UK: Inspector finds UK Border Agency backlog dating back 10 years

Inspector finds UK Border Agency backlog dating back 10 years

The 'highlights':

John Vine says the backlog includes 14,000 people who are married to British citizens but whose appeals were put on hold while UKBA sorted out a policy to deal with them. The chief inspector says this marriage backlog was rising at the rate of 700 a month when he carried out his inspection last September.

Vine said UKBA staff themselves were shocked that as many as 2,100 cases had been discovered lying unprocessed in the boxes that had been sent to Sheffield. He said that in the four years he had been the first chief inspector of borders and immigration there had been improvements in the work of UKBA. But asked if he thought there might be other backlogs lying as yet undiscovered, he replied: "There are a lot of areas that I have yet to inspect."

From the Telegraph: Immigration backlog of 16,000 migrants uncovered by inspectors

Tens of thousands of income checks on applicants wanting to stay with partners in the UK were also not being carried out due to a limit on the number of checks HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) would conduct.

UK Border Agency staff were left having to ration which checks, designed to verify whether pay slips, P60s and other supporting documents were genuine, were carried out, despite the value of the checks being “acknowledged by all”, the inspectors said.

“This would frequently mean that the agency’s allocation of checks ran out within days of the beginning of the month,” the report said.

“The limit on these checks to 250 per month for an organisation processing several hundred thousand applicants a year is insufficient.”

Immigration officials also failed to check whether migrants applying to stay with partners in the UK after arriving in the country could support themselves without using public funds, with case workers saying this was rarely used as a reason to refuse applications.

For those who are interested here's a link to the full report (also posted on the advisory board).

I find this so ridiculous - and yet a not surprising reason why all of those FLR(M) apps have been taking so long. We pay so much to the UKBA to sort all of this out - why can't they do correctly? Or rather, where is the money going? I know the visa fees we pay are more than the cost of processing is. So stupid. 

Not surprising in the least.

Several years ago husband had a flatmate who was from Hong Kong, but had been a student in the since he was 15.  After he finished university, he applied for a visa to remain in the U.K.  

After years, in which this flatmate had to make multiple trips from northern Scotland to Sheffield to attend interviews, and was repeatedly asked to re-submit documents because they'd been 'lost' or 'never received,' he gave up.

Within three days of him withdrawing his application, he received a box full of every document he'd ever sent them, including all the multiple copies of 'lost' or 'missing' documents.