THE senior immigration inspector in charge of the unit responsible for deporting foreign criminals was promoted to a new post as the crisis worsened last autumn.

Alan Kittle was running the criminal casework team, the special division of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) that dealt with foreign nationals in British jails.

His promotion was announced last autumn and in January he was due to move to a new role at the directorate.

In a farewell note in an internal newsletter called The Foreign Nationals Bulletin, Mr Kittle said that he was leaving the criminal casework team “in a far better position now than has ever been the case in the past to work closely together to address whatever arises”.

At the time foreign prisoners who should have been leaving prison and being taken straight to an airport for deportation were instead disappearing into the community.

Mr Kittle admitted in his message, written at the beginning of January this year, that his unit was struggling to cope with the numbers of prisoners being released from jail who should be considered for deportation. The Times reported yesterday that many simply had their release papers stamped “deportation review pending” and immediately absconded.

The official wrote: “It is a fact that the number of referrals we are receiving from prisons has far outstripped our capacity to deal with them as early into the sentence as we would like.

“We have seen some increases in casework staffing but have, however, been promised a far greater increase in the spring of 2006, which is good news for our staff and for you! The last part of the year has seen a large increase in the number of operational staff we have to conduct interviews with prisoners, deliver surgeries and training to staff in specific establishments with specific responsbility for foreign nationals.”

The Home Office has revealed that it plans to spend an extra £2.7 million this year in dealing with the removal of convicted foreign nationals from Britain. Despite this recognition of the crisis and allocation of more resources four months ago, however, it was not until Tuesday of this week that the police were asked to help the Home Office to locate more than 900 former prisoners who could not be traced.

There are currently more than 10,000 foreign prisoners in jail in England and Wales and another 915 inmates whose nationality is not recorded.

There are three prisons where more than half the inmates are foreigners: The Verne in Dorset (50 per cent), Wormwood Scrubs, west London (51 per cent) and Morton Hall, near Lincoln, (72 per cent).

Mr Kittle’s newsletter hinted at further chaos in the unit dealing with deportations when he wrote that his team was “relocating for the third time in two years”.

He said that his two years in the job had been “hard work and challenging”.

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