I HAVE ALWAYS suspected that Purgatory is staffed by bureaucrats. Now I have proof that Hell is a branch of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. Tuesday’s report by the Public Accounts Committee, into the utter shambles that is our immigration and asylum system, has got to rank as the 21st-century sequel to Yes, Minister.

This is a directorate that employs half its staff in advising, paying or recruiting the other half. It has 70 people handling correspondence with ministers and MPs, although even Sir Humphrey could not have devised 70 ways to say “I don’t know”. For this organisation cannot say how many failed asylum applicants remain in the country. It has no clue where most of them are staying. It has even lost track of more than 400 foreign criminals who, on their release from prison, have given Sir Humphrey’s polite request to turn up for deportation the respect it deserved. Meanwhile, it subjects the honest and the unlucky to nonsensical, interminable, Kafkaesque processes in grim outposts such as the aptly named Lunar House in Croydon.

You couldn’t make it up. Except that almost every figure about asylum and immigration is made up. Since the Government abolished embarkation controls in 1998, no one knows who is coming in and out of Britain. This week a Home Office minister didn’t even know whether the backlog of asylum cases was 155,000 or 283,500, though he was keen to emphasise the lower number. Even the headline figure of 1,350 people removed a month includes those who are leaving voluntarily, some after taking a £1,000 payment euphemistically termed “integration support”. Our machinery is so inefficient that we are reduced to bribing people to leave. How do we know that we’re not just creating a new queue of serial bribe-takers?

The Public Accounts Committee believes that it would take 10 to 18 years to deal with the asylum backlog, even if there were no new unsuccessful applicants. We might as well forget it. The longer people remain here, the harder they are to remove. For every MP moaning about the failure to meet targets there is another campaigning for Mr and Mrs Deserving and their daughter who has won a place at Cambridge. We are a kindly people. And there is nothing that unites us more than interfering bureaucrats who think that human beings will stall putting down roots and making friends until someone gets round to taking out the file.

Yesterday one of the cases before the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal was that of a young Turkish man who had originally come to Britain on a student visa. He had applied for permission to stay on after graduating, but got no response — for five years. By the time the Home Office lurched into action, this man had started first one and then another successful business. Why is he a prime candidate for removal? Is it because they do at least know where he is? The adjudicators hearing his appeal have discovered that they have no jurisdiction to rule on the case, for various complicated reasons. So the case is now going back to an immigration judge for a third time. How can the cost to society of this particular case possibly outweigh the benefits?

Labour’s sound and fury has focused mainly on the judicial process. But the only effect of the Prime Minister’s order to “streamline” the appeals system, by abolishing the second tier of appeals, has been to make it twice as time-consuming. In the simple case of a Filipina who has been refused permission to bring her husband over, one court must now meet to decide whether there is a point of law to reconsider. Then another must meet to reconsider it. Thousands of cases are also piling up at the High Court. One tribunal judge I have spoken to reckons that three quarters of High Court cases will soon come from IND. What is the point of all this activity, given that the decisions will never be enforced? It is a charade, the illusion of movement without progress, and it is costing us a fortune.

The answer, surely, is to raze the whole miserable edifice to the ground, along with the bent lawyers, the expensive interpreters and the whole industry of refugee advisers and outfits specialising in fake papers and torture scars. We must give up on the backlog, except where the intelligence services, already grinding their teeth in frustration, have an interest. The world knows anyway that Britain is a soft touch. In fact, ministers were considering an amnesty last year, shortly before the July bombings made it politically unacceptable — and made the spooks grind their teeth even more.

The truth is that it has suited this Government to talk tough on immigration and asylum while doing little in practice to stem the flow, for what it sees as economic reasons. We have to accept that for ten years Britain has had completely open borders; that millions of people have come here in that time — some good, some bad, a few genuinely evil. There has been a deliberate policy of increasing numbers into this country: the trouble is that this has never been made explicit. An organisation that sends out letters saying “you must leave as soon as possible”, but cannot say what timescale is meant by “as soon as possible”, and admits that it does not monitor it, is not an organisation that has come under real ministerial pressure.

Until embarkation controls are re-established in 2008 (a spectacular Labour U-turn that has barely been noticed) it will be impossible to get a grip. Then we must decide whether we are prepared to get tough on the new arrivals. Other countries have learnt that the way to stem the asylum flow is to detain people when they first arrive, and make rapid informed decisions. Even the gentle Swedes use upmarket prison camps. That might not seem very British: but all our very British fudge has done so far is to ignore the real undesirables, while arbitrarily consigning others to a pointless, and hellish, limbo.

camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk

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