.
The organisation is being restructured because of claims that complete checks were not being done on people entering the country. The UK Border Force will be a separate body reporting directly to the home office and the UK Borders Agency will just deal will work related to immigration policy. They will be working on deporting prisoners after serving their sentence, although this can be difficult when they have no travel documents or give a false identity. Therefore it has been requested that more help be given to be able to deal with this sort of thing.
