THE immigration minister Beverley Hughes personally authorised a policy to allow tens of thousands of migrants into Britain without adequate checks, according to a leaked Home Office document.
Despite being cleared by an internal inquiry into the
“fast-tracking” of migrants last week, new evidence indicates that the minister approved a far wider policy than previously disclosed to rubber-stamp applications. According to the confidential memo, staff at the
immigration service headquarters were ordered to wave through applications which had been on their files for more than three months.
The policy, it says, was “agreed by the minister of state, Beverley Hughes” who, along with senior officials, would “totally support” staff on the results of the exercise.
The disclosure contradicts statements by Hughes that she had not sanctioned a fast-tracking policy. Last night the Conservatives renewed calls for her resignation, claiming she had misled the House of Commons.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, demanded to know why last week’s Home Office inquiry had failed to disclose her decision to authorise the widescale fast-tracking. “This smacks of a cover-up,” he said.
The Sunday Times broke the story three weeks ago of how checks had been relaxed on thousands of eastern Europeans wishing to enter Britain.
Hughes said the procedures had been authorised “at a junior level” and that they were confined to “a very particular group” of migrants processed by a “team in Sheffield”. She told MPs that rubber-stamping was “rare and untypical” and added: “I am not condoning for a moment the dip in scrutiny that has taken place.”
She commissioned an inquiry which appeared to support her statements when its report was published last week. It said the policy on eastern European migrants was based on a “misunderstanding” between senior officials who did not involve the minister. However, the report made no
mention of the fact that, at the same time, Hughes had personally approved the operation of a similar and far more extensive policy.
The existence of this policy was revealed to The Sunday Times last week by a disgruntled Home Office civil servant who claimed that it was “corruption and abuse of the system on a massive scale”.
The memo, passed anonymously to the newspaper by the official, is a record of an instruction authorised by Hughes that no inquiries were to be made on thousands of applications by migrants wishing to enter or settle in Britain.
According to the note, the policy was approved by the minister in July last year.
It states that the policy of rubber-stamping applications operated across Hughes’s department — not only at Sheffield but also at the Croydon headquarters of the Home Office’s Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND). It states that fast-tracking with no checks was applied to “all applications” more than three months old from migrants
processed there.
Senior officials involved in the procedure say it involved approving thousands of applications from those seeking to enter or settle in Britain as students, spouses, au pairs, domestic servants, working holidaymakers and dependent relatives of migrants already here.
The leaked memo was written by Graham Austin and Moira Bing, two senior immigration officials in the casework directorate at Croydon. It states: “As there are a large number of applications that are over three months old waiting to be decided, it has been agreed at ministerial level that an enhanced procedure should be undertaken to clear these as quickly as possible.
“This note confirms that the decision in this case has been taken under an enhanced procedure for clearing backlog cases, which commenced on 14 July, 2003. Bill Brandon/Christina Parry (two senior immigration policy
managers) have instructed that all applications - as far as possible - over three months old should be granted unless the information available on file is such that it can properly and defensibly support a refusal. Where a case will result in a refusal, the case must be cleared by a senior caseworker.
No further inquiries should be made.”
The note adds: “This exercise has been agreed by the minister of state Beverley Hughes and has Bill Brandon and Christina Parry’s complete authority. They will totally support staff on its outcomes.”
It is understood that the memo was shown to Ken Sutton, the Home Office mandarin whom Hughes commissioned to report on the Sheffield fiasco, but no mention of it appears in his report. Nor does Sutton mention that Hughes
herself authorised the fast-track policy at Croydon.
The civil servant who passed the memo to The Sunday Times said that the fast-tracking exercise — known as Backlog Reduction Accelerated Clearance Exercise (Brace) — “resulted in virtually no control on applications”. She said: “There are now tens if not hundreds of
thousands of foreign nationals being allowed to stay who do not qualify to be here. This includes drug dealers, other criminals and probably the odd terrorist.”
She said that the note showed “the appalling way senior officials in IND are instructing their staff to grant all manner of applications without inquiry. I know the instruction has one or two get-out phrases such as ‘as far as possible’ but be in no doubt that this instruction means grant every application without inquiry unless you absolutely have to
refuse.”
When The Sunday Times put its original allegations to the Home Office earlier this month, the department claimed that there had been no relaxation of procedures. To verify the latest memo, an undercover reporter posing as a
Whitehall information officer spoke directly to one of the officials involved in the authorised “fast-tracking” policy who confirmed that it was genuine: “It’s gone up in internal briefings but there’s no way the press should have seen it unless someone has leaked it.”
Confronted with the leak yesterday, the Home Office finally admitted that a secret no-checks policy was introduced last August for all cases more than three months old, and had been approved by Hughes. It claimed that the
fast-tracking procedures at Sheffield were different from those elsewhere. But insiders said that the distinction was a nonsense and the schemes were identical.
