Home Office warned it must improve
In a recent report, the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee has warned that it expects to see a significant level of improvement by the end of 2015.
Despite being praised for its progress concerning the deportation of foreign national offenders (FNOs) in October last year, the slow rate at which processes were improving was also criticised. A few months later, the Home Office faced yet more negative press from a report by the same author. The Chief Inspector for Borders and Immigration recommended that the Home Office improves its management of nationality casework after finding that applications for British citizenship were not being properly scrutinised.
Now the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee has also commented on the lack of progress made. Its January report entitled Managing and removing foreign national offenders pulls on information collected in 2006 which indicated that the Home Office did not have access to sufficient data to properly manage FNOs. This new report states that there has been little improvement since then and that data is still incomplete, poor in places and does not support decision making.
According to the Committee, this deficiency increases the risk of foreign national offenders entering the UK undetected and the figures speak for themselves: in 2013-14, only 30% of arrested foreign nationals were checked against the key overseas criminal record database.
The report states that, despite previous efforts to improve including increasing the numbers of caseworkers from 100 in 2006 to over 900 in 2014, the Home Office must now identify the data it needs in order to support decision-making across all immigration systems and act immediately to implement the changes. Once this data has been collected, the department and the police need to make better use of existing information to prevent more foreign national offenders from entering the UK.
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