HOWZAT

“We are still in a situation where some risks have to be taken, and staff should feel that if they are encouraged to take risks they will be supported when something does go wrong,” he wrote.

The minister’s office replied by e-mail three days later:

“Beverley Hughes has seen and noted your submission of 7 March . . . Beverley feels the basic point is that while staff have to take some risks, this was a decision that flew in the face of common sense.”

The e-mail was copied to David Blunkett, then home secretary, and Sir John Gieve, his most senior mandarin. The words “to be withheld” were later scribbled across the top, an apparent instruction not to comply with an FoI request for its release.

The same words appear on a note, prepared by Jeffrey, sent to Hughes a few day later. In it, in response to Hughes’s insistent complaints about the need to clear the 45,000 backlog, he outlined the new “risk-taking” policy. This involved fast-tracking all 337,000 applications, with little or no regard as to whether they were merited.

The policy, codenamed Brace, meant that officials had to make quick decisions based on the paperwork in an applicant’s file, regardless of whether it was complete. No further follow-up checks were to be made.

Jeffrey said staff were given guidance that “Brace is about pragmatic (ie not pursing every angle that could conceivably justify refusal) grants rather than pragmatic refusals”.

In other words, the official policy was in principle to grant applications rather than to refuse them.

This telling exchange — and equally significant evidence of a concerted cover-up — is buried deep in a batch of documents that ministers tried desperately to prevent being made public.

Their illegal activity followed an application by a Whitehall whistleblower, Steve Moxon, to force them to release the material under the Freedom of Information Act.

An immigration case worker whose ultimate bosses had been Jeffrey and Hughes, Moxon was sacked after telling The Sunday Times about the fast-tracking process in 2004. He has spent five years trying to obtain the truth about the policy, which Hughes always claimed publicly was implemented by junior officials without her knowledge.

Not only do the papers expose her claim as untrue; they go further in showing that Hughes and Jeffrey were happy to encourage the culture of deliberate risk-taking.

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