A HOME OFFICE whistle-blower has accused ministers of hiding the truth about immigration by operating a secret policy allowing thousands of “ineligible” migrants to enter Britain.

He claims it is an attempt to massage the figures so it will not appear as if there is a mass influx of migrants when eastern European states join the European Union on May 1.

Steve Moxon, a civil servant in the immigration service, decided to expose the “fiddle” after his complaints to ministers and senior officials were ignored.

The policy, codenamed BRACE, is so sensitive that immigration officials have been warned not to refer to it on their computers.

In a signed 11-page statement, Moxon says his department was ordered to “rubber-stamp” thousands of applications from eastern European migrants without proper checks. He said: “I’ve granted (residency) to people who should never in a million years have been allowed into this country.”

His allegations are politically sensitive because the government has already come under fire for claiming that fewer than 13,000 people a year will enter Britain when the eight east European countries and two others are admitted to the EU. Independent estimates suggest this is wildly optimistic.

The government is now anxious to avoid further bad publicity, Moxon claims, and this has led to migrants being allowed to enter early. “The suspicion must be that the whole exercise is a deliberate ploy by the government to siphon off as many individuals as possible to be here before May 1 so they do not appear in the figures for those post-May 1,” he said.

Moxon, a 48-year-old case worker in the Home Office’s Immigration and Nationality directorate in Sheffield, risks his job by speaking to The Sunday Times. His claims are supported by scores of internal documents.

One of the main roles of his “managed migration” department is to process applications from self-employed eastern European businessmen seeking entry into Britain under a scheme called the European Community Association Agreement (ECAA).

This includes two non-accession states — Bulgaria and Romania — which are not due to join the EU until 2007.

From last August, however, he and colleagues were ordered to apply a “fast-tracking” method to applications known by the codeword BRACE.

Leaked documents show just how sensitive officials were about the policy. One states: “As this is NOT a published policy, however, no reference should be made to this,” either to the applicants, their representatives or on the Home Office computer system (G-CID).

In another paper, case workers are told: “Do not mention BRACE in the case notes. Use words ‘granted pragmatically’ and ‘in light of the changes in the immigration laws in May 2004’.”

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