UNITED KINGDOM
The UK Home Office has been accused of failing to keep track of hundreds of thousands of people who should have left the country in the past two years.
Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt (pictured) said that of 10 million people whose period of leave to be in the UK had expired in the preceding two years, there was no evidence of departure for 601,222 of them.
He said these figures included 513,088 non-visa nationals from countries whose citizens can generally stay for six months without the documentation, and 88,134 visa nationals.
Mr Bolt said the Government had over-promised in its plans for exit checks.
The policy was instituted in 2015 in a bid to more easily pursue those who had overstayed illegally, but the operational value of the data was described as “severely hamstrung”, while travel industry representatives branded the execution of the checks as “shambolic”.
An investigation found that 8,474 of 52,238 Chinese visa holders who were required to leave between April 2015 and March 2016 had not been recorded.
However, it was later found that the majority had gone home but their departure had not been captured on the system because they had left Britain by ferry or train, rather than by air.
“The Home Office needed to be more careful about presenting exit checks as the answer to managing the illegal migrant population, which for now remained wishful thinking,” Mr Bolt said.
A Home Office spokesperson said exit checks were helping it better focus operational activity on those people who did not comply with immigration rules.
However, the spokesperson acknowledged that more work could be done “to realise the full operational potential of data collected”.
London, 30 March 2018
