A CLOUD of drizzle hung over Sheffield city centre last week as Steve Moxon walked out of the anonymous five-storey office block where he works as a Home Office civil servant.

An unassuming man, he had spent his day vetting applications from economic migrants in the Immigration and Nationality directorate.

Now 48 years old and with a peripatetic career behind him, he had joined the civil service last year in a spirit of idealism and optimism hoping to provide a public service.

He had been led to believe he would be carefully assessing the detailed applications of non-European Union nationals who wanted to settle in Britain as economic migrants.

He thought he would be acting as a “gatekeeper” to decide on a case-by-case basis whether would-be migrants and their families were properly entitled to settle in the country.

But last week his mood was as grey as the weather. Bitter and disillusioned after months complaining about the failings of the system, he had given up. It was time to blow the whistle.

He has prepared a 11-page statement outlining how he believes the system is a sham. At his home were 100 pages of internal Home Office e-mails and memos supporting his case.

Moxon’s contract of employment tells him that, as with all civil servants, he “owes duties of confidentiality and loyal service to the crown”.

So he knew he might be getting into deep water when — in a rare move for a serving civil servant — he gave his statement to The Sunday Times.

In explicit detail it describes the government’s system for “managing” the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants as a farce. He claims he and his colleagues are routinely pressured by senior mandarins to grant entry or “leave to remain” in Britain to thousands of migrants who should not really be here.

He says his department routinely ignores its own rules on what checks should be made. “The rule book was effectively torn up . . . the law I was supposedly working to implement had been lost sight of.”

When he recently asked a senior colleague if what he was being asked to do was correct, she replied: “Look, we all know it’s pants. So don’t ask me about it because I’ll just get annoyed.”

The criticisms will make uncomfortable reading for David Blunkett, the home secretary, whose Sheffield Brightside constituency is only a mile from Aspect Court, the giant building that houses Moxon’s “migration” unit.

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