UK Immigration Service
Encyclopedia
The United Kingdom Immigration Service, (previously known from 1920 to 1970 as the Immigration Branch), was the operational arm of the Home Office
, Immigration and Nationality Directorate
. The UK Immigration Service was,until its disbandment in 2007, responsible for the day to day operation of front line UK Border Controls at 57 ports "designated" under the Immigration Act 1971
including airports, seaports, the UK land-border with Ireland and the Channel Tunnel juxtaposed controls. Its in-country enforcement arm was responsible for the detection and removal of immigration
offenders such as illegal entrants, illegal workers and overstayers as well as prosecutions for associated offences. On its disbandment, Immigration Service staff were re-deployed within the short lived Border and Immigration Agency which was itself replaced by the UK Border Agency
.
The enabling Act which provided the basis of immigration control was the Aliens Act 1905
and it was followed by the Aliens Restriction Acts of 1914 and 1919. The powers exercised by Immigration Service officers were/are largely based on the Immigration Act 1971
that came into force on 1 January 1973 and its associated rules. Other subsequent legislation includes:
Any Immigration Officer
with responsibility for immigration enforcement and prosecutions is additionally governed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
and may also use powers found within the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981
, Proceeds of Crime Act 2002
, Identity Cards Act 2006 and Identity Documents Act 2010.
For the earlier part of its history the Immigration Service's work was dominated by control of passengers at seaports and the control of crews. By the late 1950s the numbers of arriving passengers at airports overtook that of seaports for the first time and the distribution of staff began to reflect this. Immigration control at airports gradually changed from the late 1990's onward as a new emphasis was given to controlling passengers in visa issuing posts abroad. During the 2000's new technologies opened up opportunities to create a new "flexible" border control that better focussed its resources on high risk passengers.
There were little or no IS resources dedicated to dealing with in-country immigration offenders before 1973 and the detection of potential deportees was seen as a matter for the police. The enforcement arm developed slowly in the 1980's and 90's but, in the 2000's, underwent a transformation in terms of its remit, training and powers and, by 2006, removed more in-country offenders than were refused entry at UK ports for the first time.
The service was split into two Directorates in 1992 comprising IS Ports Directorate and IS Enforcement Directorate. It was again reorganised and regionalised in 2000 into two Regional and South East commands. The IS Enforcement Directorate was reformed in 2003 and, in 2004 assumed command of the failing Criminal Casework Team responsible for the deportation of foreign national prisoners.
In 2007 IS Ports Directorate became a uniformed service for the first time. IS Enforcement Directorate was disbanded and its operational resources divided among new regional “Local Immigration Teams”.
In April 2007 staff were informed that the UK Immigration Service would henceforth cease to exist as a distinct body.
The development of in-country enforcement controls is dealt with separately in Part 2, (see index).
There was particular focus on the large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews who had arrived in the East End after fleeing persecution in Tsarist Russia. In 1898 the Secretary of the Board of Trade reported a "..stream of Russian and Polish immigration—in other words, the immigration of the most destitute type...increasing in volume year by year". The "stream" actually consisted of 175,000 people arriving between 1894 and 1899 but the concern was the fact that the rate of arrivals had risen between 1897-99 and that so many had congregated in the East End of London.
Parliament considered the options, including setting up border controls, but some could not imagine how such an imposition would actually work and one Lord expressed concern that the restrictions would exascerbate the existing "servant problem":
"I daresay your Lordships have seen the difficulty of getting domestic servants commented upon in the newspapers. I have seen letters proposing that domestic servants should be brought over from Germany and Norway, where very excellent domestic servants are to be found. How will it be possible to get these servants to come over?"
The Lords doubted that immigration officers would cope:
"Who are to be these inspectors? They must be men of considerable talent. They would have to be linguists. They ought to know every language... The inspector will say, "Where did you come from? What is your fortune?" which is a very inquisitive way of greeting every foreigner who comes into this country".
Other, more serious minded Lords focussed on the sweatshops brought about and encouraged by unregulated foreign labour;
"Aliens coming into this country find a system of unregulated industry in existence. They find that they can work under filthy surroundings, that they can work for wretchedly low wages and in many cases no wages at all, and that they can work as long as they or their immediate masters please. That is an evil which exists, and many Englishmen do the same. Some thrive by it and rise out of the condition; others stick there; others sweat it out and die there. I do not see the point of making these unfortunate aliens the scapegoat for our own neglect in this matter".
The legislation that finally emerged was the Aliens Act 1905
which was considered even at the time a flawed and inconsistent piece of legislation. It was ambivalent in its aims and constructed powers whose ostensible aim was that they should be equally applied but its underlying aim was to control a particular “problem” group. Libetarian opponents of the Act, (and those worried about the availability of servants), ensured that it only applied to steerage passengers and to ships carrying more than 20 passengers. It was easily evaded, (as noted in questions to Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, at the time), and did not even require Immigration Officers to give written permission to land or stamp a passport – permission to land was given verbally.
It was however the first legislation to define some groups of migrants as 'undesirable', thereby making entry to the United Kingdom discretionary, rather than automatic. The Act ensured that leave to land could be withheld if the immigrant was judged to fall into one of four categories:
People refused entry under the act were given a right of appeal to the Immigration Board in charge of control of one of the designated ports listed by statute. In the first five years of the control were refused, (after appeal):
The practical application of the control was conducted by the new Aliens Inspectorate and its officers, the first Immigration Officers, who were hurriedly recruited from within the existing ranks of HM Customs and the Board of Trade
. Their basic task was to test whether the traveller had means of support which might be proven by either presentation of cash or evidence of a firm offer of employment. Inspection generally took place aboard ships or in “receiving houses” on shore. The anomalies within the regulations meant that it was common for passengers to evade the control by the simple means of posing as 2nd or 3rd class passengers or sharing the evidence of funds between them. The head of the new organisation was titled HM Inspector and its first incumbent was the classically educated Ulsterman Mr. William Haldane-Porter, (later Sir William), who was given the attractive salary of £500 per annum, rising in eight years to £700.
Mr Haldane-Porter was well aware of the limitations of the 1905 Act and said in 1912 that there was a,
"...highly organised and very undesirable traffic which is being carried on by by certain agents in this country in aliens, chiefly Armenians and Syrians... I have pointed out that as these aliens mainly arrive as cabin passengers it is impossible, in the existing state of the law, to deal with them by inpection at the ports."
The 2nd reading of the 1911 Aliens Bill produced a heated debate on the necessity to increase the scope of immigration control. Winston Churchill
disliked the idea, both on principle and for practical reasons, and admitted that he had not much liked the 1905 Act and had voted against it,
"... not only because I disliked the electioneering rancour by which they were characterised, but also because of the cheap attempt, for party purposes, to exploit the misfortunes of a poor and wretched class of people."
He saw a great many administrative headaches should the controls be extended:
"It would involve our setting up at eighty ports, besides the fourteen emigration ports, all the machinery necessary for the working of the Act, emigration officers, immigration boards, medical inspectors, interpreters, and, in many cases, receiving houses. For what should we have to set up eighty ports. This vast paraphernalia and apparatus? We should have to set it up in order to deal with 2,700 aliens, which is the total number, who came in by the whole of those eighty non-immigration ports last year. Of those 2,700 the number of 926 were on their way to destinations outside the United Kingdom, 102 had return tickets, and 532 had single tickets. Therefore, there would be only 1,139 aliens coming in through those eighty ports to justify the setting up of all this elaborate and costly machinery, with its attendant inconvenience to all the other persons who travel to our shores. At twenty-nine of these ports less than five aliens a year are landed".
The 1914 Aliens Registration Act was rushed through on the eve of the First World War and allowed stricter controls than before including the power to make aliens aged over 16 register with the police. The power still remains but no longer forms an important part of internal immigration controls. Although the 1905 Act technically survived until its repeal in 1919, it was, in practice, submerged by the all-embracing powers of the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914. The 1914 Act contained a clause which gave the Home Secretary power to prevent the entry and order the deportation of aliens if it was deemed 'conducive to the public good'. For the purposes of the 1914 legislation immigration officers were re-titled Aliens Officers and the service was a compound of Home Office staff and Customs staff.
In order to mark someones arrival and departure the new Aliens Officers endorsed the passports of passengers with red stamps on arrival and with black stamps to cancel the endorsement on the persons departure. In April 1915 an Order in Council was made that no alien passenger was to be allowed to land unless he held either a passport with a photograph attached issued within the two preceding years, or some other document establishing his national status and identity. Prior to this passports had not contained photographs and had not been stamped in any way.
From April 1915 only passengers with exit permits were allowed to leave the UK, and then only from certain ports. In an extension to their duties that would be repeated during World War 2, officers were tasked with retrieving ration documents from departing passengers. In 1916 a “Traffic Index” was created from the landing and embarkation cards collected at ports and matched together at the Home Office’s Aliens Branch HQ to show whether the person had complied with their conditions of entry. This simple process was the only mechanism for measuring the effectiveness of the control and continued until 1998 when embarkation controls were abolished.
In 1917 the actress and alleged spy Mata Hari
was detected by Aliens Officers on a neutral ship at Falmouth. She was taken for questioning by Special Branch
. The relationship between the Immigration Service and Special Branch officers at ports has always been an important one. By 1920 the number of Aliens' Officers had reached 160.
It stipulated that no alien might land without the permission of an immigration officer, by way of a passport stamp, and granted powers to attach conditions to the grant of leave, to refuse those who could not support themselves, and their dependants, those medically unfit and those convicted of crimes abroad. It gave the power to demand documents satisfactorily establishing identity and nationality. It restricted the employment rights of aliens resident in Britain, barring them from certain jobs (in the civil service, for example), and had a particular impact on foreign seamen working on British ships. It required people seeking employment in the UK to obtain permission from the Ministry of Labour which was of huge significance in establishing a link, for the first time, between immigration control and the employment market. It also targeted criminals, paupers and ‘undesirables’, and made it illegal for aliens to promote industrial action – a response to fears of imported revolutionaries following the still recent Russian Revolution. The methods created during the First World War to control potential subversion were maintained after the War. HM Chief Inspector Mr Haldane- Porter said in 1919:
"One of the chief functions of the controls after the war would be to exclude Bolshevik
agents from the U.K. At home this would be achieved by Immigration officers, while abroad officers should be attached to the consulate in the guise of vice-consuls, these officers working with and receiving their instructions from MI5
."
Further motivation to extend restrictions on foreigners was driven by post-war unemployment and the consequent desire to safeguard jobs for indigenous Britons. The Act was renewed annually until 1971 until it was replaced by the Immigration Act 1971
.
The new Immigration Service was created as a branch of the Home Office with its HQ located at 10 Old Bailey, London. The first Chief Inspector of the service, Mr Haldane-Porter, was given permission to recruit staff and favoured those with seafaring experience - perhaps reasonable given the focus of work onboard ship and within docks such as the Port of London and Clydeside. Immigration Officers continued to work on board ships until the early 1990s and still board merchant vessels in some circumstances.
The ethos of the Service developed rapidly under the direction of its new Chief Inspector and an insight into his attitude might be gleaned from his 1921 message to staff,
“Figures are all very well and we cannot get our statistics without them but after all we are dealing in the first instance with human beings”.
Immigration Officers controlled passengers and seamen at ports throughout the United Kingdom. This included Ireland until the creation of the Irish Free State
in 1922 and, even after this, UK immigration officers controlled Irish ports until 1925 while the new administration made its own arrangements.
One of the first major issues confronted by the new service was that of an escalating problem of stowaways. In 1921 a conspiracy to smuggle Chinese nationals in as stowaways was uncovered. Mr Haldane-Porter wrote in November 1920 that the traffickers had,
"confederates in Hong Kong who told the Chinamen that England was a sort of terrestrial paradise where you could get very high wages for doing very little work and that all they had to do to reach this paradise was to pay $400 in advance"
A new dimension to the work arrived in the 1920s where the influx of visitors to the Wembley Exhibition meant that the traffic generated by air travel could no longer be ignored. It was decided to appoint one, (and only one), immigration officer to deal with incoming passengers at the main London airport in Croydon. By 1925 the Immigration Officer at Croydon Airport
was dealing with 15 aircraft movements per day. By 1937 the total numbers of people arriving by air reached 37,348, still a paltry number when compared to the numbers arriving by sea, (498,326). The numbers arriving at seaports would continue to rise but would be outstripped by the late 1950’s by the rise of air travel.
In 1924 staff at Dover and Folkestone were visited by the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. He addressed the staff and gave them some advice;
"If, when considering the desirability or otherwise of an alien's presence in the United Kingdom, doubt arises, benefit should be given to the country, not to the alien".
The departure of the founding Chief Inspector, Sir William Haldane-Porter in 1929 paved the way for a number of changes – most notably in recruitment policy which was now widened out to allow the promotion into the Service of Clerical Officers from the main Home Office.
1930 marked the height of the brief era of British airships such as the R101
. The airships' UK hub was at Cardington and may have had a very brief Immigration Service presence but no known public record exists. In 1932 a distinguished Frenchman recorded his impressions of UK immigration control;
"As soon as you set foot on British soil you experience a feeling of inferiority, purely relative and temporary however. You are a foreigner. What is worse, you are 'only a foreigner'. The impression is instantaneous. Whereas at Le Havre all travellers, no matter what their nationality, file in any old fashion past the passport officer without any distinction being made in favour of the French, here from the very outset you are parked on one side. You draw a false conclusion from it because you fail to see that only a small question of procedure is involved. There is, in fact, no necessity to scrutinise very carefully the passports of the Britishers. That being the case it is quite sound to pass them quickly through 'en bloc' . If we don't adopt this method, which is the right one, in France, it is not because we have more respect for foreigners than the English have. It is quite simply that we have less for our own nationals, and that we detail a single official to the examination of passports where they assign four or five. Perhaps our authorities are afraid that a Frenchman would die of amazement if he were to see at one stroke five of his own civil servants out of bed at six o'clock in the morning!"'
The 1930s otherwise presented their own unforeseen difficulties with the ever increasing numbers of refugees arriving from Europe fleeing from Nazi Germany
. Refugee arrivals rose from close to zero in 1930 to 3109 in 1933. By 1938 the figure was 11,000. After 1936 the figures were augmented by the numbers fleeing from war torn Spain. Although there was no publicly stated policy for the admission of political refugees before 1971, a settled but implicit approach had emerged during the 1930s. A Home Office memorandum of 1933 stated:
"we do not, of course admit that there is a 'right of asylum', but when we have to decide whether a particular political refugee is to be given admission to this country, we have to base our decision not on the question whether he is recognised by his Government but on whether it is in the public interest that he should not be admitted."
The handling of refugees was largely dependent on their being able to show that they could maintain themselves or be maintained. The Immigration Service cooperated with the Jewish support organizations who worked to provide support or provide sponsors but there was no agreed international approach to the handling of refugees. A Home Secretary memo to the Cabinet in 1933 shows that efforts were made to take a flexible approach but admitted that some refugees, ("a few") had been refused and returned to France where they awaited a relaxation of the rules. The memo shows that restrictions placed on those Jewish refugees were based mainly on economic fears for the employment market. Another reason, strange to say, was that the government feared opening up the employment market to people born in the UK who had since become naturalised foreign citizens. At that time they had no right to come back to the UK, (and were apparently not wanted), and the government did not want to raise their expectations that the rules would be relaxed.
Despite the foregoing the statistics for 1938 and 1939 show Germans as being the top nationality refused entry for both years and it is likely that a large proportion of these were potential refugees being returned to an uncertain fate. That said, the UK admitted more Germans than any other nationality in 1939 and continued to admit Germans throughout the war.
This bleak picture was in contrast to the ever increasing numbers of passengers travelling in happier circumstances on the great liners of the day. The RMS Queen Mary
for instance presented problems in quickly clearing large numbers of passengers and to do so within Victorian Customs Sheds was increasingly impractical. Shipping companies invited a, no doubt very agreeable, solution whereby Immigration Officers travelled 1st class on the liner itself or pre-cleared passengers in Cherbourg. In 1936 air traffic had grown to such an extent that a Chief Immigration Officer was appointed to take charge at Croydon Airport with additional responsibilities for immigration control in the new Gatwick terminal.
which, with its very own direct rail link to London and art deco architecture was the last word in airport design until it was replaced in the 1950's.
Croydon Airport was closed and became a fighter base; its passenger traffic transferred to Shoreham. The Dunkirk evacuation brought with it not only rescued troops but also vast numbers of refugees and displaced people who had to be identified and dealt with. Large numbers of Dutch and Belgian refugees were temporarily placed in camps on Brownsea Island
in Poole harbour. The possibility of enemy agents gaining entry under the guise of being part of this group was very real and Immigration Service staff were seconded to interview refugees and displaced people at special reception centres. The main one of these was the Royal Victoria Patriotic School at Wandsworth in London, whose MI6 interrogators included Colonel Oreste Pinto
. During four years over 30,000 people were interviewed at this centre. Other wartime work involving Immigration Service staff included the examination of British refugees exchanged with the Germans via Lisbon.
As the passenger traffic through the channel ports shrank the efforts of border control were focused on the merchant shipping that kept Britain's lifelines open and many staff were redeployed to Scottish ports, Bristol and English northern ports for the duration. An office was also set up at Dartmouth to deal with the Channel convoys. Staff were also later deployed to Poole to deal with flying boat services which flew routes to Lisbon via Ireland and were of especial interest because of the human flotsam and jetsum seeking to exit occupied Europe. These required careful scrutiny and it sometimes took six hours to clear a flight.
In Scotland the great "Queens" brought troop ships containing up to 15,000 troops each at Gourock. The ports of Glasgow and Gourock pooled their resources to deal with the Russian convoys. Scottish immigration staff also covered the airports at Dyce and Leuchars, (which played their part as terminals for the dangerous Mosquito service to Stockholm), and found themselves occasionally giving a reception to escaped resistance fighters arriving in the Shetland Islands. In the first six months of 1940 Scottish immigration officers examined almost 4000 survivors from upwards of 100 ships sunk by enemy action.
In 1941 at Rothesay dock, Clydebank,a German spy posing a a steward on a Belgian vessel, named Alfons Louis Timmermans, was detained, made the short trip from the Royal Victoria School to Wandsworth Prison where he was later hanged in June 1942. His is one of four entries in the refusal logs of the immigration service during World War 2 to show "Outcome - death by judicial execution".
A far reaching report by the Croydon Inspector after the war reviewed the processes for dealing with the growing number of air passengers. It suggested that these should, in future, be separated into inbound and outbound control areas and that arriving passengers should be marshalled or “funnelled” into one control area regardless of what aircraft they had arrived on. This had far reaching consequences and still forms the basis of controlling passenger’s movements at British airports today.
In 1946 the major airport controlling air traffic was Hurn Airport
in Dorset. Although well organised its location so far from London made it unpopular with carriers. It was agreed that the main passenger airport for London would be Heathrow, which opened on 1 May 1946 and came under the command of the Croydon Inspector. The vision of the Croydon Inspector for controlling air passengers took some time to be realised as the design of Heathrow in its early years took little account of the requirements of either Immigration or HM Customs and Excise.
It was still a time of displaced people finding their way home after the war and passenger liners still travelled to the West Indies to return servicemen who had been de-mobbed. The owners of the shipping lines wanted to reduce their costs for return journeys, which promised to otherwise have few passengers, and offered cut price fares to the UK. The first of these vessels to arrive, in 1947, was the now little remembered MV Ormonde which brought 108 migrant workers and attracted little notice. The arrival of the MV Empire Windrush, was an entirely different matter. She arrived at Tilbury and brought with her 500 regular passengers and a large number of stowaways as reported by Pathe news. The Empire Windrush's arrival was not a surprise; her slow progress towards Britain had been noted well in advance of her arrival. The Minister of Labour, George Isaacs, said,
"The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organised arrangements is bound to result in difficulty and disappointment. I hope no encouragement will be given to others to follow them".
Over and above the continuing movement of displaced people there were other signs of re-adjustment following the end of the war. The Polish Resettlement Act 1947
allowed 200,000 Polish citizens to stay following the war and it took until 1952 for the wartime restrictions on travel between the UK and Ireland to be abolished and a Common Travel Area
was created between all the islands which still exists today. Numbers of staff increased in the early 1950s to deal with the residual screening of people who had arrived during the war who, although they had undergone screening at reception centres had still to have their status regularised.
The 1953 Aliens Order “tidied up” and updated some of the regulations which had been in force since the First World War – not least, finally allowing in legislation for the existence of flying machines. The 1950s brought special challenges such as the influx of visitors for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
in 1953, a year which also saw the opening of the new passenger car ferry terminal at Eastern Docks, Dover. During the parliamentary debate for the 1953 Act the Home Secretary was asked how many people were currently in detention and advised that on 22 July 1953 the total number of immigration detainees in the UK was 11.
The position of refugees had been under review since the war. Questions had necessarily been posed as to whether more could and should have been done to save Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. The result was the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. Originally intended to encompass only European refugees it was later extended to all countries. Overlapping waves of refugees had to be dealt with in the wake of the Suez Crisis
and Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Between 19 November and 3 December 1956 4221 refugees arrived at Dover and the Immigration Service was increasingly hard pressed. At that time it numbered fewer than 400 staff, including managers, to cover 30 different ports across the United Kingdom 24 hours per day and seven days a week.
Extra staff were being assigned to the London airports to deal with the increase in air traffic. Croydon Airport had long been recognised as too small to deal with future needs and finally closed its doors to commercial traffic in 1959. Also in 1959, a watershed moment arrived where, for the first time, more passengers arrived by air than by sea, (741,669 to 738,367).
In the early 1960s government ministers, as well as private employers, started to recruit directly in the West Indies. These included Enoch Powell
, who actively encouraged the migration of medical staff from India and the West Indies during his time as Minister for Health. The London Transport executive made an agreement with the Barbadian Immigration Liaison Service. Other employers, such as the British Hotel and Restaurant Association, made similar agreements. In the 1950s most Indian migrant workers to arrive in Britain were Sikhs from the rural areas of the Punjab, where the partition of the Punjab between India and Pakistan had created immense pressure on land resources during the 1950s and 1960s, greatly increasing such emigration from then on. In the period immediately before and after the introduction of the 1962 Act, the entry of dependents into Britain increased almost threefold as families attempted to 'beat the act', amidst widespread fears that Britain planned to permanently close its doors to its citizens in the New Commonwealth, including the families of those already living in Britain. Total "New" Commonwealth immigration thus grew from 21,550 entrants in 1959, to 58,300 in 1960. A year later this last figure had more than doubled and a record 125,400 "New" Commonwealth immigrants entered the UK in 1961. The term "new" Commonwealth is a matter discussed in following sections.
Consideration of legislation to place controls on Commonwealth citizens had by 1960 already been under active consideration for some years. A Cabinet committee comprising senior Cabinet members including the Home Secretary produced a report in 1956 which detailed the numbers of arriving black and asian migrants in the early 1950s. It directly addressed what it saw as the key issue of migration from "coloured territories". It outlined the new circumstances that had to be addressed given the changed circumstances;
"The principle that the United Kingdom should maintain an open door for British subjects grew up tacitly at a time when the coloured races of the Commonwealth were at a more primitive stage of development than now. There was no danger then of a coloured invasion of this country".
The report conceded, with clear frustration, that there were few grounds to impose a new Act on the basis of protecting the employment market given that a number of British employers, including London Transport, British Railways and the NHS were actively recruiting in the West Indies. It noted too that there was little evidence of "inter-breeding" but expressed its alarm at the future possibility and the "incalculable".."long term consequences".
The report, odious to most modern eyes and current attitudes, laid out its cards squarely in favour of racially based immigration controls. The report discussed the possibility that the British public might react badly to a law that was seen to be overtly racist and attempted to address the central difficulty of putting legislation into place that met its aims without appearing to be racially motivated; a difficult job in the circumstances. It noted, "There is no doubt that even though a Bill...would in form be non-discriminatory, it would nevertheless be clear against whom the Bill was really directed". The committee agreed that, presentationally, it would be best to emphasise the potential housing shortages that further migration might bring about.
The legislators' later intentions in 1961/62 are therefore not in doubt and the famous speech by Enoch Powell in 1968 merely outlined the thinking that had apparently been going on behind closed doors for a decade or more. It is useful to explore the background discussions that clearly went on at the time, (and continued to go on - see the memo in the next section), in order to place in context and highlight the difficulty that the legislation placed upon immigration officers who were commanded in high moral tones at the outset of the Act to apply a law equally whose intention was anything but. Where a law is based on unspoken assumptions it is left to those enforcing it to try and impose some kind of consistency. The Immigration Service was handed a bad law with too few powers to enforce its tacit aims and an inbuilt likelihood that they would be accused of prejudice in the way that it was applied. The instincts of law enforcement officers are to rely on strongly defined powers and rules and the service was tainted by association with the suspect motives of the legislators until at least the early 1980s by which time a more coherent and consistent body of law had emerged.
came about as a result of growing public and political unease regarding the impact of migration from the, now fast declining, British Empire
. West Indian immigration, (especially), had, since the war, continued to grow fairly gently but steadily until there were by 1956 around 100,000 new West Indian migrants in the UK. There were echoes of the public outcry which had brought about the 1905 Act and the political arguments, in public at least, similarly attempted to focus on the economic control of migrant labour and attempted to skirt around the underlying racial prejudices that were voiced by their constituents. Whatever the motivations of those concerned, it was clear that the common citizenship status shared by the various members of the Empire, or Commonwealth
, as it was becoming known, was untenable with a world population growing more mobile. There was also a better understanding than there had been in 1948 that Britain’s world position had irrevocably changed as it moved away from the assumptions of empire towards potential membership of the European Economic Community
.
The new Act was seen by its opponents as draconian, "a monstrous Bill", but its limitations were many - some of these are dealt with in the section on the history of in-country enforcement, (see index). The question of what to do with those facilitating illegal entry was addressed but seen as a particularly theoretical clause. The Attorney General did not believe that it would lead to any prosecutions.
"This is a necessary provision, though I doubt very much whether there will be any prosecutions under it, because the difficulties of proving that a particular individual has reasonable grounds for believing the man to be an illegal immigrant, or that he knows it, are not likely to lead to many prosecutions".
Preparations to implement the new Act included a recruitment campaign in 1962 which brought the staffing of the Immigration Service up to 500 ready for the start date on 1 July 1962. At midnight on 30 June 1962 the door was literally closed on some people as newly labelled entrances at Heathrow were uncovered and old ones shut.
The new rules for Commonwealth citizens meant that those determined to settle in the UK, but who no longer qualified, had to find new ways of achieving this. Commonwealth
governments had warned that the new restrictions would create a black market in forged documentation and they were proven correct. The 1960s saw an emergent boom, in immigration terms, of bogus students who saw study, whether real or not, as a way to get a foot in the door. A market grew in bogus colleges
and forged documents provided by racketeers who would, for a price, provide a complete package comprising travel, documents and illegal work. They would reclaim their investment, with interest, on a proportion of the migrant’s illicit wages. Other developing trends included bogus marriages and forged birth certificates which were designed to allow “children” to join relatives in the UK as dependants despite being clearly above the permitted age. The ability of either the Immigration Service, or their administrative HQ at Princeton House in High Holborn, to combat these abuses was limited. The entire administrative strength of the Immigration and Nationality Dept at Princeton House was approximately 300 and before 1962 IND was divided into three "Divisions" B1, (casework), B2, (policy) and A2, (admin). In 1962 another Division was created, B3, to deal with deportation casework. No formal operational enforcement and detection structure was to come into being until the 1970s and realistic legal powers to deal with illegal migrants would not appear until 1973 with the implementation of the 1971 Act.
The quality of Entry Clearances, (Visas), issued abroad in the newly controlled Commonwealth countries also gave cause for concern when presented at British ports. The initial assumption when the 1962 Act was introduced was that these would be taken at face value on arrival. There was also an instruction to Immigration Officers and general understanding that written entry conditions would only be recorded and stored in exceptional circumstances. By 1965 new instructions had been issued which, although very liberal by later standards, encouraged control officers to impose conditions more often and to refuse people who had clearly obtained entry clearances by misrepresentation.
Memo to Cabinet by Home Secretary Frank Soskice
29th Jan 1965 (extracts)
Evasion takes different forms. One is for the evader to pass himself off as a person with a legal right of entry. He may pretend to be under 16 when he is older, or the son of a Commonwealth citizen already here. Many of these claims are made more difficult to counter because they are supported by officially issued passports giving false particulars, which can be arranged from some countries without much difficulty...another device is to pose as a student or visitor...there are genuine students who stay on whether or not they complete their studies and genuine visitors who change their minds.
The main type of defence against this type of evasion is for the immigration officer to admit the student or visitor about whom he is suspicious on condition that he leaves the country within a specified time...the power exists but has been little used because the means of enforcement are defective...there is no good way to keep track of individuals admitted under conditions.
Second, there is no simple power to enforce the condition, ie: to require the defaulter, if traced, to leave the country.....The net intake of coloured Commonwealth immigrants, (see footnote), during 1964 was 64,000...I think coloured Commonwealth citizens are coming faster than they can be absorbed into the community”.
(A footnote states): “This expression is used as a term of art to mean those Commonwealth citizens who are not citizens of Canada, Australia or New Zealand. All the statistics in this memorandum relate to coloured Commonwealth citizens”.
The above memo is startling to modern eyes for two main reasons; firstly the candid admission that the control was toothless at the point of entry and non existent afterwards and, secondly, for its relaxed affirmation of a two tier approach to the law by the Home Office on the basis of race. The Home Secretary’s memo does not use the terms “old” and “new” Commonwealth but the division of nationalities described matches the terms as used in published Immigration statistics until the early 1980’s. This differentiation had no basis in immigration or nationality law and, as the memo makes clear, was a simple euphemism, or "term of art", for “coloured”, (as they put it), and white migrants.
There were possible cultural, political and practical reasons to treat the two groups of nationalities differently such as the historic ties of kinship and a lasting gratitude to those countries which had provided commonwealth forces during both world wars. There was also the compelling economic argument that there was more cause for concern over economic migration from countries which were relatively poorer. Whatever the merits of these arguments they are undermined by the evidence within the memo, and elsewhere, that the Home Office and government policy of the time was primarily motivated by a need to differentiate on the basis of race.
In the same way that the advent of aircraft caught legislators by surprise, so too did the invention of the Hovercraft. There was much debate in immigration policy concerning how this strange new machine should be defined. Was it a ship or an aircraft? Were passengers arriving by land,sea or air? A classic Civil Service compromise was reached; the machine was an aircraft which arrived at a seaport. More serious questions were being asked at the end of the 1960s concerning immigration following the infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech
by Enoch Powell. The highly emotive speech changed the political landscape for anyone attempting to consider practical, administrative issues for many years to come. Thirty-nine Heathrow immigration officers, very unwisely, wrote to Enoch Powell in support of tougher controls whereupon he made their note public. Although their concerns were based on what they saw as a lack of administrative powers to do their job effectively they did, by associating themselves with the speech, damage their impartiality as Civil Servants and they were disciplined as a consequence.
On 8 June 1968 Immigration Officers at Heathrow detained James Earl Ray
, the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr.
, attempting to travel on a false passport. Another event in 1968, infinitely less serious but still noteworthy as providing some of the colour of the time, was the refusal of the Captain Beefheart
Magic Band at Heathrow Airport. The Refusal of Leave to Land report by the, (sadly), unnamed immigration officer recounts the event with evident relish.
The East African countries, on attaining independence, pursued a policy of Africanization that required residents to demonstrate their allegiance to the new state. Many Indians in Kenya
for instance either did not fulfill the conditions for acquiring the new citizenship or did not register within the time limit, preferring to wait and see how their fortunes were likely to go in the new regime before committing themselves. Some may have been reluctant to lose their British connection. For many of those who did not acquire the new citizenship, serious consequences ensued. They lost their employment or their livelihood, and sought to use whatever protection their citizenship of the UK and Colonies could offer them. Their passports had been issued by the British High Commission and, therefore, under the 1962 Act they were not subject to immigration control. They had, as British subjects, right of entry into the UK. In 1967, Asians from Kenya and Uganda, fearing discrimination from their own national governments, began to arrive in Britain.
The potential numbers of those eligible to travel to the UK created alarm, and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 was rushed through Parliament. The new Act provided that British subjects would be free from immigration control only if they, or at least one of their parents or grandparents, had been born, adopted, registered or naturalised in the UK. The issue of a passport by a British High Commission thus ceased to be a qualification for entry free of control. For those subject to control, another voucher system was introduced. This one was based on tight quotas.
The 1968 Act directly, and deliberately, favoured white commonwealth citizens more likely to have British ancestry. Cabinet papers released in 2002 showed that the thrust of the legislation was designed to have this effect.
By the end of the 1960s the previous practice of detaining immigration offenders in prison was increasingly unworkable as numbers of detainees rose. A dedicated facility was opened near Heathrow in a disused RAF base which became the Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre. The accommodation had reminders of its history and enjoyed bomb proof doors among other features. At Gatwick Airport temporary detention accommodation was located in the disused 1930s air terminal and housed around 15 detainees. This building was shared, rather incongruously, with the British Airways social club.
By the end of the 1960s immigration legislation and rules were drawn from too many sources, out of date, clumsily drafted in haste or misconceived. Consensus was reached that a completely new Immigration Act was needed to draw together or re-write the law in a way that would tighten controls and clarify the rules. This major reappraisal and consolidation of immigration law coincided with an expansion of the Immigration Branch administrative HQ, change of name and a change of location. In 1970 the Immigration Branch became the Immigration and Nationality Department and, in 1972, it relocated from High Holborn to Croydon where it took up residence at the recently built Lunar House
.
The Immigration Act 1971
gave right of abode in the UK to those it defined as ‘patrials’. These were:
The Act replaced employment vouchers with Work permit
s, allowing only temporary residence. Commonwealth citizens who had been settled in the UK for five years when the Act came into force, (1 January 1973), also had the right to register and thus possibly the right of abode. Others would be subject to immigration controls. Apart from the five year residence qualification, the right to live in the UK and to enter free from immigration control was determined by birth or parentage, not by nationality.
On the same day that the new Act came into force, 1 January 1973, the UK entered the European Economic Community (EEC). At the same time that immigration restrictions were confirmed for Commonwealth citizens with a traditional allegiance to Britain, a new category of privilege was created for the European nationals who had formed the bulk of the work of the immigrations service for the preceding 50 years. Membership of the European Community, now the European Union, encompassed the right of movement of workers within member states. The practical reality of membership from an immigration control standpoint was that EU nationals were separated from other arriving passengers. As, in theory at least, they could be excluded or deported, (for instance following criminal conviction), there still continued checks against warnings lists. By 1970 the staff numbers within the Immigration Service had risen to approximately 1100 - rather more than double the administration workers at its London HQ.
Despite the legislation of 1968 and 1971 the numbers of Commonwealth citizens coming to settle still caused political anxiety - especially where projections of future trends were based on a list of vague assumptions. In October 1978, the government statistical service predicted, for the benefit of the then Prime Minister James Callaghan, that the number of people of New Commonwealth and Pakistani origin would rise from 1.6 million in 1976 to between three and four million by the end of the century. Mr Callaghan's hand-written note on the draft document reads:
"On reading this, it seems to be full of one or other of: 'assumptions'; 'estimates'; 'arbitrary assumptions'; 'uncertainty'; 'projections'; 'scarcely any evidence'; and 'higher and lower projections'... This isn't statistics; it's astrology…This won't alter policy; it won't alter the facts; it will give a certain spurious validity to the future… If this is the best the Astrologer- General can do, I would not publish."
The lack of reliable statistics and access to data was to be a recurring theme throughout the 1980's and beyond. The old "Traffic Index" of manually collated landing and embarkation cards was replaced by a new computer system, (INDECS), in 1979 but the primitive database was hardly an improvement. Immigration Officers working in 24 hour ports-of-entry only had access to the main immigration database via telephone during office hours Monday to Friday. For the most part, immigration officers worked as they had always done, in the dark, on the basis of the story they heard and the documents in front of them.
- which again tightened citizenship critera. From an immigration control standpoint there was growing concern, and heated debate, concerning the restrictions placed on foreign spouses joining UK partners. There was evidence that marriage was being used by some as a means to circumvent the stricter settlement rules and a particular focus on applications from the Indian sub-continent. In the absence of overseas visa controls there was an incentive for prospective spouses to attempt to gain entry as visitors and apply for stay on the basis of marriage once in the UK once the marriage had taken place. The attempts by the Immigration Service at ports to investigate suspected bogus marriages impacted on cultural sensitivities where the differences between marriages arranged legitimately according to custom and those arranged for immigration purposes were notoriously difficult to separate. To investigate the complexities of the applications within a port of entry control environment was far from ideal and the Service was criticised for insensitivity in its dealings with these cases, especially in the misuse of medical examinations. In 1983 new immigration rules regarding marriage were introduced which required people to satisfy IND and UKIS that the "primary purpose" of the marriage was not for immigration purposes.
The thrust of IND's policy throughout the 1980's was to continue to reassure public and political opinion that the numbers of those settling in the UK was under control and to try and take the heat out the immigration issue. The published statistics for those being allowed residence during the 1970's have a reassuring uniformity. "About 50,000" seems to have been an accepted norm and the Control of Immigration Statistics documents published by the Home Office continued in to the early 1980's to divide those Commonwealth citizens settling in the UK between "old and "new" Commonwealth to give a further reassurance that the correct emphasis between national groups was being maintained. The emphasis on settlement statistics was the most important statistical indicator until the explosion in asylum numbers in the early 1990's.
The pressures on the inbound controls presented by the growth in numbers and rates of refusal for some nationalities meant that, by 1986, the case for new visa requirements became very strong and, on 1 September 1986, it was announced that there would be new visa restrictions for people of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Pakistan. For reasons which are not readily explainable the visa restrictions did not come into force until 15 October. The ensuing panic over the weeks inbetween the announcement and implementation of the new rules brought Heathrow Airport to a standstill and the evening television news bulletins contained hugely embarrassing images of hundreds of detainees camped in the main arrivals hall at Terminal 3 awaiting processing. Between 1st September and 15th October 8,024 people were detained on arrival at Terminal 3. Hundreds of detainees were taken to hastily arranged reception centres and the low point came on 14 October 1986 when 1020 people were detained on arrival in one day, 580 of which were Bangladeshi nationals.
The imposition of blanket visa controls on these Commonwealth countries in 1986 can possibly be seen as the final stage of the process that had started in 1962 and an attempt to move away from the inconsistencies of the past. There was now an increasingly long list of countries whose people would require visas before coming to the UK, even as visitors. Although the concept was not voiced at the time it was the start of a longer term policy of "exporting the border", that is, to move the border control abroad so as to avoid the costly processes of in-country detention, in-country appeals and combating illegal entry. This was good in theory but had to be balanced against the very formidable costs of setting up visa issuing posts abroad and the fact that the management of those posts came under the purview of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Immigration Officers' sent overseas to staff these posts were seconded to the F&CO. The F&CO had their own proper concerns about maintaining good relations with Britain's trading partners and not creating any barriers to trade.
The growing pressures on detention accommodation resulted in an imaginative attempt to provide new spaces by means of a floating detention centre. The Earl William was an ex cross-channel ferry refitted for a new role as a static, secure holding facility moored at Harwich. The use of a moored vessel provoked hostile opposition from those who saw the idea as a modern day Prison hulk. The Home Office pressed forward with the idea and the Earl William was contracted into service under the management of Securicor, who had been running immigration detention facilities since 1970. Acceptance of the new arrangements required that the Earl William prove itself as cost effective, humane and secure. In October 1987 the strongest gale to hit England in 200 years broke the vessel free of its moorings and it ran aground on a sandbank. Although none of its 78 detainees was injured the credibility of the exercise was fatally undermined and it was not used again.
The 1987 Carriers Liability Act sought to place greater responsibility on those bringing passengers to the UK to verify that their documentation was in order. The Act gave powers to fine the carrier £1000 for each inadmissible passenger. This fine was doubled in August 1991 and two years later extended to cover passengers without transit visas where these were required. This applied as much to lorry drivers and owners of small aircraft as it did to international airlines and was fiercely resisted by the transport lobby. That the Act was needed was evidenced by the rise in the numbers of clandestine illegal entrants that still continued to arrive despite the sanctions imposed. By 1998 8000 illegal entrants were arriving clandestinely and being detected emerging from lorries where in 1992 there had been 500. The Act insisted that carriers, including hauliers, should take responsibility for those they brought to the UK but allowed that carriers could not be expected to be experts in forged or counterfeit documents. The fine was applied however where, in the opinion of the Immigration Service, the forgery was "readily apparent". Carriers were also fined for the more demonstrable errors of transporting people without identity documents or without a visa where they were required to have one. The 1987 Act was later repealed and replaced by provisions within the 1999 Act. Between its implementation and 1991 approximately £30m in fines were imposed. The practical effect of the Act from an Immigration Service perspective was to create a great deal of additional work in collecting evidence and debating with carriers whether or not they were liable. The service received no part of the revenue from the fines to offset its additional costs.
The numbers of "designated" ports, ie: those licensed to allow international passengers rose in 1987 to include Leeds/Bradford Airport, Newcastle and Edinburgh and a new terminal opened at Gatwick in 1988.
The fall of the Berlin Wall
brought with it a new political landscape, opened up travel routes long closed and meant the re-emergence of nationalities which had been submerged within the Soviet bloc. For immigration officers at ports prior to 1989 the arrival of a person with an East German passport was a notable event which would involve the interest of Special Branch. The way in which they were subsequently dealt with went from one extreme to the other and were soon accepted as readily as other German passports. The other side of the coin was the concern at the potential movement of labour from other countries in Eastern Europe and visa controls were applied in 1992.
HQ in Croydon. The application of the 1951 Convention dealing with the treatment of refugees was still being applied, to a large extent, to those people fleeing persecution from behind the Iron Curtain
.
The total number of asylum applications in 1979 was 1563 and by 1988 had risen, fairly steadily but not too dramatically, to 3998. In 1989 the numbers of applications rose sharply, to 11640, and by 1991 had reached 44840. The reasons for the dramatic rise are complex and have to be seen in the context of international travel patterns to other European nations.
Some saw the general drift of migration away from legitimate to various illegal routes and then on through the asylum system as a linked process. Peter Tompkins CBE was HM Chief Inspector of the Immigration Service between 1981-1991 and, in 1994, wrote;
"As migratory pressure began to increase, governments reacted with tougher legislation in relation to settlement, only to experience a rise in the number of those seeking intial entry as visitors, or students, and overstaying. Closing these loopholes was followed by additional evasion though marriages of convenience. The imposition of fresh visa requirements as governments sought to relieve pressure on frontier controls led directly to an upsurge in the use of forged and falsified travel documents which, in turn, sparked off penalty legislation putting pressure on carriers to check documents prior to embarkation. The latest development is the so-called inadmissable passenger who arrives with falsified documents, or no documents at all, and goes on to claim asylum.....the reality is that increased migratory pressure has created an environment where most immigration policies are irrelevant because they bear so little relation to what actually happens".
Peter Tompkins was the last HM Chief Inspector to have risen through the ranks steeped in the gritty practicalities of front-line border control. His 1994 essay also made some astute predictions for the future;
"Politicians... will produce rhetoric about quotas, family unification and special skills togther with undertakings to maintain a strict line on enforcement. They will have little or no chance of succeeding because, like their predecessors, they will neglect to provide adequate control machinery for their policies....The most revolutionary change, already well under way, will see the transfer of activity from airport arrivals to airline check-in desks at departure points...these pre-entry controls need to be supplemented by equally radical changes in after entry enforcement. Three essential requirements are comprehensively enforced employer sanctions, full exchange of information from central and local government authorities to control authorities and, most importantly, the provision of sufficient detention accommodation.."
These prescient recommendations from Peter Tompkins could have provided the blueprint for immigration control for the next 15 years. All of these things came to pass to one degree or other but only after many false starts.
Only a very small proportion, 5% in 1994, of applicants were granted full refugee status. Of the others a larger number were granted Exceptional Leave, (later re-titled Discretionary Leave), usually on the basis that other compassionate circumstances applied such as family ties.
The rates of refusal highlighted a growth in applicants whose motive was found to be economic migration rather than genuine fear. The reasons for the rapid increase in arrivals included increasing availability of cheaper air travel, the existence by then of community groups able to provide support on arrival, relative economic prosperity that made employment possible, the availability of Legal aid
to pursue the claim and eligibility to certain benefits and accommodation. For those who might otherwise have intended to enter and work illegally the benefit of an outstanding asylum claim was the legitimacy it conferred and safety as regards arrest.
The administrative processes governing asylum applications were overwhelmed and a backlog started to accumulate. The increased delays meant more applicants eventually found themselves eligible for concessions based on the length of time the process had taken and this, in turn, encouraged speculative applications from those who saw no future in pursuing the difficult alternatives offered of seeking permission to remain through legitimate settlement or approved employment. As numbers rose, a decreasing proportion were found to qualify for refugee status. In 1980, in the United Kingdom, 64 per cent. of claimants were recognised as refugees. In 1990, the figure was about 25 per cent.
New challenges emerged for the Immigration Service who encountered asylum seekers at ports and in-country. Between 1995 and 2000 the newest problem the Immigration Service faced was the growth in asylum seekers entering via the Channel Tunnel
with 700 a month presenting themselves at Waterloo station
. Waterloo, as an international terminal, was later replaced by the control at the impressively refurbished St Pancras station and the creation of "juxtaposed controls" agreed by the Sangatte Protocol of 1992 which was itself brought into being by the Channel Tunnel (International Arrangements) Order 1993. This allowed for control zones to be set up at each end of the tunnel; the British end at St Pancras operated by French officers and the French control zone at Coquelles staffed by UK Immigration Officers. A passenger at Coquelles was still legally in France; the international frontier was at the mid-point of the tunnel. In immigration terms a person did not enter the UK until they left the terminal at Cheriton. This brought about some complex scenarios; it was not possible to claim asylum in the UK at Coquelles but it was possible to enter the control area illegally and be treated as an illegal entrant.
Most asylum applicants detected at ports of entry had no identifying documentation but the asylum legislation trumped the immigration rules and it was not legally or physically possible to detain all those who arrived. The Immigration Service at ports did its best to intercept new arrivals as they emerged from inbound aircraft before they could destroy the passports they had used to travel. The realities of the numbers of people arriving and the sheer scale of aircraft movements made 100% interception impossible and, often, the first that immigration officers at ports knew of an undocumented asylum seeker was their appearance at the passport control. Efforts would immediately be made to identify by which route they had travelled and, equally importantly, the agents or "facilitators" who had accompanied them. Arriving asylum seekers would then enter into an increasingly well worn process of documentation, medical checks and contact with refugee support bodies and Local Authorities.
A new team to counter the growing trend of facilitation of asylum and illegal entry at seaports, both clandestine and documentary abuse, was created at Dover in 1994. The Facilitation Support Unit (FSU) was jointly staffed by the Immigration Service and Kent Police. The unit was to develop essential expertise in bringing prosecutions against those people smuggling
illegal entrants. A report to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2001 said,
"In 1999, the FSU investigated 299 incidents and arrested 410 persons suspected of facilitating a total of 1,803 illegal entrants/asylum claimants. In the same period, 105 trials were completed involving 120 defendants and resulting in 106 convictions. Custodial sentences exceeding 172 years were imposed".
The efforts made to identify and document the arriving asylum seeker were vital to the end of the process where an application was refused. Without proof of identity and nationality it was impossible to document the person so as to ensure that they could be removed. Proof of an inbound carrier allowed the removal of the person to their last port of embarkation. Without evidence of any of these removal would be very much more difficult whatever the outcome of the claim. Fingerprinting of asylum seekers was vital to this process, and was being considered by 1991. Legal powers to fingerprint asylum seekers were finally given within the 1993 Asylum and Immigration Act in the teeth of strong opposition from those who viewed this as criminalising asylum seekers.
The gaps in the identification process presented opportunities to fraudsters to make multiple applications in various identities so as to duplicate payment of benefits; in 1991, for instance, eight asylum applicants were found to have made 100 asylum and social security applications between them. One applicant had 49 identities and another had 34. One suspect was found in possession of 14 Department of Social Security payment books. Such instances provided some evidence that some asylum seekers were motivated by the availability of benefits but this was disputed by those who cited as an alternative incentive the length of time that applications took to be resolved.
In 1983 the total Immigration detention
space available to the Immigration Service was approximately 180 spaces located at the major London airports. Elsewhere, other ports made use of local prison spaces. The relatively small number of beds were designed to cater for short stay cases of people soon to be removed from the country having been refused at a port of entry.
By 1987 it was recognised that the available space was woefully inadequate and an attempt was made to address this by use of a floating detention vessel, (see above). The failure of the Earl William was a severe blow which meant that the numbers of those who had to be released on temporary admission, (immigration bail), grew. The situation did not improve until the opening of Campsfield House
Detention Centre in 1993 which provided 200 extra spaces. The expansion led to a more centralised management of the detention estate whereas before the centres had largely been managed by the airports that they served. On 25th May 1995 the total number of people held in immigration detention centres was recorded as 381 with a further 508 being held in prisons under immigration powers.
The pressure on the detention estate grew as the numbers of asylum applicants rose during the 1990’s. As detention usage grew so did the costs - £7.76m in 1993/4 rising to £17.8m by 1996/97. Tinsley House, which opened in 1996 at Gatwick, was the first purpose built immigration detention centre.
titled Fairer, faster and firmer - a modern approach to immigration and asylum which promised an expansion of the detention estate. The result was a flurry of Public Finance Initiatives to build centres at Oakington
, (Cambridge), Yarlswood (Bedford), Dungavel
, (Scotland) and a new expanded centre at Harmondsworth near Heathrow which increased the overall capacity by over 1500. Expansion brought the total capacity of immigration detention centres to approximately 2,800 by 2005.
This massive expansion was driven by the need to maintain control not only of people arriving in the UK who had been refused, but also by the dramatic rise of enforcement within the UK over the period. The removal of those whose asylum claims had failed became the top priority but the job of tracing and detaining failed asylum seekers was only the beginning of an often tortuous process of dealing with many barriers to their removal. These included renewed applications, resurrected appeals, judicial review, MPs representations, applications to stay on the basis of marriage, human rights appeals on the basis of family ties and the problems associated with obtaining travel documentation that would actually allow the removal to take place. Maintaining control of the person during this process was, and is, seen as essential to successfully enforcing immigration removals for adults.
The announcement in 1998 that IND had published its instructions on the internet was a tangible sign that the organisation was looking to the future possibilities offered by the IT revolution and was set for modernisation. The document "Fairer, faster, firmer" outlined what it considered to be the failings of the previous decade and set out its ideas for the future. One of the major successes of recent times, (as noted by Peter Tompkins above), had been the establishment by the Immigration Service of a team of Airline Liaison Officers whose job was to stop inadmissible passengers at their point of departure abroad. The first of these had been posted to New Delhi as long before as 1993 and quickly established good links with local police and immigration officials. There were some notable successes and, although undocumented arrivals had risen by 17% the previous year, this was not the case where the ALO’s were deployed. In 1998 ALO's in five locations, working under a code of conduct ratified by the Air Transport Association Control Authority Working Group, prevented 2095 passengers travelling with suspect documentation. In 1999, 4999 inadmissable passenger were identified in 17 locations. By 2001, 57 ALO's had been deployed abroad.
Another key change was a reappraisal of how and when people should be notified of their permission to enter the UK. This work was conducted under the banner “flexibility” and reconsidered how it was best to give people permission to enter, whether it was still necessary in all cases and whether permission could be granted as part of the visa process abroad. This was part of a move to modernise working processes at ports which had barely changed in their basics since 1962. The general aims, as reported to the Home Affairs Select Committee, were to speed up passenger flows and to make better use of data supplied by carriers to identify facilitators and racketeers. Flexibility was contained in the Immigration (Leave to Enter and Remain) Order 2000 and came into effect 30th July 2000. It paved the way for:
There were moves to set up a more joined up intelligence network, based on the police's National Intelligence Model, whose intention was to ensure " that information is fully researched, developed and analysed to provide intelligence which enables senior managers to provide strategic direction, make tactical resourcing decisions about operational matters and manage risk". It was planned to expand the use of fingerprinting and, for enforcement, there was a major change of direction with ambitious plans to train immigration officers to make use of their powers of arrest, give them more powers of search and make them less reliant on police resources.These were just a few items on a lengthy programme of changes, backed up by substantial promises of money and legislative time in Parliament. The document was a serious statement of intent and bore the hallmarks of a small organisation evolving into a larger and very much more professional organisation but, at its heart, was a central IT project that was intended to be the hub of all the administration of casework within the Croydon HQ.
, (PFI) agreed between IND and an IT consortium led by Siemens Business Services signed in 1996 and scheduled for completion in 1998. It was a well meant but ultimately over ambitious venture intended to provide the department with a “paperless” office where cases, especially asylum cases, would be electronically prioritised and actioned without the old fashioned processes involving transport and storage of thousands of paper based files. The system, it was hoped, would not only speed up the process but would pay for itself through a 40% reduction in staff. The new system would also do away with the need for the department to be divided into separate administrative “Divisions”. The new team based casework teams would be formed within a new multi-skilled “Integrated Casework Directorate”.
There was an urgent need to modernise the casework systems in IND. The case management systems had barely changed since the 1970’s when staff had been counted in hundreds. By 1997 they numbered over 5000 and were dealing with an ever increasing backlog of asylum cases. All cases were considered on paper files and the separate “Divisions” within IND would deal with a particular aspect, eg: applications to stay longer in the UK were dealt with by B1 Division; if there was an appeal a separate appeals file would be raised and tied to the first file; if an asylum claim was being considered or deportation action was being considered then more files would be added and so on. These ever weightier files would make a stately progress from one area of IND to another by hand – conveyed by a battalion of messengers and their movements recorded on card indices, until an electronic tracking system was introduced in the 1980s. The Immigration Service, for its part, also produced paper files and, if there was no bar to removing the person, would have no need to liaise with the centre. But, as further appeals were introduced, asylum applications rose and other barriers were raised that according to standing rules needed the scrutiny of an HQ caseworker. The numbers of requests for “authority to remove” that were passed to Croydon rose and added yet more pressure to the creaking system. The delays in the process were exploited by legal advisors who realised that any removal could be delayed by continued representation, renewed appeals and applications to stay, threats of Judicial Review and, last but by no means least, after 2000, Human Rights Act appeals. The Casework Programme went further than merely providing a database tool to IND caseworkers. The programme was intended to restructure the department into a new Integrated Caseworking Directorate, (ICD), which would comprise huge, multi-skilled teams. Steps were taken to prepare for the changes by selecting the staff who would transfer to the new area and prepare the way for reducing the overall numbers of staff. So confident was IND in this programme that it commenced plans to make staff redundant and advertised terms.
The delivery of the IT system in 1998 was delayed but there was an interim rollout of a computer network in readiness and the old caseworking teams were disbanded. These included the various teams such as those dealing with deportation of foreign national criminals and the teams which had provided support to the Immigration Service at ports and in enforcement. The assumption behind the programme was that these specialisms would be absorbed within the new multi-skilled teams.
The reorganisation which started in December 1998 had an immediate impact in that the system ground to halt. Urgent steps were taken to restore some kind of service but the infrastructure that had previously supported the thousands of enquiries, the requests for return of passports for travel, the MPs representations, enquiries from Courts, Prisons and legal representatives, the review procedures that allowed the Immigration Service to continue with removals – had all been seriously damaged or destroyed. Frantic efforts were made to repair the damage against the expectation that all would be well once the promised IT system was actually rolled out. In early 2001, as reported by Computer Weekly at the time, Siemens conceded that they were unable to deliver the IT system that was supposed to form the heart of the process. The impact on IND of dismantling its administrative machine and losing experienced staff while dealing with a continuing rise in workload was catastrophic.
, (HAC), started a wide ranging enquiry into the reasons for the rise in asylum and the way that IND and the Immigration Service had handled the issues. During the course of collating evidence for the enquiry the HAC visited the Red Cross centre at Sangatte near Calais and saw for themselves the numbers of would be refugees waiting to try and enter the UK clandestinely. The issues were pushed higher up the political agenda by an awful tragedy that that took place on 19th June that year when 58 Chinese people were found dead in the back of a sealed lorry at Dover. The Dutch driver was later charged with manslaughter. The deaths of the Chinese people at Dover brought about a new focus on the fact that the trafficking of people was now more than the exploitation of displaced people by opportunistic individuals it was the now, (in this instance Triad based), organised crime. There was nothing new in this, Chinese trafficking
had been noted before World War 1, but the scale of the business was growing. The HAC discussed what they described as the "pull factor", what it was that made Britain an attractive destination relative to other countries and what might be done to reduce this.
Another event in February 2000 also put asylum seekers of the newspaper front pages. A group of nine Afghan nationals hijacked an aircraft and forced it to fly to Stansted Airport whereupon they eventually surrendered themselves. They and 79 of the passengers claimed asylum. The Afghan hijackers case was to become a political headache that highlighted the lack of powers the Home Office actually had. The then Home Secretary, Jack Straw
, promised tough action but, a court ruled in 2004 that, under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, they could not be sent back to Afghanistan because their lives would be endangered. By 2006 the hijackers eventually won both their release and permission to stay in the UK. The ruling that allowed the hijackers to stay was roundly condemned by the Prime Minister, who described it as an "abuse of common sense", and Home Secretary who blamed it on misinterpretation the Human Rights Act 1998
which had come into force in 2000. The Joint Committee on Human Rights
defended the decision and was itself critical of ministers' comments.
The HAC report noted the underlying issues of staffing within Immigration Service operational areas between 1995 and 2000 where numbers had been frozen or reduced. The HAC welcomed the plans to expand staff numbers. In fact, numbers were set to sky rocket as money was freed up to throw numbers at the “immigration problem”. IND having based its strategy on reducing staff in the 90’s was set to recruit 850 new staff as soon as they could and between 1997 and 2003 staff in IND would rise from 5000 to 11,000 The HAC was informed that on 1 July 2000 there were 2,567 staff in post in IS Ports Directorate and that this figure was due to increase to 3,050 by 31 March 2001.
The report saw an overarching need to join up the threads of law enforcement and recommended that people-smuggling should be treated as per any other area of organised crime and that the Immigration Service should develop joint intelligence cells to enable it to liaise more effectively with other law enforcement agencies. It noted as well that the controls on movement across Europe were only as strong as the weakest point within the member states and that 61% of forgeries were European documents.
The HAC launched a scathing rebuke as part of its conclusions:
“We conclude that the Home Office has been dilatory in enforcing the removal of people whose asylum claims have been refused and others who have gained illegal entry to the UK. This in itself has attracted more people to the UK”.
The HAC also directed criticism at IND for failing to provide the Immigration Service in either ports or enforcement with up-to-date IT and commented.
"The Immigration Service does not have at ports a single computer system on which details of names, dates of birth, nationality and passports on passenger lists on incoming flights or sailings can be checked automatically against databases of criminal records, driving licence applications, credit card holding, house occupation, in real time.".
Of the greatest long term significance was recommendation 14:
“We recommend that existing border control agencies should be combined into a single frontier force on the basis of secondment and direct employment, but with clear lines of communication back to the parent agencies. Pending the creation of a single frontier force, strategic co-direction of better joint working should be provided by a ministerial group to which the official Border Agencies Directors Group should report at least four times a year”.
This was not a recommendation for full scale merger but it was a prescient objective. It excited little comment within IND and the Immigration Service at the time and was probably seen as “blue sky” thinking rather than as a realistic possibility.
“the gangs have transferred the knowledge, facilities and networks used for smuggling drugs and other commodities to a highly profitable new endeavour. Many actively recruit potential immigrants in source countries, provide escorts and safe houses en route and are increasingly providing support on arrival such as legal advice to lodge asylum applications. Opportunist illegal entry is becoming rarer. The trade is now firmly in the hands of organised crime”.
INDIS believed that the documents were targeted at the points of the immigration control that were perceived as weakest – in this case the British and European Union channels. This created a conflict with the idea of flexibility at the controls which sought to move passengers quickly. How this might have been resolved is now immaterial because outside events provided a new focus on the security of border controls with the attack on the World Trade Centre
in New York on September 11th 2001. The future emphasis was to be very much more stringent at the point where the traveller came into contact with border controls but the new thinking did have the effect of moving some of the consideration away from the airport queues. The reappraisal of the UK's security needs in the wake of 9/11 would ultimately lead to the creation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency
.
Better liaison and better intelligence started to bring rewards - Operation Gular disrupted a network responsible for smuggling over 400 people into the UK over a two year period. Five men were sentenced to a total of 20 years as a result of closer working with the French authorities.
In February 2002 the government published the White Paper “Secure Borders, Safe Haven”. In many ways this was a continuation of the modernisation policies set out in its predecessor “Fairer, Firmer, Faster” in that it outlined plans for more electronic mechanisation of the controls such as iris scanning, heartbeat sensors, x-ray and gamma ray scanners which would be used at Dover and Coquelles to spot hidden illegal entrants. The new technology would be used, to speed through frequent travellers so that resources were better targeted at those more likely to present a problem.
The document went beyond the creation of new technologies though and has to be seen in the context of its time. Numbers of new asylum seekers peaked in 2002 at 84,130, (the highest it would reach), keeping the issue of asylum firmly at the top of the political agenda. It was a document that highlighted the changes in thinking and social attitudes that had taken place since the 1950’s and 60’s when the background social policy assumptions had centred on the concept of assimilation. That idea had been replaced by multiculturalism
and social cohesion
. The document set out ideas as to how the difficult balance could be struck between controlling migration, promoting cultural acceptance, combating social exclusion and promoting a cohesive, modern sense of what it meant to be British.
The document advocated a policy of “managed immigration” to allow more people to enter the UK legally, (especially for work), and tougher mechanisms and rules to prevent those working illegally. It linked immigration policy to an oft repeated assertion that migration provided a positive resource for the economy. The white paper said,
“Migration is an inevitable reality of the modern world and it brings significant benefits. But to ensure that we sustain the positive contribution of migration to our social well-being and economic prosperity, we need to manage it properly and build firmer foundations on which integration with diversity can be achieved”, and;
“The Government will initiate and open and constructive debate about citizenship, civic identity and shared values”.
The practical intention was to seek to drive asylum applications down by a "carrot and stick" approach. The "pull" factors which encouraged asylum seekers to come to Britain would be reduced,(by, for instance, removing access to support for destitute asylum seekers who did not claim asylum immediately upon arrival), and an incentive to follow the mainstream immigration route would be encouraged by relaxing the rules on those coming to work. This would test the assumption that most asylum applicants were actually econonomic migrants and that by freeing up the legal labour market it would take the heat away from the asylum pressure-cooker.
The rules on young people coming for “working holidays” were to be relaxed and a new, “Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme” introduced which would be extended across the economy with set quotas for industries short of labour. Under the scheme a worker could stay up to six months but would have no right to bring dependants. The work permit scheme would be extended to those with medium skills from outside the EU coming for a specific job. Permit holders would be able to apply to stay in Britain after four years.
The changes were introduced by the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. The most controversial area was that of cutting off support to asylum seekers. The Refugee Council
said that the law would “"potentially affect the lives and wellbeing of thousands of asylum applicants in the UK forcing them into extreme poverty and making it more difficult to pursue their asylum application". This aspect of the law was challenged and, in 2004, the European Court held that it breached Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights
and the policy was dropped.
Despite these future setbacks the numbers of asylum seekers started to fall. This was brought about by many factors, the better casework processes, faster removal rates, new appeal regulations and other factors such as the 33,000 people who were denied boarding in 2003 by ALO's abroad. During the 1990’s the Airline Liaison Officers abroad had been an essential component in preventing undocumented passengers reaching the UK and driving down asylum claims, (see previous sections). The impact was significant - numbers of Inadequately Documented Arrivals (IDAs) detected after arriving by air fell from 14,071 in 2003 to 6,831 in 2005. This though was only one of the measures taken to regain control of the border together with more casework and enforcement staff, restricted public benefits, improved casework processes and streamlined appeals procedures. The ALO network underlined the benefits of driving down the routes which organised criminal facilitators could exploit and more thought and effort went into refining these ideas and tightening the control.
There had been a belated recognition that the Immigration Service had been left behind in the development of technology and there had been a flurry of activity as the controls on the border caught up. (In-country enforcement continued to lag behind). Measures included:
In 2003, 3,482 clandestine entrants had been detected at the on-entry controls; in 2005 this had been reduced to 1,588. More effort was directed into de-briefing new asylum seekers during initial screening to gather intelligence about the facilitators and routes used. In 2005 Iris screening underwent live testing at ports for the first time.
The downward trajectory was steep enough to prompt the Prime Minister when speaking at the 2004 Labour Party conference to set a target for IND and the Immigration Service that, by 2006, the numbers of failed asylum seekers removed from the UK would exceed the numbers of new applications. This became known as the “Tipping The Balance” target and the work to meet the target became the organisation's top priority.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Police and Immigration Service, together with other government welfare agencies and the NSPCC
, piloted an operation known as "Operation Paladin Child" to monitor the arrival of unaccompanied children at Heathrow Airport. Social services were asked to undertake assessments of any child who was a non-EU passport holder, under 18 years of age, who was travelling without a parent, legal guardian or older sibling, and not part of a recognised school, church or sporting group visit. The operation, as well as addressing an important issue head on, had the wider benefit of building an understanding between social workers and law enforcement officers of each others needs.
Between August and November 2003, 1,738 unaccompanied children arrived from non-EU countries. Most of these were travelling legitimately for education or holidays but a small number of children gave 'grave cause for concern' and police were subsequently unable to locate 12 of the children.
IS at Heathrow Airport led the way in the UK in setting up sensitive and sophisticated reception arrangements for children and developed facilities and training to identify children at risk – work which has continued and flourished. A programme of specialist training for immigration officers in dealing with children at risk resulted in 495 immigration officers being trained in interviewing children by 2006.
The possibility that numbers might cause alarm seems to have been acknowledged by the Home Office who fast tracked visa applications in Romania and Bulgaria between 2002 and 2004. A later Home Office investigation showed that junior staff had taken short cuts to clear a back-log.
The National Audit Office
expressed concern at the lack of checks that had been conducted and the Home Secretary admitted that the system had been “insufficiently robust”. It transpired that warnings had been given by the visa issuing post in Sofia that checks on applications were being waived in London against their wishes.
The Immigration Minister, the energetic and highly regarded Bev Hughes, told the BBC and the House of Commons that she had been unaware of the allegations but later confirmed that she, or her office, had been notified of the problems 18 months before and that she had inadvertently misled the House. Although the most likely cause of the confusion was that she had been misled by her own office and let down by its record keeping the minister was bound by the convention of ministerial responsibility
and resigned.
Having grossly underestimated the numbers for the first eight countries there was concern about allowing unlimited access to Romania and Bulgaria when they joined. A particularly unexpected aspect of those coming was the impact on child benefit payments with 68,000 new applications. Restrictions were placed on Romanian and Bulgarian citizens when they joined in 2007 which slowed their flow into the job market. Concerns among some government agencies about benefit fraud
by EEA citizens and concerns within the NHS about illicit "health tourism" by foreign nationals meant that closer working and "joined up" government became newly fashionable concepts; but the constraints of the Data Protection Act and the nervousness of government agencies in identifying foreign nationals meant that progress in tackling identity fraud
would be slow.
The impact for the Immigration Service was not so much the new arrivals as the opportunities that their national documents presented for fraud. A growing number of migrants from neighbouring countries used fraudulently obtained “accession” documents as a means of entering the UK. The wider impact on IND and the Home Office was to undermine the positive work that had been achieved in restoring its reputation in the wake of the asylum crisis and once again damage its credibility and operational integrity.
in tackling organised crime. The paper made it clear that it was intended that the various agencies already working together on these issues would do so ever more closely but that there was no need to create a new border agency.
“In light of the creation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the opportunity for that new body to establish close working partnerships with the existing border agencies, it is not proposed to create a single border agency”
The agency, SOCA, would be a “non-departmental public body”. Rather ambiguously, the paper said that although the Home Secretary would be “accountable to parliament for the agencies performance”… “The Agency will enjoy full operational independence from Ministers”. The arms length relationship that agencies’ provided clearly had attractions and may have provided a model for the future of IND.
The high level thinking around security and intelligence meant that, even without the July 7th terrorist bombings that year, there was a new appetite for greater cooperation and better use of data. The Immigration Service distinguished itself after the attacks and displayed the “can-do” attitude that was in the best traditions of the service. The order was given to work with the police to re-establish embarkation controls at all ports in the wake of the bombings and the service was able to report that it had completed the task in four hours.
The 2005 white paper “Controlling Our Borders - Making Migration Work for Britain” outlined the new “e-Borders” programme;
“a joined up modernised intelligence-led border control and security framework” to “allow Immigration Service and other agencies including Police, Customs and Excise, Security Services to work more closely together”.
It went on to explain how this would be achieved;
“The e-Borders systems will collect both arrivals and departure information … Carriers will provide advance passenger information (API) and passenger name records (PNR) electronically. Passenger details (including names, dates of birth, nationality and travel document details) will be checked against multi-agency watchlists prior to boarding a flight….we will have a much clearer picture of passengers’ movements in and out of the country. This wealth of information will help border control, law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and other Government departments to target their activity”.
This was a hugely ambitious project to join up various agencies and utilise both public and private data, both inside and outside the UK, in ways that had never been attempted before. It had already started in 2004 as Project Semaphore which was to test the principles in a limited way and act as a proof of concept for the full implementation of e-Borders. Semaphore went beyond the theoretical though – it would actually start producing data on routes of interest.
“Controlling our Borders” also outlined two other planks that were to underpin future strategy. The Points Based System for issuing visas would not become reality until 2007 but was already in planning. More immediate was the “New Asylum Model”, (NAM), for dealing with asylum applications. This was a combination of existing fast track processes, which would be extended, and another attempt at single owner caseworking whose aim was to ensure continuity through the entire decision making process. Caseworkers would be expected to perform a far wider range of duties including the presentation of case at appeal hearings and the casework surrounding a person’s removal. The new casework teams would be the machine that would track and manage failed asylum seekers towards removal as a “ready to go product” in much the manner championed by the Home Affairs Committee.
The Border and Immigration Agency was created on 1 April 2007. This was not the unified border force that had often been suggested and had been recommended by the Home Affairs Committee in 2001. The creation of the new agency took place in the wake of the, still toxic, Foreign National Prisoners scandal and the resignation of Charles Clarke as Home Secretary. The publicly stated benefits were that the agency would be more accountable. The key organisational change was that of regionalisation. The new agency would be divided into six new regions each under the command of a Director. Border staff would not be regionalised owing the fact that their workforce was inextricably tethered to ports in London and the South East. The Immigration Service Ports Directorate would, for the first time, be uniformed. The case for regionalisation was set out on the basis that local teams would form closer links with other regional government offices and with local communities. The Unions suspected another motive of creating an environment where national pay scales would be ended in favour of local rates. The practical argument for regionalisation appeared to undermined by the fact that most migrants lived in the South East.
The fate of Immigration Service enforcement staff was less clear cut. They already had a regional structure but the directorate would again be disbanded and reorganised along the new regional structure. The central management structures for enforcement were disbanded and their functions dispersed, and duplicated, among the new regional commands. As the new agency was created so the Immigration Service ceased to exist. There is little room for sentiment in government reorganisation and the end of the service was simply announced, in passing, as a short global e-message without further comment.
Although the Immigration Service had officially ceased to exist it was not quite the end of the story. Having set up the Border and Immigration Agency the re-branding, was hardly underway before, on 1st July the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown
, announced that he was going to;
“reform the UK’s border arrangements, integrating the work of Customs, the Border and Immigration Agency and UKvisas, overseas and at the main points of entry to the UK, and establishing a unified border force”.
The Cabinet Office
quickly published a “review” document “Security in a Global Hub - Establishing the UK’s new border arrangements”.
Significantly, the foreword was attributed to the Prime Minister without any contribution from the Home Secretary. Whether or not the Home Secretary or Immigration minister had been privy to the announcement is unclear. If they were it is difficult to understand why the BIA was set up only a few months previously and, it would appear that, either the decision was taken quickly or the ministers with responsibility for immigration did not know about it. Further evidence the decision was taken with some speed was that there appears to have been none of the preparatory Civil Service policy documents that usually accompany such a major move. There was for instance, as far as can be determined, no publically available impact assessment.
The lack of analysis is made stranger by the many previous words of caution that had been offered concerning the possibility of a unified agency. The Home Affairs Committee in 2001, while being broadly supportive of the idea took note of the then Home Secretary’s warnings regarding a separate Border Agency which stood separately alongside the existing agencies:
" you may end up with very, very significant problems in the relationship between the new border police and its work with the former parent agencies, namely Customs, immigration service and the police”…. "to work together, but to ensure that they still had professional and practical lines back into their respective agencies ... you get people to co-operate much more effectively on the ground ... but bear in mind the real importance of those links back to the parent agencies".
They took note and recommended that the transition should take place in cautious steps;
“We recommend that existing border control agencies should be combined into a single frontier force on the basis of secondment and direct employment, but with clear lines of communication back to the parent agencies. Pending the creation of a single frontier force, strategic co-direction of better joint working should be provided by a ministerial group to which the official Border Agencies Directors Group should report at least four times a year”.
Nobody had, until then, proposed the “big bang” approach of merging Immigration, overseas visa issuing posts and Customs. There was much to be said for the idea but to simply announce that it would happen was a political decision rather than the usual Civil Service approach. The new UK Border Agency, a huge international organisation, came into existence on 1st April 2008. Until that point the staff of what had been the Immigration Service would have noticed few changes but it was after this point that the nature of control of UK borders changed and the serious work of unifying different functions began.
That then was, for practical purposes, the real end of the Immigration Service rather than the bland announcement of a year earlier. It could be argued that this, after 103 years, is where the story comes full circle. Before 1905 the control of migrants and the control of dutiable goods operated under the same banner. It was felt then that the control of people and the control of goods were so inherently different that they should be managed separately. It remains to be seen whether UKBA eventually reaches the same conclusion.
The Immigration Service was by no means a perfect organisation; it had at various times been hidebound and resistant to change. It had also been at various times a hugely capable, experienced and practical organisation that rose to the occasion when demanded. It also, very unusually among Civil Service organisations, had a strong sense of identity. The merger with HM Customs & Excise, with their even longer history and equally strong sense of identity, means that it will take time for a new sense of common ownership, identity and tradition to develop within the UKBA. It is safe to assume that those who share the unique experience and responsibility of working in law enforcement will ensure that this will happen.
“A person shall not be required to submit to examination under this paragraph after the expiration of the period of twenty-four hours from the time when he lands in the United Kingdom. …” (Para 2 Sch1, Commonwealth Citizens Act 1962).
MP's were very loathe to impose controls beyond the token gesture of a passport stamp at a port of entry. It was not an oversight; it was intended by the legislators that the new controls on Commonwealth citizens should be as relaxed as possible but the effect of the law was to provoke a growing industry in people-smuggling across the English Channel. Arrival on a dark beach was by far preferable to being grilled by immigration officers at Heathrow when you knew that, if you stayed out of reach for 24 hours you could legally stay forever.
This was partially addressed by the 1968 Act after which Commonwealth citizens were at least required by law to submit to immigration control on arrival. But even then, for those that evaded the border controls, the law stipulated that there were only 28 days in which to apprehend them. In the event of their being captured the person was awarded an in-country right of appeal that would mean they could not immediately be removed. If they were not caught within the 28 days then the only recourse was to the courts. Even then, prosecution was only allowed where this was within six months of the person’s appearance at a Magistrates’ Court otherwise, once again, they would be deemed to have been given the right to stay permanently. Where court action was initiated the only way of enforcing the person’s departure was if the court recommended deportation. Whatever the obstacles put in the way and despite the fragmented liaison between police and immigration 122 Commonwealth citizens were detected and removed as illegals between June 1968 and July 1970.
The system was then convoluted and unwieldy but the problems were largely irrelevant because there was in any case no such thing as a permanent in-country enforcement arm of the Immigration Service to try and find offenders. Immigration control was something that generally happened on the border or not at all. It was assumed, as it had been since 1905, that the problem of people evading immigration control was a police matter and that those people arrested should be put before the courts whereupon they would be prosecuted and go through the bureaucratic deportation process. This was a classically cumbersome Judicial and Civil Service process which involved the court making a recommendation , IND considering it, drafting a submission to the Home Secretary, (no less), and the Home Secretary agreeing to personally sign a deportation order. The deportation order would be sent to the police who would try and find the person.
This process did not then lend itself to hot pursuit and, although it was probably adequate for dealing with seamen deserters and petty crooks in the 1920’s when such cases were counted in dozens it had no practical relationship to the emerging modern world of the 1960’s and the boom in international air travel. Still less did it take into account the rise in the numbers of potential offenders after 1962. The apparent growth in people smuggling was evidenced by the conviction in 1970 of a trafficker who rejoiced in the nickname Harry the Greek who allegedly smuggled 2000 Indian and Pakistani nationals to the UK from West Germany and Belgium. But, Harry the Greek was successfully prosecuted and convicted in Belgium, not the UK.
The 1971 Act removed the 28 day limit and created a right of appeal that could only be exercised from abroad. It also attempted, at last, to define what an illegal entrant was but it was only through testing the law through various judgements and challenges that the principle was established that someone arriving illegally did not have to go through the judicial process and deportation consideration, they could be “administratively” removed on the direction of an immigration officer acting on the authority of the Secretary of State. The evidence of how badly new powers were needed was provided in a parliamentary question from 1972 which gave the bald facts that 13 people had been successfully prosecuted in the previous 12 months for facilitating illegal entry and 10 people had been treated as illegal entrants.
Even after the 1971 Act any action to detect immigration offenders in the community was still considered a police matter and largely limited to the detection of seamen deserters, absconders from ports or those who were subject to deportation action. The powers in the 1971 Act focussed on the offences of overstaying and assumed that those who did so would be prosecuted and deported. Although it defined what an illegal entrant was, it did not provide sufficient clarity as to how the law should be applied. The concept of illegal entry as laid out in the 1971 Act did not extend to those who simply presented false documents or lied to the immigration officer on arrival about what they were going to do or. It was only by establishing legal precedent
through judgments’ that a consistent set of powers emerged. The evidence of a lack of understanding on the part of those who drafted the Bill of operational reality is illustrated by the fact that the law did not recognise the possibility of illegal entry across the land border with Ireland.
The police who dealt with foreign nationals acted on the information passed to them according to whether the person had been posted "wanted" or not and were reliant on IND records of who had overstayed. The police set up their own Immigration Intelligence Unit in October 1972. The Immigration Act prosecutions recorded at the time are then police prosecutions rather than Immigration Service ones. The police enjoyed some success in this work but their job was that of proving a case and prosecuting it; it was not the job of actually removing people from the UK - this was the job of immigration officers using powers under the Immigration Act and there was a clear need for the Immigration Service and police to cooperate better. The immigration enforcement offices evolved in the early 1970s to meet this need.
The process where overstaying was suspected did not lend itself to deterrence; IND would write to the persons last known address and then send warning letters to any further addresses supplied. In the absence of any evidence of departure, and the overstayer having been fully awakened to the prospect of their impending arrest, the police would be invited to visit the last known address. When police encountered other foreign nationals in the course of normal police work they might verify that the person had a valid document and entry stamp but it did not form part of their work to second guess the Immigration Service and investigate whether the person had obtained it by deception.
It was only after the new Act came into force in 1973 that any real effort was directed to the detection and removal of illegal entrants. The Act was based on a concept of illegal entry which imagined illegal entry via clandestine landings on dark beaches. This had some basis in fact given the incentive within the 1962 Act to enter this way but even with the new laws it was a slow start; the total number of illegal entrants, overstayers and seamen deserters detected and removed in 1973 was reported as 44 but, in 1977, when answering a question on the numbers of deportees in 1973 the minister stated that 147 had been removed. Early immigration enforcement statistics are difficult to interpret as the terms "illegal entrant" and "illegal migrant" seem to have been used interchangably and, at various times, encompassed overstayers, deportees AND illegal entrants which are all different types of offender in later reports. The lack of a cohesive enforcement structure must have played a part in this confusion but, overall, the clear message was that the numbers of enforced removals were very small.
The state of affairs brought about by the 1960’s Acts was confirmed by the House of Lords judgement in 1972, (DPP v Bhagwan). This judgement led to the gaping hole in the immigration control being known as the “Bhagwan gap”, and drove a coach and horses through any attempts to deal with people who had arrived illegally in the 1960’s. In June 1973 The House of Lords ruled that Commonwealth and Pakistani illegal entrants who had arrived in the UK between 1962 and 1968 were all legally irremovable; that those same nationalities entering illegally between 1968 and 1973 were also irremovable if they had been in the country longer than 6 months and that only those who had arrived after 1/1/73 were subject to illegal entry action. In 1974, as a result of the judgement, an amnesty was directed at Commonwealth and Pakistani illegal migrants who had arrived before 1973. The amnesty provoked its own high level of fraudulent claims from people now intent on proving that they were illegal entrants so that they would be allowed to remain. This led to the topsy-turvy scenario of immigration officers investigating people with the aim of proving that they were actually legally in the UK. By 1976 the amnesty had allowed approximately 1800 people to remain. A further amnesty for illegal entrants was announced in 1977 which resulted in 460 further applicants being allowed to remain. In 1978 the Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees announced to the House of Commons that, in his opinion, immigration on 1960s levels was over.
Immigration enforcement during the 1970s remained low key and sparsely resourced. Enforcement work, such as there was, was done by immigration officers who were otherwise normally engaged on passport controls at ports. In London the main enforcement effort was based at King George V Dock in the Port of London with a staff of two immigration officers whose duties included making enquiries regarding seamen deserters. Port managers would allow officers to pursue enforcement cases during off-peak periods when staff were available. As the work of the Port of London diminished the office, affectionately known as KGV, closed in 1976. The main offices after 1976 were based at Harmondsworth near Heathrow and at Adelaide House, London Bridge. The Harmondsworth office was the Immigration Service Intelligence Unit which, by 1976, had 29 officers, responsibility for managing the Immigration Service Intelligence database and a remit of assisting the police. By 1980 major operations were possible and were being mounted with particular emphasis on the hotel and restaurant trade.
s" and other criminals associated with Jamaican drug crime including Ranking Dread
. Combatting bogus colleges, (already noted above), was also an ongoing theme in enforcement work with some particular successes, including the closure of the "Advanced College of Business and Cultural Studies" where 63 people were arrested. Another regular source of work was the "marriage visit" to a home address to test whether the relationship was a genuine one. Marriage abuse was, and is, an embedded feature of immigration enforcement work and the Enforcement Directorate sought to combat it directly by allowing specialist teams to develop. "Operation Goldring" was a long running exercise operated by a central London unit at Isis House in the late 1980's early 1990's.
Immigration Service enforcement continued to grow in strength through the 1980s and, in 1992, the service was split to form separate Ports and Enforcement Directorates. The split did not immediately solve the issue of those “hybrid” ports which dealt with both areas of work or an underlying cause of friction where the Enforcement Directorate tended to draw on the most experienced staff within the Ports Directorate.
By later standards enforcement immigration officers were badly trained and equipped. In those days before mobile phones their lack of communications, including no radio access, meant that they were heavily reliant on police support. Although immigration officers were conferred powers of arrest under the 1971 Act they did not use these as a matter of policy and they were reliant of police officers and police facilities to perform their duties. When conducting pro-active investigations to private addresses immigration officers would take the lead in identifying immigration offenders and ask police to execute the arrest on their behalf.
Those offenders thus detected would be interviewed at a police station under caution in the presence of a solicitor, (if requested), in accordance with Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
, (PACE), which governs the conduct of arrests, detention and investigation of criminal matters. A large proportion of available resources was dedicated to responding to police requests for assistance. By 1989 the two main London offices at Isis House and ISIU Harmondsworth were responding to thousands of calls per year. Isis House identied 1,402 offenders as a result of police call-outs in 1989 and ISIU 1,230.
In 1993 an attempt by an immigration officer and police in London to arrest a Jamaican woman, Joy Gardner
,went tragically wrong when she suffocated during attempts to restrain her. The incident, and the subsequent investigation, halted most pro-active immigration enforcement for a substantial period and was the cause of a reappraisal by police of their role in immigration enforcement which would have far reaching implications. The Metropolitan Police
, and other forces, had worked hard during the 1980s to build community trust and confidence and senior officers were understandably concerned not to undermine this. The police insisted on new safeguards and processes to better communicate the nature of joint operations and assess risks. Although police assistance continued to be the norm it was the beginning of a shift towards greater self reliance by immigration enforcement.
Police confidence in immigration was further undermined by a developing circumstance beyond the control of the Immigration Service. The beginning of the 1990s saw a rapid escalation of immigration offenders claiming asylum shortly after arrest. These applications had to be considered by due process but the release of those detained caused police to question the worth of assisting UKIS. Senior police officers also expressed concern at the escalating use of police stations as places where immigration offenders were required to report having been released.
In 1993 asylum seekers were give the right of appeal before removal as part of the Immigration and Asylum Appeals Act 1993. Where before there had been delays to removals caused by speculative and "vexatious" asylum applications the introduction of the appeal undermined the ability of immigration enforcement to maintain control over an immigration offender up to the point of removal. The numbers of asylum applications began to rise even more quickly. Enforcement offices had little administrative support and operational grades were often required to undertake the casework that ensued from various representations as well as the time consuming logistical work of actually arranging removals. This growing volume of work ate into their, already limited operational capability. In 1993 there were only 120 immigration officers undertaking enforcement work for the whole of the UK. It clearly was not enough to make an impact on illegal working or to combat the true scale of illegal entry but to create an effective in-country control would require a raft of new legislation and a vast expansion of detention faclities and enforcement immigration officers. In general it would require the sort of intrusive powers that were common in other countries such as employment checks and ID cards and no political party wanted to sign up to this. In 1992 the Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker
, ruled it out and opined, against all evidence, that the UK was far better off with controls on the border.
These cases were referred to Croydon for consideration and the prospect of enforcing the person’s departure was remote given the ever increasing length of time that asylum applications were taking to be resolved. Where, like all law enforcement agencies, the officers are judged by their results, there was a positive disincentive to target nationalities with a high incidence of asylum claims. There was a natural inclination to favour operations that were more likely to produce quick removals with a minimum of casework. This was clearly short sighted and was recognised as such but there was at that time insufficient work done within the administrative core of IND to coordinate its processes and identify and prioritise its work to prevent such trends. The organisation of IND favoured distinct silos which failed to acknowledge or understand each others' needs. Asylum casework at that time was prioritised according to its own process requirements. Enforcement offices would detain people that they believed presented a high risk but would have to release them when it became clear that resources did not exist to speed the application and appeal to a conclusion within a reasonable timeframe. Those that were detected by enforcement offices and treated as illegal entrants might later find that the person had been refused asylum but then granted permission to stay under some other concession without any reference to them.
This was not the only frustration and cause of wasted effort; before 1993, when an asylum application was nearing completion enforcement immigration officers would be asked to re-interview the applicant and serve them with a “minded to refuse notice”. This, as the name suggests, was a letter informing the applicant that the Home Office was thinking of refusing their application and inviting them to come up with more grounds to support their asylum claim. This process, apart from ensuring that the officers had to effectively interview the person all over again, meant that the applicant was thoroughly alerted to their impending refusal and were thus given every opportunity to abscond if they so wished. By 1999 there were 20,000 asylum absconders recorded.
After 1993, when asylum decisions were eventually made, the applicant would exercise a new right of appeal and the file would enter another long queue. The logical point at which to detain and remove the person, at the point they were told of their appeal outcome, was missed because it was deemed to be against natural justice to detain someone at the closure of a hearing. Enforcement officers grew used to following a very cold trail when acting on information passed from IND and were forced to rely on other intelligence.
Those that were detected were increasingly difficult to remove. The additional appeal against asylum that came into force in 1993 was combined with a growth in immigration legal "advisors". People with no legal qualification could set themselves up as advisors and tap into the badly regulated legal aid
scheme. Legal aid costs rose dramatically between 1988 and 1992 as did the numbers of applications for Judicial Review
. By 1997 25% of all Judicial Reviews lodged were related to immigration cases.
Growing numbers of those detected were being found working illegally, 10,000 in 1994 as opposed to less than 4000 in 1988. It is likely however that the lesser total is reflective of fewer staff in previous years. The topic of illegal working had continued to move up the political agenda since Kenneth Baker had rejected more internal controls in 1992. In 1995 a private members Bill had proposed that it should be illegal to employ illegal workers. This was dismissed by its opponents as a "nasty, vicious little proposal" but what is probably more surprising to the lay person is that it was not already the case. Until 1997 it was only possible to work illegally if you had been placed on a restriction on entering the country prohibiting employment. People who had entered illegally would of course have no such restriction. In practice this made little difference given that an illegal entrant found working would be arrested as an illegal entrant, not an illegal worker. It made little difference to the employer either - there was no sanction for employing an illegal entrant other than the possibility that they would fall foul of tax and national insurance regulations. The issue of National Insurance numbers provided no effective regulation on foreign nationals intending to work. A report of the Social Security Select Committee of 1996 stated that there were 20 million more national insurance numbers in circulation than those entitled to them.
The impact of the collapse of the IND Casework Programme project, (see earlier section), did not affect the work of tracing immigration offenders but the chaos in the Croydon HQ eventually had the effect of stopping the essential casework machinery that supported enforced removals. IS enforcement was supported by two units whose function was to log new cases on the central database for this purpose, (HOMIES). They also arranged consideration of any barriers to removal including representations and new applications. It was they who gave authority to remove the person in all but the most straightforward cases, told ports to stop removals when there was a legal challenge and gave advice on how to proceed. These units, along with their database, were abolished as part of the Casework Programme on the assumption that their functions would somehow be taken up by the caseworkers within the massive new teams. What actually happened was that these specialists were diverted to deal with the asylum crisis that arose as the result of staff lay-offs and the failure of the Casework Programme to deliver its promised IT. As part of the general restructuring that the crisis provoked the Immigration Service was again divided into two different management structures. The previous Ports Directorate and Enforcement Directorate were done away with and the service was partially regionalised under the command of "Immigration Service Regional Operations" and "Immigration Service SE Operations".
Of particular significance in the context of later events was the disintegration, by 1999, of the processes for dealing with foreign national criminals held within UK prisons awaiting deportation. This process was administered by IND in Croydon and had built up long standing processes to liaise with prisons, courts and the Immigration Service in arranging the deportation of those who had been recommended for deportation by courts or whose removal was “conducive to the public good”. It was supported by “Convictions Clerks” and other specialist teams whose job was to log the notifications of new foreign national criminals and set the wheels of consideration in motion. All of these functions were dispensed with without any reference to the courts or Prison Service who were left without the means of liaising with IND.
The published statistics of 2001-2003 show no record of how many people were removed as immigration offenders. For two of these years the figures are only estimates and for one year there is no published figure at all. These were the visible signs of organisational sclerosis and there were many others that occupied MP's who queued to criticise IND. For enforcement offices around the country the effect was to see their casework backlogs build up with no prospect of their being resolved. By 2000 tentative steps were being taken to re-establish these vital cogs in the machine which included the creation of a small “Enforcement Liaison Unit” to allocate cases to the few remaining enforcement caseworkers and deal with the most urgent cases of foreign national criminals.
Despite this dispiriting picture the problems with the Casework Programme and the crisis within asylum casework did not put a stop to modernisation and the continuation of vital longer term strategic planning. In many ways these few years were to provide the foundations for future successes such as the development of intelligence led operations, the development of professional management skills and project management, the development of prosecutions capability, joint working with other agencies, the growth in numbers and prosecutions capability for arrest trained officers, (including use of the new powers contained in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002
which allowed the confiscation of the criminal assets of traffickers, among others). The development of better IT systems continued, (albeit not so grandiose as the project now abandoned).
Neither did the hiatus stop the increasingly useful liaison work with police in combating organised crime. The disruption of West Indian organised or semi-organised crime continued to be a theme of immigration enforcement work with particular success in the early 2000s in dealing with Yardies. Immigration enforcement forged a close partnership with police and played an important role in the ongoing operation to combat black-on-black crime, Operation Trident which started in 1998.
Behind the scenes a hugely ambitious plan was unfolding following the commitments made as part of the 1999 legislation. In 2000 a pilot in London established the Immigration Service’s first arrest team which was set up trained and equipped to operate independently of the police for the first time. By the end of the pilot three London Arrest Teams had been established and had conducted 413 operations.
In a 2001 report the Home Affairs Select Committee welcomed a commitment to increase enforcement staff but was more wary regarding the ambitious target for enforced removals:
"The target of 30,000 removals in 2001-02 - a ten-fold increase over the 1999 figure - seems a very ambitious goal".
They clearly believed that the 30,000 removal target for in-country enforcement was unachievable and they were ultimately proven correct. How the target was arrived at and how it was considered achievable is unclear. Numbers of enforcement staff were certainly set to rise but there was no prospect of training and deploying staff to make a significant impact in the time available. Public documents offer no clue as to how this figure arose.
The numbers of enforcement staff had risen from 1,677 in 2002 to 2,463 in 2003. A reorganisation of enforcement resulted in the setting up of a number of "co-located" offices. These were enforcement units that drew in a support network of mainstream IND caseworkers whose role was to deal with "barrier" casework, ie: the vital casework to deal with late applications to to stay in the UK, Judicial Reviews and appeals which were part and parcel of the legal hurdles placed by legal advisors seeking to block someones removal. The results of the co-locations were disappointing but the principle was one that stuck and evolved later in the development of regionalisation and the setting up of Local Immigration Teams.
Over and above the formation of the arrest teams whose remit was the detection of immigration offenders, was the establishment, in January 2002, of an Immigration Crime Team to tackle organised immigration related crime such as identity fraud, forgery and trafficking. Early successes included the arrest of 29 persons connected with British passport fraud and the arrest of two men for the manufacture and supply of forged British passports one of whom received a five year sentence and the other 18 months. The operation resulted in one of the largest ever seizures of high quality forged passports believed to have a street value of over £2 million.
The ICT operated as part of Reflex, the Government's inter-agency task force created to combat organised immigration crime. Immigration enforcement also contributed to a joint intelligence unit under Operation Maxim involving the Immigration Service and UK Passport Service (UKPS) with a remit to investigate identity fraud alongside related criminality. In 2001 the numbers of fraudulent British passport applications detected was 161. In 2002 it was 1360. The ICT also contributed to Operation Wisdom, targeting individuals who obtained passports using the identities of dead children which was co-ordinated by the National Crime Squad and involved 18 UK police forces and the Immigration Service. In 2003-04 ICT made 115 arrests related to organised crime.
, Lancashire when cut off by tides while cockling – digging for cockles. This tragedy, and crime, was the result of a number of factors; the fact that the people had been trafficked by "Snakeheads"
and then used for illegal labour by a Gangmaster who had no regard for their safety, (and who was subsequently jailed).
In the subsequent investigation and enquiry there was much confusion as to whether the Immigration Service had been aware of the illegal workers at Morecambe bay and might have prevented their exploitation and deaths. It transpired that the local office did, on occasion, support police in similar circumstances and first of all said that they thought had been involved in supporting a police operation to target cockle pickers but then discovered that this had been a different group on a different day. This confusion was embarrassing and highlighted the lack of management information systems to record the nature of operations conducted. The operational side of IND had been largely left out of the IT development that took place after the failure of the Casework Programme and the tragedy was the cause of a review of systems and processes and quickly led to the introduction, in April 2005, of a new National Operations Database, (NOD), developed by enforcement staff themselves, to better manage and record operational activity.
The Morecambe Bay disaster highlighted facts that were already well known, that large numbers of illegal workers were being exploited, and was a key element leading to the passing of the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004
and the creation of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority
.
By the early 2000’s the numbers of suspect marriages being reported by registrars rose alarmingly:
In presenting evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2005 the Registrar for the London Borough of Brent estimated that, between 2001 and February 2005, approximately 20% of all marriages in Brent were bogus, equating to approximately 250 marriages a year. He suggested that the incidence of sham marriages increased dramatically in late 2003 and early 2004 and that marriages between foreign nationals and EEA nationals were a particular problem.
In response to registrars' concerns and media coverage of the issue, the Government established a "Bogus Marriage Task Force" in 2004 which included representatives from the Immigration Service, local government, the registration service and IND policy officials. This proposed a new scheme to govern marriages where one or both parties were subject to immigration control and did not have entry clearance as a spouse or fiancé(e). The scheme was enacted in section 19 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004
and came into force on 1st February 2005 with the following rules:
The exemption for Church of England marriages was to be part of the legislation's downfall but, when the new provisions came into force, the London Borough of Brent
experienced a drop of 50% in the overall number of marriages taking place. The numbers of reports from all registrars of suspicious marriages dropped from 3,740 in 2004 to fewer than 200 between February 2005 and March 2006.
In 2003/04, in the London area alone, there were 114 people arrested in connection with taking part in or arranging sham marriages. Of these 43 people were charged and given custodial sentences of up to 18 months. The offences ranged from: conspiracy
to commit perjury; offences under the Immigration Act 1971; offences under the Conspiracy Act. During 2004-05, 100 people were arrested of whom 59 were charged and received sentences from three months to nine years.
The new laws was challenged by The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants,(JCWI), who argued that the new requirements were in breach of the right to marry contained in Article 12 of European Convention of Human Rights; a "disproportionate and ineffective response to the alleged problem of 'sham' marriages"; and potentially discriminatory on faith grounds. The Courts agreed and the law was repealed.
The failure of the 1999 Act to impose fines on employers for using illegal workers was now addressed by the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006
which created a new Civil penalty
for employers who hired illegal workers,(Section 15), and separate criminal offence of knowingly employing an illegal worker, (Section 21). The rules imposed much stricter rules than the 1999 legislation as to the level of evidence that employers needed to keep regarding proof of employment rights and carried a potential £10,000 fine for each illegal employee. The Act came into force on 29 February 2008.
Although the proportion of asylum seekers would afterwards fall, in line with the falling numbers of applicants, the overall numbers of offenders removed continued to rise year on year until, by 2010, over 39,000 offenders were removed.
2006 was notable for enforcement in other ways, (apart from being their most productive year to that point). The Prime Ministers “Tipping the Balance” target was met - asylum removals outstripped applications for the first time - and it was a watershed for immigration enforcement in being the first time that the enforcement arm of the service removed more people than those refused and removed at ports of entry.
In particular the HAC expressed concern that there did not appear to be any mechanism for “tracking” individual asylum seekers through the system. This was based on the idea that recently failed immigration and asylum applicants should be fed logically though the casework machine and pushed out of the end to enforcement offices as “ready to go” products.
The, (then), Director of Enforcement & Removals, David Roberts MBE, a hugely experienced manager and one of the early pioneers of immigration enforcement, outlined to the HAC what he saw as the competing priorities that had to be balanced.
“If we are to target individuals whose leave may have expired...then we would need a very different system of internal immigration control than we have at the moment, and targeting individuals in order to ensure that they are removed is not, I believe, an effective enforcement strategy. What we need to have is a very clear set of priorities which are ranked…in terms of the harm that people who are here unlawfully cause the UK and target our resources accordingly”.
What Mr Roberts was explaining was that chasing individuals based on poor data quality and old intelligence was an ineffective way of dealing with the worst offenders, achieving high numbers of removals or providing an effective deterrent to rogue employers and traffickers. Enforcement work did not easily fit into neat and tidy models and did not fit easily with a “deal in date order” ethos. It was recognised however that only looking at “easy” targets was unacceptable and that a balance should be struck where high “harm” cases such as criminals should be given more priority.
The HAC made the valid point that the “wide net” approach used by enforcement meant that it was more likely that they encountered people who had established themselves in the UK and were more difficult to remove;
“It is difficult to reconcile the removal of vulnerable individuals or those with strong links in the UK with the principle of harm reduction set out by the IND”...“By failing to prioritise the removal of those who are newly illegal, the IND is ensuring that a proportion of those singled out for removal are people who have established themselves in this country, perhaps with children who have known only this country, and who—despite the public's general hostility to illegal migration—command significant community support”.
The HAC did note however that enforcement managers were constrained by the fact that the data concerning who was still in the UK was, to say the least, incomplete. They recommended, not for the first time, the reintroduction of the embarkation controls which had stopped in 1998. The issue about embarkation controls was to rumble on for many years to come but the general issue of the quality of data was one that concerned the HAC who saw this as a barrier to properly prioritising enforcement work and to understanding the scale of the problem. The HAC disliked widely based operations and wanted a more focussed approach.
The experience of immigration enforcement managers was that, although pursuit of recently refused individuals was important, it was expensive, labour intensive and, too often, unproductive where they were under pressure to meet targets. Where possible, they worked to maximise their resources, and removals, by using recent intelligence, improving liaison with other agencies, (especially the police), and by maintaining contact with offenders through use of Reporting Centres. Targeting large work-places had the dual benefits of combating illegal working and providing the best opportunity for detecting immigration offenders and failed asylum seekers in large numbers. The “pool” of data which immigration Service enforcement had available was relatively limited. The main Case Information Database, (CID), used by IND had been in existence only a few years. Cases may have taken years to resolve and the information available about a person’s whereabouts and circumstances was of limited value either because of its age or because of poor data quality. On the latter point, enforcement, being by the nature of the job at the end of the process, was particularly hit by poor data quality from earlier stages and was forced to spend time and resources checking and re-checking case data.
Although there were comprehensive records of how many applications had been refused over the years it was simply not known, and could not be known, how many people had managed to stay in the UK illegally. It was clear that, until 2006, the numbers of people applying for asylum was greater than the numbers being removed but simply subtracting one from the other did not work. Many people left the UK voluntarily, (not necessarily in the same identities in which they were known to IND), many case records were duplicated and there were substantial numbers of cases of people making asylum claims in multiple identities. Over and above this there was no way of knowing how many new illegal entrants had successfully entered and had yet to be detected. A 2005 Home Office study into the numbers of illegal migrants in the UK gave an estimate of 430,000 while conceding that it could be as high as 570,000 or as low as 310,000. Many MPs had asked for estimates of illegal entrants in the UK and had been given a consistently vague response. It was hoped that many of these issues would be solved by the proposed e-Borders data system which was already in development, (since 2003), and whose aim was to provide data on all people entering and leaving the UK. A “proving” system called Semaphore had started testing in 2005.
In 2006 Dave Roberts was asked by the HAC how many illegal entrants there were in the UK. Knowing his audience to be knowledgeable on the issues involved he answered simply that he didn’t have the “faintest idea”. His answer was not treated as remarkable by the HAC but he was pilloried by the Press.
Jumping forward to April 1996 the total % had reached 7.8%. By 1999 it was 8.1%, 2002, 10% and in 2003, 12%. These percentages have to be seen in the context of a rising prison population.
Numbers of Foreign National Prisoners in prison between 1993 and 2005:
By 2006 the foreign prisoner population had peaked at 14% and, at the time of writing in 2011, the figure has dropped slightly to 12.8%. The total prison population in September 2010 was recorded as 85,458 suggesting a total foreign prisoner population of 10,255.
The criminal deportation process is different to that action taken against illegal entrants, is based on some of the oldest immigration legislation and rooted in a very different world. It is a process for dealing with those who have broken the criminal law and, before Court Recommended deportation was discontinued, could be thought of as falling into two main areas:
It was, and is, a cumbersome process starting at the point of arrest. Whether or not the court could recommend a person for deportation required the police, or whoever performed the arrest, to know that the person was a foreign national subject to immigration control. This might not be obvious and the Immigration Service might be called upon at that stage to interview the person to establish their status. Assuming that it could be established, then the court needed to be informed of the fact that the person was liable to be deported within a statutory time limit. If the court was informed in time then the Judge could recommend deportation as part of the sentence. If the court knew that the person was a foreign national then they would usually inform IND of the sentence.
The Judge might have good reasons not to recommend deportation, or might quite properly prefer to pass the decision to the Home Office, but these reasons would not be automatically communicated to IND. If IND wanted to find out what they were, (and they were bound by policy and precedent to do so), then they had to write to the court and pay for a transcript of the Judges remarks. Having collated all necessary information the caseworker would then be able to assess the case and submit a proposal up though the numerous levels of Civil Service management to the Home Secretary. The Deportation Order would then be personally signed by the Home Secretary, served by an immigration officer and the Immigration Service would make arrangements for the person’s departure, (provided that they could prove who he was, what nationality he was, could obtain a travel document and overcome any appeal rights and other barriers).
Court recommendations for deportation meant that the person had a right of appeal against this part of the sentence that might have to be disposed of before any further action could be taken. If the court did not recommend deportation it was still possible for deportation to be taken on "conducive" grounds, (see above). Whatever route was chosen full consideration had to be given of the persons other circumstances - such as family ties and length of residence.
Tracking the prisoner through the criminal justice system was then a difficult task and would continue to be a difficult task after 2006. Assuming that IND knew of the prisoners existence they then needed to keep track of the prisoner as he or she moved through the prison system and find out what their likely release date might be. Tracking them involved telephone enquiries to the, (possibly), many prisons that the person had been lodged in and the release date was in any case never clear cut; it all depended on the findings of the Parole Board
.
Where a prisoner had spent a long time on remand awaiting trial then there was every chance that they might be released immediately on being sentenced having already served their time. IND would then have to decide quickly whether to hold the person in prison under immigration powers or whether to release them on restrictions pending further consideration of their future immigration status. In 2002 it was agreed with the Prison Service that immigration detainees would no longer be held in prisons and the options, (where the immigration detention estate was hard pressed to meet demand), were often limited. As staffing fell and backlogs grew the numbers of prisoners falling into this category for emergency consideration started to grow.
The amount of liaison and casework involved in this process was very laborious and a well established system was dismantled in 1999 during the IND Casework Programme restructuring, (see previous sections). This instability coincided not only with a steep rise in the numbers of foreign prisoners as described above, but also with the growth of asylum applications. All available IND resources were diverted to deal with the asylum backlog and the Criminal Casework Team that was gradually re-formed after the Casework Programme crisis, was left under-funded and under staffed. The problem was partially addressed in 2003 when extra staff were allocated but it was insufficient to deal with the growing backlog of cases.
An additional factor, which proved fatal, was the lack of centrally available data on either the numbers of prisoners or the stage at which their case had reached. The development of IT systems within IND had focussed almost entirely on asylum. The Case Information Database, (CID), which was hurriedly rolled out in the wake of the Casework Programme failure did not cater properly for either deportation or other casework relating to immigration offenders and prosecutions. This was not apparently seen as much of a problem in 1999 where the minister replied to a question:
"There is no pressing operational need to collect centrally separate information about the number of people in prison custody or otherwise detained who are subject to deportation action"...."It is our practice to complete the necessary administrative action associated with deportation before the person concerned has completed his sentence so that deportation can take place on release from custody. Where it is not possible to do this for legal reasons such as an outstanding appeal, or where the person is not immediately removable for other reasons, consideration is given to whether they should be detained under Immigration Act powers or whether they can be granted temporary release".
This was a confirmation that some cases could not be easily resolved within the term of a persons custodial sentence but the statement that there was no pressing need for information was most definitely not the case as subsequent events proved.
Within a very short time of its development the organisation was dependent on CID for its management information but, because of its limitations, IND’s senior managers were left effectively blind to the full implications of the rise in the numbers of foreign criminals - as evidenced by numerous parliamentary replies explaining that no data on deportation cases existed or was difficult to obtain.
This was the general combination of circumstances as it stood in 2005. The Criminal Casework Team had previously navigated these difficulties as part of IND’s National Caseworking structure but it was decided that it made more sense to place the team under the general umbrella of the Immigration Service Enforcement and Removals Directorate.
“The Criminal Casework Team did not have figures available on how many failed applicants had been released from prison because removal could not be arranged”.
This triggered a chain of events which involved the Public Accounts Committee asking for further clarification. IND had difficulty answering the questions relating to the numbers involved and had to revise the figure upwards on more than one occasion which undermined its credibility. It emerged, by April 2006, that 1023 foreign prisoners had been released at the end of their sentence between 1999 and 2006 without deportation consideration having been completed.
By May it was confirmed that 880 of the cases had been considered for deportation but it was too little too late and the Home Secretary Charles Clarke
resigned. On 23 May 2006 the new Home Secretary John Reid stated to the Home Affairs Committee:
“I believe that… in the wake of the problems of mass migration that we have been facing our system is not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of its scope; it is inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management, systems and processes; and we have tried to cope with this new age, if you like, with a system that has been inherited from an age that came before it”.
The phrase “not fit for purpose” reverberated long and loud across the political landscape. If IND was not fit for purpose then the Home Office as a whole was also under the spotlight. The foreign national prisoner crisis had only come to light because the National Audit Office had refused to audit the Home Office’s accounts. The Home Office itself would be split in two and a new department would be formed, the “Ministry of Justice
".
In the aftermath of the scandal the trigger point at which foreign nationals would be considered for deportation was reduced from two years imprisonment to twelve months and plans were put in place to introduce “automatic deportation”. It is unclear whether cases with lesser sentences were considered – in a statement to the HAC in 2008 the head of IND, Lin Homer, insisted that this was the case.
In the subsequent investigation into the background to the problem an accusatory spotlight eventually settled on the management of the Enforcement Directorate on the basis that the Criminal Casework Team had been under their command when the problems came to light. The timing was deeply unfortunate in that it detracted from the substantial progress that had been made in enforcement and undermined it at a time a debate was being conducted as to its future role. The Enforcement & Removals Directorate was broken up for the second time in seven years and its resources distributed among a network of new regional Local Immigration Teams. Its central management support functions were disbanded.
That was the rather sad end of immigration enforcement as it had existed as part of the Immigration Service because, in April 2007, the Immigration Service itself was, if not physically disbanded, then discontinued as a distinct body. The future of immigration enforcement was, until at least the time of writing in 2011, to be an adjunct of the general in-country immigration management structure rather than having a coordinating policy and organisational structure of its own.
The final end of the Immigration Service as a whole is described in Section 1.
. Where a person is removed from the UK, they can still make an application to return to the UK, but under new immigration rules introduced in October 2008, a person who has been removed from the UK may not apply for a visa for a period of 1,5 or 10 years, depending on whether they voluntarily left or were removed.
is the lawful expulsion of an undesirable alien, usually following a criminal conviction but also in cases where there are grounds “conducive to the public good”. Section 5 of the Immigration Act 1971—provides the power for the Secretary of State
to make or revoke a deportation order (DO). This requires a person to leave the UK and prohibits them from re-entering the UK unless it is revoked. Any leave to enter or remain which a person gains is invalid whilst a DO is outstanding against them. There is no expiry date to a DO. A person who enters the UK in breach of a DO is an illegal entrant (see below) and may be removed as such.
Deportation Orders were once always signed by the Home Secretary but are now more commonly signed by a senior official. They place a bar on return to the UK for lengths of time which vary according to the severity of the offence. Deportation Orders stay in force until revoked.
Section 32 of the UK Borders Act 2007
places a duty on the Secretary of State to make a deportation order in respect of a person who is not a British citizen who has been convicted in the UK of an offence and sentenced to either:
This duty applies to all foreign criminals except where they fall within one of the exceptions in section 33. Where an exception does apply, deportation may still be pursued.
Section 33 of the Act details those who are exempt from the provisions of automatic deportation. There are certain exemptions:
Those absconding from port arrival areas are also technically illegally entrants but, when detected, may be dealt with under port arrival procedures for administrative convenience. Those returning to the UK in breach of an existing deportation order are also treated as illegal entrants.
The powers to remove illegal entrants are found in paragraphs 9 or 10 of schedule 2 to the Immigration Act 1971. These enable an Immigration Officer to give any directions for removal as are authorised in paragraph 8 of schedule 2 to the 1971 Act.
A series of court judgements in the late 1970's and early 80's clarified some aspects of the law regarding illegal entry. The definition of what constituted illegal entry was gradually extended to include entry by deception. These included the Zamir judgement, which concerned a person who obtained a visa to join his father as his dependant while omitting to mention that he was married. The judgement held that people applying to come to the UK had a "duty of candour" to reveal any factors relevant to their stay. The House of Lords later changed its mind and it was not until 1983, with the Khawaja judgement, that a settled definition of illegal entry by deception came about.
The case of Norman (Court of Appeal 1985) established that a person who sought entry as a visitor when his true intention was to claim asylum was an illegal entrant. Had the Immigration Officer known on arrival that asylum was intended, then he would not have granted entry as a visitor.
Overstayers were, until the end of the 1990s, treated as potential deportees – a cumbersome administrative process which involved a written submission to the Home Secretary in each case. Until the mid 1980’s there were attempts to prosecute overstayers but this was seen to be both expensive in terms of court time and of little deterrence value as well as further delaying the persons departure. A further difficulty was the interpretation of the law by the courts which held that an overstayer had to be detected within three years and proof had to be offered that the person knew that they had overstayed. This was later overturned by the 1988 Act.
The process by which overstayers were detected before 1998 was ostensibly based on the system of landing and embarkation cards. Landing cards were, and are, completed by arriving foreign nationals, (not EU nationals). A small percentage of arriving passengers had their arrival conditions recorded for later embarkation checks. These were placed on conditional “coded” landing by the immigration officer on arrival and would be required to fill out an embarkation card on departure. These cards were tallied by a small army of junior clerical staff in the Croydon HQ and those who had no “pair” could be assumed not to have left. In practice, the value of the cards as a clear indicator that a person had overstayed was limited and its value as a trigger for pro-active investigations was questionable. Embarkation controls were ended in 1998 at a time when savings had to be found. The landing card did though often contain a useful written record of the person intentions on arrival and evidence of their inbound carrier who would be liable to pay for their return trip. Overstayers were most likely to emerge in the course of other enquiries or as part of a police investigation. Assisting police to establish nationality of arrestees was, and is, a major part of immigration enforcement work.
The investigation of bogus marriages was, especially during the 1980’s and 90’s, a bread-and-butter activity for Immigration Service enforcement. There were occasional operations to stop marriages at Registry Offices where firm intelligence suggested a fraud but the majority of this work was conducted at residential addresses at the behest of IND caseworkers who referred applications for further checks. Immigration Officers would visit the marital address and assess whether there was evidence that the marriage was genuine and subsisting and not a “marriage of convenience”. Officers would assess the domestic setting and draw obvious conclusions where there was only evidence of one person living there. That might conclude matters but, in cases of doubt, the couple would be interviewed in detail and asked questions regarding their domestic life together and the history of their relationship. Some marriage visits did not fall into this category and were altogether sadder. It was common for immigration offices to receive letters, particularly from young anglo-asian women, asking for help to prevent a forced marriage
. The ability of immigration officers to provide help in these scenarios was fatally limited by the fear the women had of the consequences of presenting evidence in a public immigration appeals hearing. Some protection was eventually provided by the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007
.
The information available to the Immigration Service regarding bogus marriages was hindered by the proper concerns that registrars had of breaching confidentiality. The 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act introduced new powers for registrars’ to demand that both partners attend in person to give notice, provide proof of identity and a declaration of nationality. Under the terms of the Act registrars had a duty to report to the Home Office any marriage that they have reasonable grounds for suspecting to be a sham marriage.
Although the Act required registrars of civil marriages to report suspected sham marriages to the Home Office it did not contain any power to carry out investigations into the genuineness of an intended marriage or to delay or refuse to conduct the marriage.
Marriage enquiries continued to be part of the general remit of operational enforcement but the numbers of enquiries possible became less as the focus was put on tracing failed asylum seekers and illegal workers. It remained a background issues rather than a primary concern with relatively little information gathered regarding success and failure. At one point a Home Office minister even denied that it was his responsibility.
Section 24(5) of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 provides the following definition:
“Sham marriage” means a marriage (whether or not void) –
UK Immigration Service grades are/were reflective of the legislation
that stipulates that the decision to refuse a person leave to enter
the United Kingdom is taken by an Immigration Officer
only with the authority of a Chief Immigration Officer or an HM Immigration Inspector. The decision that a person inside the UK is in breach of immigration law
and liable for administrative removal or deportation
can be taken by an Immigration Officer or a caseworker of Executive Officer grade or above acting on behalf of the Secretary of State
, with the authority of a Chief Immigration Officer or Higher Executive Officer. The removal of such offenders may only be enforced with the authority of an HM Inspector or Senior Executive Officer. Immigration Officers also have the power to deal with immigration offenders under the criminal proceedings part of the Immigration Act 1971
and prosecute through the Criminal Justice System.
Assistant Immigration Officers' were common in the early days of the service but were dispensed with when the age bar on becoming an Immigration Officer was abolished, (date uncertain but probably before WW2). The grade of Assistant Immigration Officer was revived in 1991 but the role was initially badly defined and the scope of their work subject to ongoing dispute with the unions representing the Immigration Service grades, the Public and Commercial Services Union
, (PCS), and Immigration Service Union, (ISU).
Accusations of racism are an occupational hazard for immigration officials but there have been relatively few substantiated cases of immigration officers abusing their position based on their own prejudices and the checks and balances within the administrative processes mitigate against one person being the only arbiter in reaching a decision on a case. There is then little direct evidence to substantiate overt prejudice but, where there was Anti-Semitism
in pre-World War 2 Britain it would be naive to assume that those prejudices not shared by some within the service and, where there was colour prejudice in post war Britain, this was probably shared by some staff within IS at that time. Until as late as the 1970s women were subject to institutional discrimination - women were only admitted to the Service in 1971, on a trial basis. Only in 1973 did they become a permanent fixture. In the wider Civil Service women had, only short time before, been expected to resign on marriage. Those trail-blazing women who eventually did join the Immigration Service were made to feel unwelcome by a misogynistic culture which changed only slowly and reluctantly but soon proved their worth. Similarly, as Britain became more multi-cultural so did the service but, as this coincided with an expansion of the service and an influx of young blood this was an easier, if too long delayed, transition.
There are some threads that are found within the culture of the service at all times in the reports and recollection of its staff. There is a distinct pride in uncovering deception and safeguarding, as they saw it, the public purse and domestic employment market. The attitude of the service was always primarily driven by the practicalities of law enforcement rather than by the abstract ideas of social engineering that provided the sub-text of the 1905 and 1960s Acts. The Service’s political masters were more ambiguous in their aims and unsure of what immigration control was for and what it was they wanted to achieve. This lack of clarity cannot translate itself into an operational law enforcement environment which depends on clear rules and the service, where there was a lack of clarity of purpose, defaulted to its core tasks of applying the rules as literally as it could, identifying breaches of the law, identifying deception and removing as many people as possible who failed to qualify. The relationship between the service and Home Office ministers was not always an easy one.
The internal culture of the service was driven and formed by its public facing role. A common theme among its staff was to feel, (in common with all law enforcement officers), that the practicalities of enforcing controls was little understood by its political masters or administrative HQ whose senior managers generally had no practical experience of its work. The transient nature of the senior managers within the Home Office was in stark contrast to the immobility of Immigration Service staff. It was common for staff to remain in the service their entire careers owing to the system of allowances which made it financially ruinous to transfer to a mainstream Civil Service job. Another factor influencing lack of movement was the flat pyramid structure which offered little opportunity for advancement. In the 1970s and 1980s an immigration officer could expect to wait 12–13 years before being promoted to Chief Immigration Officer. This was a recipe for insularity but the positive effect was to foster a strong group identity uncommon within the Civil Service and to create a huge depth of experience and specialist knowledge within the service. This was added to by the common circumstance that many officers would at some point in the careers take posts overseas within Visa offices at British High Commissions and Embassies before returning to their home port. The added knowledge of the culture and circumstances "on the ground" made an immeasurable contribution to the experience and skills of the service.
The very separateness and strong identity of the Immigration Service was long a cause for concern for senior IND and Home Office managers who sought at various times to foster a more corporate culture. There was a long standing aversion among senior Home Office managers to the idea of a separate service but the Immigration Service saw itself as separate and distinct on the basis of its very different working environment operating a 24 hour 7 day a week shift pattern. The Immigration Service Union gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee in 2001 and said,
" The Immigration Service is at present part of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. The two organisations have conflicting cultures, the IS providing immediate decisions face to face and IND making paper based decisions without direct responsibility for the welfare of applicants. The two organisations remain in a state of conflict, each struggling to impose its cultural values on the other. Until the IS obtains a proper higher management structure of its own and the two organisations recognise their differences, adopt what is best about the other and find ways of accommodating each other's needs, there is little prospect of real progress".
Conflict may have been too strong a word but there was certainly, at best, a deep seated lack of understanding between the operational grades and their administrative managers within IND as to each others needs and the ISU's statement was representative of that of operational grades. It is ironic therefore that since the Immigration Service was abolished and subsumed into the UK Border Agency the operational border control has, for the first time in immigration terms, become a uniformed service with a distinct identity that separates it from the rest of Home Office staff. Some of the issues surrounding immobility have been addressed but changes forced on operational staff, who in the case of enforcement staff have to earn formal accreditation, have included the imposition of non-qualified managers. This, and the dramatic planned reductions in staff which, in 2011, are already seeing the most experienced officers leave, may have long term consequences which are impossible to predict.
It is the interpretation of the rules that makes immigration law so controversial. The practicalities of assessing large numbers of people arriving at ports mean that a great deal of discretion is given to the immigration officer, (although less now than was once the case). While the officer must obtain the approval of a Chief Immigration Officer or Inspector to refuse someone entry the way in which interviews are conducted and recorded are based on a lower level of proof than those in other areas of law enforcement. The immigration rules for visitors say that the immigration officer must be “satisfied” that the person is a genuine visitor not intending to stay longer than the rules allow and is not intending to seek employment. The idea that a relatively low ranking officer merely has to satisfy himself or herself as to the persons intentions rather than prove an offence, as is the case in criminal matters, is a long standing cause of legal and legislative tension. The level of proof is effectively a balance of probabilities rather than that of an overwhelming case being proven against the arriving passenger. In practice the immigration officer is required to conduct an in-depth interview, seek corroborative evidence from other sources and present a compelling case to a Chief Immigration Officer before refusing the person. The work of a port based immigration officer is to sift arriving passengers to detect those whose accounts of their intentions give some cause for concern. The officer will briefly interview all arriving people who are not British Citizens or EU nationals, check their document for alterations or forgery, verify any entry clearances held, assess their travel history against the stamps in their passport, check them against warnings lists and do all of this, usually, in less than two minutes. If the officer is satisfied they will stamp the passport with one of a variety of wordings, (conditions), depending on the reason for the persons stay and apply a time limit according to pre-set criteria. The pressure on port immigration officers is to do this quickly so as to satisfy various targets concerning waiting times. There has never been a quota or target for detecting and refusing inadmissible passengers – the performance standards for immigration officers at ports have always revolved around the quality of interviewing, decision making and their investigative qualities.
Immigration enforcement has, during the 2000’s and after, undergone a long process of reform where immigration staff have been trained and equipped to perform their own arrests rather than rely on police support. Not all enforcement work is based on visiting addresses to arrest or detain suspects; much effort is dedicated to attending police stations and interviewing suspected offenders who have been arrested by police.
Where private addresses are visited in an effort to trace offenders officers generally seek to gain the cooperation of those present but do have certain powers of entry and may obtain warrants to search premises. Enforcement visits are intelligence led and must, in accordance with agreements with police, be risk assessed.
The aim of the investigation is to prove the offence of illegal entry or overstaying and the aim of most searches is to seek evidence of the person’s identity and immigration status to establish when, where and how they entered the UK. Where interviews at ports of entry are based on the idea of establishing a person’s credibility on a balance of probabilities, the aim of the enforcement immigration officer is to prove an offence has been committed at a certain point in time, at a certain place and to a high degree of probability. Having successfully completed an investigation the officer will refer the case to a Chief Immigration Officer or above who will take note of any compassionate circumstances and, if authorised, serve formal notice on the person that they are an offender and are liable to be detained. Where there are no barriers to removal, eg, outstanding criminal matters or other legal barriers, the person is taken to an immigration removal centre and arrangements made for their departure. In practice there are a multitude of potential obstacles to removing a person from the UK which may include outstanding applications or appeals, legal representations and lack of essential documentation.
Home Office
The Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for immigration control, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service . It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs,...
, Immigration and Nationality Directorate
Immigration and Nationality Directorate
The Immigration and Nationality Directorate was part of the Home Office, a department of the United Kingdom government. The headquarters were in Croydon, South London where it occupied thirteen buildings...
. The UK Immigration Service was,until its disbandment in 2007, responsible for the day to day operation of front line UK Border Controls at 57 ports "designated" under the Immigration Act 1971
Immigration Act 1971
The Immigration Act 1971 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom concerning immigration.The Act, as with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, and that of 1968, restricted immigration, especially primary immigration into the UK....
including airports, seaports, the UK land-border with Ireland and the Channel Tunnel juxtaposed controls. Its in-country enforcement arm was responsible for the detection and removal of immigration
Immigration
Immigration is the act of foreigners passing or coming into a country for the purpose of permanent residence...
offenders such as illegal entrants, illegal workers and overstayers as well as prosecutions for associated offences. On its disbandment, Immigration Service staff were re-deployed within the short lived Border and Immigration Agency which was itself replaced by the UK Border Agency
UK Border Agency
The UK Border Agency is the border control body of the United Kingdom government and part of the Home Office. It was formed on 1 April 2008 by a merger of the Border and Immigration Agency , UKvisas and the Detection functions of HM Revenue and Customs...
.
The enabling Act which provided the basis of immigration control was the Aliens Act 1905
Aliens Act 1905
The Aliens Act 1905 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Act for the first time introduced immigration controls and registration, and gave the Home Secretary overall responsibility for immigration and nationality matters...
and it was followed by the Aliens Restriction Acts of 1914 and 1919. The powers exercised by Immigration Service officers were/are largely based on the Immigration Act 1971
Immigration Act 1971
The Immigration Act 1971 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom concerning immigration.The Act, as with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, and that of 1968, restricted immigration, especially primary immigration into the UK....
that came into force on 1 January 1973 and its associated rules. Other subsequent legislation includes:
- British Nationality Act 1981British Nationality Act 1981The British Nationality Act 1981 was an Act of Parliament passed by the British Parliament concerning British nationality. It has been the basis of British nationality law since 1 January 1983.-History:...
, which came into force on 1 January 1983, - Immigration Act 1988,
- Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993,
- Asylum and Immigration Act 1996,
- Immigration and Asylum Act 1999,
- Immigration (Leave to enter and remain) Order, 2000,
- Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It received Royal Assent on 7 November 2002....
, - Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004The Asylum and Immigration Act 2004 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It set various rules for immigrants to the United Kingdom...
, - Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006The Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.It is the fifth major piece of legislation relating to immigration and asylum since 1993.-Commencement Orders:...
, - UK Borders Act 2007UK Borders Act 2007The UK Borders Act 2007 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom about immigration and asylum. Amongst other things, it introduced compulsory biometric residence permits for non-EU immigrants and introduced greater powers for immigration control...
.
Any Immigration Officer
Immigration Officer
The role of Immigration officers are to ensure that immigration legislation is enforced. This can cover the rules of entry for Visa applicants, foreign nationals or those seeking asylum at the border, detecting and apprehending those that have breached the border and removing them, or pursuing...
with responsibility for immigration enforcement and prosecutions is additionally governed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 is an Act of Parliament which instituted a legislative framework for the powers of police officers in England and Wales to combat crime, as well as providing codes of practice for the exercise of those powers. Part VI of PACE required the Home Secretary...
and may also use powers found within the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981
Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981
The Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It replaces the Forgery Act 1913, the Coinage Offences Act 1936 and parts of the Forgery Act 1861...
, Proceeds of Crime Act 2002
Proceeds of Crime Act 2002
The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which provides for the confiscation or civil recovery of the proceeds from crime and contains the principal money laundering legislation in the UK.-Background:...
, Identity Cards Act 2006 and Identity Documents Act 2010.
For the earlier part of its history the Immigration Service's work was dominated by control of passengers at seaports and the control of crews. By the late 1950s the numbers of arriving passengers at airports overtook that of seaports for the first time and the distribution of staff began to reflect this. Immigration control at airports gradually changed from the late 1990's onward as a new emphasis was given to controlling passengers in visa issuing posts abroad. During the 2000's new technologies opened up opportunities to create a new "flexible" border control that better focussed its resources on high risk passengers.
There were little or no IS resources dedicated to dealing with in-country immigration offenders before 1973 and the detection of potential deportees was seen as a matter for the police. The enforcement arm developed slowly in the 1980's and 90's but, in the 2000's, underwent a transformation in terms of its remit, training and powers and, by 2006, removed more in-country offenders than were refused entry at UK ports for the first time.
The service was split into two Directorates in 1992 comprising IS Ports Directorate and IS Enforcement Directorate. It was again reorganised and regionalised in 2000 into two Regional and South East commands. The IS Enforcement Directorate was reformed in 2003 and, in 2004 assumed command of the failing Criminal Casework Team responsible for the deportation of foreign national prisoners.
In 2007 IS Ports Directorate became a uniformed service for the first time. IS Enforcement Directorate was disbanded and its operational resources divided among new regional “Local Immigration Teams”.
In April 2007 staff were informed that the UK Immigration Service would henceforth cease to exist as a distinct body.
History of the UK Immigration Service - development of UK border controls since 1905
This short history is intended to trace the development of the UK immigration control within the UK from an operational standpoint. It does not deal specifically with the administration of after-entry applications within the headquarters of the Immigration & Nationality Dept except where this has a direct bearing on the front line operational work of the Immigration Service. Neither does it deal specifically with the wider social and political issues surrounding the issue of immigration, which are better dealt with by cultural historians and sociologists, but does occasionally touch on these in order to provide context in explaining the possible rationale for administrative and policy decisions.The development of in-country enforcement controls is dealt with separately in Part 2, (see index).
1905 Aliens Act and the Immigration Boards
The beginnings of the modern-day UK immigration control can be traced from the final decade of the 19th Century and the political debate that grew surrounding the perceived growth in the numbers of Eastern European Jews coming to the UK. Political alarm was also expressed regarding the rising numbers of foreign national criminals in UK prisons, the growing demands on poor relief within local parishes and fears of degenerating health and housing conditions.There was particular focus on the large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews who had arrived in the East End after fleeing persecution in Tsarist Russia. In 1898 the Secretary of the Board of Trade reported a "..stream of Russian and Polish immigration—in other words, the immigration of the most destitute type...increasing in volume year by year". The "stream" actually consisted of 175,000 people arriving between 1894 and 1899 but the concern was the fact that the rate of arrivals had risen between 1897-99 and that so many had congregated in the East End of London.
Parliament considered the options, including setting up border controls, but some could not imagine how such an imposition would actually work and one Lord expressed concern that the restrictions would exascerbate the existing "servant problem":
"I daresay your Lordships have seen the difficulty of getting domestic servants commented upon in the newspapers. I have seen letters proposing that domestic servants should be brought over from Germany and Norway, where very excellent domestic servants are to be found. How will it be possible to get these servants to come over?"
The Lords doubted that immigration officers would cope:
"Who are to be these inspectors? They must be men of considerable talent. They would have to be linguists. They ought to know every language... The inspector will say, "Where did you come from? What is your fortune?" which is a very inquisitive way of greeting every foreigner who comes into this country".
Other, more serious minded Lords focussed on the sweatshops brought about and encouraged by unregulated foreign labour;
"Aliens coming into this country find a system of unregulated industry in existence. They find that they can work under filthy surroundings, that they can work for wretchedly low wages and in many cases no wages at all, and that they can work as long as they or their immediate masters please. That is an evil which exists, and many Englishmen do the same. Some thrive by it and rise out of the condition; others stick there; others sweat it out and die there. I do not see the point of making these unfortunate aliens the scapegoat for our own neglect in this matter".
The legislation that finally emerged was the Aliens Act 1905
Aliens Act 1905
The Aliens Act 1905 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Act for the first time introduced immigration controls and registration, and gave the Home Secretary overall responsibility for immigration and nationality matters...
which was considered even at the time a flawed and inconsistent piece of legislation. It was ambivalent in its aims and constructed powers whose ostensible aim was that they should be equally applied but its underlying aim was to control a particular “problem” group. Libetarian opponents of the Act, (and those worried about the availability of servants), ensured that it only applied to steerage passengers and to ships carrying more than 20 passengers. It was easily evaded, (as noted in questions to Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, at the time), and did not even require Immigration Officers to give written permission to land or stamp a passport – permission to land was given verbally.
It was however the first legislation to define some groups of migrants as 'undesirable', thereby making entry to the United Kingdom discretionary, rather than automatic. The Act ensured that leave to land could be withheld if the immigrant was judged to fall into one of four categories:
- a) if he cannot show that he has in his possession ... the means of decently supporting himself and his dependents;
- b) if he is a lunatic or an idiot or owing to any disease of infirmity liable to become a charge upon the public rates;
- c) if he has been sentenced in a foreign country for a crime, not being an offence of a political character; or
- d) if an expulsion order under this act has [already] been made.
People refused entry under the act were given a right of appeal to the Immigration Board in charge of control of one of the designated ports listed by statute. In the first five years of the control were refused, (after appeal):
- 1906 - 493
- 1907 - 802
- 1908 - 612
- 1909 - 1,347
- 1910 - 922
The practical application of the control was conducted by the new Aliens Inspectorate and its officers, the first Immigration Officers, who were hurriedly recruited from within the existing ranks of HM Customs and the Board of Trade
Board of Trade
The Board of Trade is a committee of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, originating as a committee of inquiry in the 17th century and evolving gradually into a government department with a diverse range of functions...
. Their basic task was to test whether the traveller had means of support which might be proven by either presentation of cash or evidence of a firm offer of employment. Inspection generally took place aboard ships or in “receiving houses” on shore. The anomalies within the regulations meant that it was common for passengers to evade the control by the simple means of posing as 2nd or 3rd class passengers or sharing the evidence of funds between them. The head of the new organisation was titled HM Inspector and its first incumbent was the classically educated Ulsterman Mr. William Haldane-Porter, (later Sir William), who was given the attractive salary of £500 per annum, rising in eight years to £700.
Mr Haldane-Porter was well aware of the limitations of the 1905 Act and said in 1912 that there was a,
"...highly organised and very undesirable traffic which is being carried on by by certain agents in this country in aliens, chiefly Armenians and Syrians... I have pointed out that as these aliens mainly arrive as cabin passengers it is impossible, in the existing state of the law, to deal with them by inpection at the ports."
The 2nd reading of the 1911 Aliens Bill produced a heated debate on the necessity to increase the scope of immigration control. Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
disliked the idea, both on principle and for practical reasons, and admitted that he had not much liked the 1905 Act and had voted against it,
"... not only because I disliked the electioneering rancour by which they were characterised, but also because of the cheap attempt, for party purposes, to exploit the misfortunes of a poor and wretched class of people."
He saw a great many administrative headaches should the controls be extended:
"It would involve our setting up at eighty ports, besides the fourteen emigration ports, all the machinery necessary for the working of the Act, emigration officers, immigration boards, medical inspectors, interpreters, and, in many cases, receiving houses. For what should we have to set up eighty ports. This vast paraphernalia and apparatus? We should have to set it up in order to deal with 2,700 aliens, which is the total number, who came in by the whole of those eighty non-immigration ports last year. Of those 2,700 the number of 926 were on their way to destinations outside the United Kingdom, 102 had return tickets, and 532 had single tickets. Therefore, there would be only 1,139 aliens coming in through those eighty ports to justify the setting up of all this elaborate and costly machinery, with its attendant inconvenience to all the other persons who travel to our shores. At twenty-nine of these ports less than five aliens a year are landed".
1914-1918 Immigration control during the Great War
Despite Mr Churchill's misgivings, 1914 marked a landmark in UK immigration control in that it was only from this point that every person entering the country had to produce evidence of identity. It was now that the work of Mr Haldane-Porter in laying the structural foundations of the service bore fruit. The working ethos of Mr Haldane-Porter and the service was also starting to gel and was summarised by him in a note to staff as “the person is more important than the document”. This sound advice was indicative that, even from the earliest times, it was realised that the job of controlling people and identifying deception could not be done by ticking boxes; it relied on a full and objective assessment of all factors.The 1914 Aliens Registration Act was rushed through on the eve of the First World War and allowed stricter controls than before including the power to make aliens aged over 16 register with the police. The power still remains but no longer forms an important part of internal immigration controls. Although the 1905 Act technically survived until its repeal in 1919, it was, in practice, submerged by the all-embracing powers of the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914. The 1914 Act contained a clause which gave the Home Secretary power to prevent the entry and order the deportation of aliens if it was deemed 'conducive to the public good'. For the purposes of the 1914 legislation immigration officers were re-titled Aliens Officers and the service was a compound of Home Office staff and Customs staff.
In order to mark someones arrival and departure the new Aliens Officers endorsed the passports of passengers with red stamps on arrival and with black stamps to cancel the endorsement on the persons departure. In April 1915 an Order in Council was made that no alien passenger was to be allowed to land unless he held either a passport with a photograph attached issued within the two preceding years, or some other document establishing his national status and identity. Prior to this passports had not contained photographs and had not been stamped in any way.
From April 1915 only passengers with exit permits were allowed to leave the UK, and then only from certain ports. In an extension to their duties that would be repeated during World War 2, officers were tasked with retrieving ration documents from departing passengers. In 1916 a “Traffic Index” was created from the landing and embarkation cards collected at ports and matched together at the Home Office’s Aliens Branch HQ to show whether the person had complied with their conditions of entry. This simple process was the only mechanism for measuring the effectiveness of the control and continued until 1998 when embarkation controls were abolished.
In 1917 the actress and alleged spy Mata Hari
Mata Hari
Mata Hari was the stage name of Margaretha Geertruida "M'greet" Zelle , a Dutch exotic dancer, courtesan, and accused spy who was executed by firing squad in France under charges of espionage for Germany during World War I.-Early life:Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in Leeuwarden, Friesland,...
was detected by Aliens Officers on a neutral ship at Falmouth. She was taken for questioning by Special Branch
Special Branch
Special Branch is a label customarily used to identify units responsible for matters of national security in British and Commonwealth police forces, as well as in the Royal Thai Police...
. The relationship between the Immigration Service and Special Branch officers at ports has always been an important one. By 1920 the number of Aliens' Officers had reached 160.
The Aliens Order 1920 – The formation of the Immigration Service
The Aliens Order 1920 was an amendment to the 1919 Aliens Restriction Act. Brought out in the context of widespread unemployment after the First World War, it required all aliens seeking employment or residence to register with the police. The Order ironed out some of the more glaring difficulties of the 1905 Act, established principles still in force today and paved the way for the creation of a professional Immigration Service.It stipulated that no alien might land without the permission of an immigration officer, by way of a passport stamp, and granted powers to attach conditions to the grant of leave, to refuse those who could not support themselves, and their dependants, those medically unfit and those convicted of crimes abroad. It gave the power to demand documents satisfactorily establishing identity and nationality. It restricted the employment rights of aliens resident in Britain, barring them from certain jobs (in the civil service, for example), and had a particular impact on foreign seamen working on British ships. It required people seeking employment in the UK to obtain permission from the Ministry of Labour which was of huge significance in establishing a link, for the first time, between immigration control and the employment market. It also targeted criminals, paupers and ‘undesirables’, and made it illegal for aliens to promote industrial action – a response to fears of imported revolutionaries following the still recent Russian Revolution. The methods created during the First World War to control potential subversion were maintained after the War. HM Chief Inspector Mr Haldane- Porter said in 1919:
"One of the chief functions of the controls after the war would be to exclude Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
agents from the U.K. At home this would be achieved by Immigration officers, while abroad officers should be attached to the consulate in the guise of vice-consuls, these officers working with and receiving their instructions from MI5
MI5
The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its core intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service focused on foreign threats, Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence...
."
Further motivation to extend restrictions on foreigners was driven by post-war unemployment and the consequent desire to safeguard jobs for indigenous Britons. The Act was renewed annually until 1971 until it was replaced by the Immigration Act 1971
Immigration Act 1971
The Immigration Act 1971 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom concerning immigration.The Act, as with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, and that of 1968, restricted immigration, especially primary immigration into the UK....
.
The new Immigration Service was created as a branch of the Home Office with its HQ located at 10 Old Bailey, London. The first Chief Inspector of the service, Mr Haldane-Porter, was given permission to recruit staff and favoured those with seafaring experience - perhaps reasonable given the focus of work onboard ship and within docks such as the Port of London and Clydeside. Immigration Officers continued to work on board ships until the early 1990s and still board merchant vessels in some circumstances.
The Immigration Service in the 1920’s and 30’s
The Immigration Service was divided into districts under the charge of an Inspector. The Immigration Officers’ grade was confined to men, (only men at that time), aged over 25. Those under 25 were automatically classified as Assistant Immigration Officers. Immigration Officers enjoyed an annual salary of between £200-300.The ethos of the Service developed rapidly under the direction of its new Chief Inspector and an insight into his attitude might be gleaned from his 1921 message to staff,
“Figures are all very well and we cannot get our statistics without them but after all we are dealing in the first instance with human beings”.
Immigration Officers controlled passengers and seamen at ports throughout the United Kingdom. This included Ireland until the creation of the Irish Free State
Irish Free State
The Irish Free State was the state established as a Dominion on 6 December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed by the British government and Irish representatives exactly twelve months beforehand...
in 1922 and, even after this, UK immigration officers controlled Irish ports until 1925 while the new administration made its own arrangements.
One of the first major issues confronted by the new service was that of an escalating problem of stowaways. In 1921 a conspiracy to smuggle Chinese nationals in as stowaways was uncovered. Mr Haldane-Porter wrote in November 1920 that the traffickers had,
"confederates in Hong Kong who told the Chinamen that England was a sort of terrestrial paradise where you could get very high wages for doing very little work and that all they had to do to reach this paradise was to pay $400 in advance"
A new dimension to the work arrived in the 1920s where the influx of visitors to the Wembley Exhibition meant that the traffic generated by air travel could no longer be ignored. It was decided to appoint one, (and only one), immigration officer to deal with incoming passengers at the main London airport in Croydon. By 1925 the Immigration Officer at Croydon Airport
Croydon Airport
Croydon Airport was an airport in South London which straddled the boundary between what are now the London boroughs of Croydon and Sutton. It was the main airport for London before it was replaced by Northolt Aerodrome, London Heathrow Airport and London Gatwick Airport...
was dealing with 15 aircraft movements per day. By 1937 the total numbers of people arriving by air reached 37,348, still a paltry number when compared to the numbers arriving by sea, (498,326). The numbers arriving at seaports would continue to rise but would be outstripped by the late 1950’s by the rise of air travel.
In 1924 staff at Dover and Folkestone were visited by the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. He addressed the staff and gave them some advice;
"If, when considering the desirability or otherwise of an alien's presence in the United Kingdom, doubt arises, benefit should be given to the country, not to the alien".
The departure of the founding Chief Inspector, Sir William Haldane-Porter in 1929 paved the way for a number of changes – most notably in recruitment policy which was now widened out to allow the promotion into the Service of Clerical Officers from the main Home Office.
1930 marked the height of the brief era of British airships such as the R101
R101
R101 was one of a pair of British rigid airship completed in 1929 as part of a British government programme to develop civil airships capable of service on long-distance routes within the British Empire. It was designed and built by an Air Ministry-appointed team and was effectively in competition...
. The airships' UK hub was at Cardington and may have had a very brief Immigration Service presence but no known public record exists. In 1932 a distinguished Frenchman recorded his impressions of UK immigration control;
"As soon as you set foot on British soil you experience a feeling of inferiority, purely relative and temporary however. You are a foreigner. What is worse, you are 'only a foreigner'. The impression is instantaneous. Whereas at Le Havre all travellers, no matter what their nationality, file in any old fashion past the passport officer without any distinction being made in favour of the French, here from the very outset you are parked on one side. You draw a false conclusion from it because you fail to see that only a small question of procedure is involved. There is, in fact, no necessity to scrutinise very carefully the passports of the Britishers. That being the case it is quite sound to pass them quickly through 'en bloc' . If we don't adopt this method, which is the right one, in France, it is not because we have more respect for foreigners than the English have. It is quite simply that we have less for our own nationals, and that we detail a single official to the examination of passports where they assign four or five. Perhaps our authorities are afraid that a Frenchman would die of amazement if he were to see at one stroke five of his own civil servants out of bed at six o'clock in the morning!"'
The 1930s otherwise presented their own unforeseen difficulties with the ever increasing numbers of refugees arriving from Europe fleeing from Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
. Refugee arrivals rose from close to zero in 1930 to 3109 in 1933. By 1938 the figure was 11,000. After 1936 the figures were augmented by the numbers fleeing from war torn Spain. Although there was no publicly stated policy for the admission of political refugees before 1971, a settled but implicit approach had emerged during the 1930s. A Home Office memorandum of 1933 stated:
"we do not, of course admit that there is a 'right of asylum', but when we have to decide whether a particular political refugee is to be given admission to this country, we have to base our decision not on the question whether he is recognised by his Government but on whether it is in the public interest that he should not be admitted."
The handling of refugees was largely dependent on their being able to show that they could maintain themselves or be maintained. The Immigration Service cooperated with the Jewish support organizations who worked to provide support or provide sponsors but there was no agreed international approach to the handling of refugees. A Home Secretary memo to the Cabinet in 1933 shows that efforts were made to take a flexible approach but admitted that some refugees, ("a few") had been refused and returned to France where they awaited a relaxation of the rules. The memo shows that restrictions placed on those Jewish refugees were based mainly on economic fears for the employment market. Another reason, strange to say, was that the government feared opening up the employment market to people born in the UK who had since become naturalised foreign citizens. At that time they had no right to come back to the UK, (and were apparently not wanted), and the government did not want to raise their expectations that the rules would be relaxed.
Despite the foregoing the statistics for 1938 and 1939 show Germans as being the top nationality refused entry for both years and it is likely that a large proportion of these were potential refugees being returned to an uncertain fate. That said, the UK admitted more Germans than any other nationality in 1939 and continued to admit Germans throughout the war.
This bleak picture was in contrast to the ever increasing numbers of passengers travelling in happier circumstances on the great liners of the day. The RMS Queen Mary
RMS Queen Mary
RMS Queen Mary is a retired ocean liner that sailed primarily in the North Atlantic Ocean from 1936 to 1967 for the Cunard Line...
for instance presented problems in quickly clearing large numbers of passengers and to do so within Victorian Customs Sheds was increasingly impractical. Shipping companies invited a, no doubt very agreeable, solution whereby Immigration Officers travelled 1st class on the liner itself or pre-cleared passengers in Cherbourg. In 1936 air traffic had grown to such an extent that a Chief Immigration Officer was appointed to take charge at Croydon Airport with additional responsibilities for immigration control in the new Gatwick terminal.
Beehive (Gatwick Airport)
The Beehive is the original terminal building at Gatwick Airport, England. Opened in 1936, it became obsolete in the 1950s as the airport expanded. In 2008, it was converted into serviced offices, having served as the headquarters of franchised airline GB Airways for some years before that...
which, with its very own direct rail link to London and art deco architecture was the last word in airport design until it was replaced in the 1950's.
1939-45 The Immigration Service during World War 2
War brought with it new emergency powers which meant that the Immigration Service now, as well as continuing to control the entry of a wave of displaced people, had to enforce rules on exit permits for all people leaving the UK and to take on the additional work of repatriating some enemy aliens. Ireland’s neutrality meant that steps had to be taken to introduce new controls between the UK and Republic. The Passenger Traffic Order remained in force until 1952 and a large proportion of the work of the immigration service during the war was taken up by the control of Irish workers seeking employment in the growing war economy.Croydon Airport was closed and became a fighter base; its passenger traffic transferred to Shoreham. The Dunkirk evacuation brought with it not only rescued troops but also vast numbers of refugees and displaced people who had to be identified and dealt with. Large numbers of Dutch and Belgian refugees were temporarily placed in camps on Brownsea Island
Brownsea Island
Brownsea Island is the largest of the islands in Poole Harbour in the county of Dorset, England. The island is owned by the National Trust. Much of the island is open to the public and includes areas of woodland and heath with a wide variety of wildlife, together with cliff top views across Poole...
in Poole harbour. The possibility of enemy agents gaining entry under the guise of being part of this group was very real and Immigration Service staff were seconded to interview refugees and displaced people at special reception centres. The main one of these was the Royal Victoria Patriotic School at Wandsworth in London, whose MI6 interrogators included Colonel Oreste Pinto
Oreste Pinto
Oreste Pinto was a Dutch counterintelligence officer . His activities during the Second World War, in which he worked with MI5 interrogating refugees to England, resulted in the capture of eight spies.In 1952, he published two books, Spy-catcher and Friend or Foe?; these led to the 1959-1961 BBC...
. During four years over 30,000 people were interviewed at this centre. Other wartime work involving Immigration Service staff included the examination of British refugees exchanged with the Germans via Lisbon.
As the passenger traffic through the channel ports shrank the efforts of border control were focused on the merchant shipping that kept Britain's lifelines open and many staff were redeployed to Scottish ports, Bristol and English northern ports for the duration. An office was also set up at Dartmouth to deal with the Channel convoys. Staff were also later deployed to Poole to deal with flying boat services which flew routes to Lisbon via Ireland and were of especial interest because of the human flotsam and jetsum seeking to exit occupied Europe. These required careful scrutiny and it sometimes took six hours to clear a flight.
In Scotland the great "Queens" brought troop ships containing up to 15,000 troops each at Gourock. The ports of Glasgow and Gourock pooled their resources to deal with the Russian convoys. Scottish immigration staff also covered the airports at Dyce and Leuchars, (which played their part as terminals for the dangerous Mosquito service to Stockholm), and found themselves occasionally giving a reception to escaped resistance fighters arriving in the Shetland Islands. In the first six months of 1940 Scottish immigration officers examined almost 4000 survivors from upwards of 100 ships sunk by enemy action.
In 1941 at Rothesay dock, Clydebank,a German spy posing a a steward on a Belgian vessel, named Alfons Louis Timmermans, was detained, made the short trip from the Royal Victoria School to Wandsworth Prison where he was later hanged in June 1942. His is one of four entries in the refusal logs of the immigration service during World War 2 to show "Outcome - death by judicial execution".
1945-1961 Post-war growth of Commonwealth immigration
Re-establishing normal controls after the war took time to accomplish. Dover was eventually fully staffed again after a gap of six years and Croydon airport was reopened to passenger traffic. Southampton was faced with a rising number of passenger liners returning to peacetime service.A far reaching report by the Croydon Inspector after the war reviewed the processes for dealing with the growing number of air passengers. It suggested that these should, in future, be separated into inbound and outbound control areas and that arriving passengers should be marshalled or “funnelled” into one control area regardless of what aircraft they had arrived on. This had far reaching consequences and still forms the basis of controlling passenger’s movements at British airports today.
In 1946 the major airport controlling air traffic was Hurn Airport
Bournemouth Airport
Bournemouth Airport is an airport located north-northeast of Bournemouth, in southern England...
in Dorset. Although well organised its location so far from London made it unpopular with carriers. It was agreed that the main passenger airport for London would be Heathrow, which opened on 1 May 1946 and came under the command of the Croydon Inspector. The vision of the Croydon Inspector for controlling air passengers took some time to be realised as the design of Heathrow in its early years took little account of the requirements of either Immigration or HM Customs and Excise.
It was still a time of displaced people finding their way home after the war and passenger liners still travelled to the West Indies to return servicemen who had been de-mobbed. The owners of the shipping lines wanted to reduce their costs for return journeys, which promised to otherwise have few passengers, and offered cut price fares to the UK. The first of these vessels to arrive, in 1947, was the now little remembered MV Ormonde which brought 108 migrant workers and attracted little notice. The arrival of the MV Empire Windrush, was an entirely different matter. She arrived at Tilbury and brought with her 500 regular passengers and a large number of stowaways as reported by Pathe news. The Empire Windrush's arrival was not a surprise; her slow progress towards Britain had been noted well in advance of her arrival. The Minister of Labour, George Isaacs, said,
"The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organised arrangements is bound to result in difficulty and disappointment. I hope no encouragement will be given to others to follow them".
Over and above the continuing movement of displaced people there were other signs of re-adjustment following the end of the war. The Polish Resettlement Act 1947
Polish Resettlement Act 1947
The Polish Resettlement Act 1947 was the first ever mass immigration legislation of the British parliament. It offered British citizenship to over 200,000 displaced Polish troops on British soil who had fought against Nazi Germany and opposed the Soviet takeover of their homeland...
allowed 200,000 Polish citizens to stay following the war and it took until 1952 for the wartime restrictions on travel between the UK and Ireland to be abolished and a Common Travel Area
Common Travel Area
The Common Travel Area is a passport-free zone that comprises the islands of Ireland, Great Britain, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The area's internal borders are subject to minimal or non-existent border controls and can normally be crossed by Irish and British citizens with only...
was created between all the islands which still exists today. Numbers of staff increased in the early 1950s to deal with the residual screening of people who had arrived during the war who, although they had undergone screening at reception centres had still to have their status regularised.
The 1953 Aliens Order “tidied up” and updated some of the regulations which had been in force since the First World War – not least, finally allowing in legislation for the existence of flying machines. The 1950s brought special challenges such as the influx of visitors for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was the ceremony in which the newly ascended monarch, Elizabeth II, was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ceylon, and Pakistan, as well as taking on the role of Head of the Commonwealth...
in 1953, a year which also saw the opening of the new passenger car ferry terminal at Eastern Docks, Dover. During the parliamentary debate for the 1953 Act the Home Secretary was asked how many people were currently in detention and advised that on 22 July 1953 the total number of immigration detainees in the UK was 11.
The position of refugees had been under review since the war. Questions had necessarily been posed as to whether more could and should have been done to save Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. The result was the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. Originally intended to encompass only European refugees it was later extended to all countries. Overlapping waves of refugees had to be dealt with in the wake of the Suez Crisis
Suez Crisis
The Suez Crisis, also referred to as the Tripartite Aggression, Suez War was an offensive war fought by France, the United Kingdom, and Israel against Egypt beginning on 29 October 1956. Less than a day after Israel invaded Egypt, Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum to Egypt and Israel,...
and Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Between 19 November and 3 December 1956 4221 refugees arrived at Dover and the Immigration Service was increasingly hard pressed. At that time it numbered fewer than 400 staff, including managers, to cover 30 different ports across the United Kingdom 24 hours per day and seven days a week.
Extra staff were being assigned to the London airports to deal with the increase in air traffic. Croydon Airport had long been recognised as too small to deal with future needs and finally closed its doors to commercial traffic in 1959. Also in 1959, a watershed moment arrived where, for the first time, more passengers arrived by air than by sea, (741,669 to 738,367).
In the early 1960s government ministers, as well as private employers, started to recruit directly in the West Indies. These included Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell
John Enoch Powell, MBE was a British politician, classical scholar, poet, writer, and soldier. He served as a Conservative Party MP and Minister of Health . He attained most prominence in 1968, when he made the controversial Rivers of Blood speech in opposition to mass immigration from...
, who actively encouraged the migration of medical staff from India and the West Indies during his time as Minister for Health. The London Transport executive made an agreement with the Barbadian Immigration Liaison Service. Other employers, such as the British Hotel and Restaurant Association, made similar agreements. In the 1950s most Indian migrant workers to arrive in Britain were Sikhs from the rural areas of the Punjab, where the partition of the Punjab between India and Pakistan had created immense pressure on land resources during the 1950s and 1960s, greatly increasing such emigration from then on. In the period immediately before and after the introduction of the 1962 Act, the entry of dependents into Britain increased almost threefold as families attempted to 'beat the act', amidst widespread fears that Britain planned to permanently close its doors to its citizens in the New Commonwealth, including the families of those already living in Britain. Total "New" Commonwealth immigration thus grew from 21,550 entrants in 1959, to 58,300 in 1960. A year later this last figure had more than doubled and a record 125,400 "New" Commonwealth immigrants entered the UK in 1961. The term "new" Commonwealth is a matter discussed in following sections.
Consideration of legislation to place controls on Commonwealth citizens had by 1960 already been under active consideration for some years. A Cabinet committee comprising senior Cabinet members including the Home Secretary produced a report in 1956 which detailed the numbers of arriving black and asian migrants in the early 1950s. It directly addressed what it saw as the key issue of migration from "coloured territories". It outlined the new circumstances that had to be addressed given the changed circumstances;
"The principle that the United Kingdom should maintain an open door for British subjects grew up tacitly at a time when the coloured races of the Commonwealth were at a more primitive stage of development than now. There was no danger then of a coloured invasion of this country".
The report conceded, with clear frustration, that there were few grounds to impose a new Act on the basis of protecting the employment market given that a number of British employers, including London Transport, British Railways and the NHS were actively recruiting in the West Indies. It noted too that there was little evidence of "inter-breeding" but expressed its alarm at the future possibility and the "incalculable".."long term consequences".
The report, odious to most modern eyes and current attitudes, laid out its cards squarely in favour of racially based immigration controls. The report discussed the possibility that the British public might react badly to a law that was seen to be overtly racist and attempted to address the central difficulty of putting legislation into place that met its aims without appearing to be racially motivated; a difficult job in the circumstances. It noted, "There is no doubt that even though a Bill...would in form be non-discriminatory, it would nevertheless be clear against whom the Bill was really directed". The committee agreed that, presentationally, it would be best to emphasise the potential housing shortages that further migration might bring about.
The legislators' later intentions in 1961/62 are therefore not in doubt and the famous speech by Enoch Powell in 1968 merely outlined the thinking that had apparently been going on behind closed doors for a decade or more. It is useful to explore the background discussions that clearly went on at the time, (and continued to go on - see the memo in the next section), in order to place in context and highlight the difficulty that the legislation placed upon immigration officers who were commanded in high moral tones at the outset of the Act to apply a law equally whose intention was anything but. Where a law is based on unspoken assumptions it is left to those enforcing it to try and impose some kind of consistency. The Immigration Service was handed a bad law with too few powers to enforce its tacit aims and an inbuilt likelihood that they would be accused of prejudice in the way that it was applied. The instincts of law enforcement officers are to rely on strongly defined powers and rules and the service was tainted by association with the suspect motives of the legislators until at least the early 1980s by which time a more coherent and consistent body of law had emerged.
1962 to 1968 Post-Empire restriction
The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants ActHistory of British nationality law
- Early English and British nationality law :British nationality law has its origins in medieval England. There has always been a distinction in English law between the subjects of the monarch and aliens: the monarch's subjects owed him allegiance, and included those born in his dominions and...
came about as a result of growing public and political unease regarding the impact of migration from the, now fast declining, British Empire
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
. West Indian immigration, (especially), had, since the war, continued to grow fairly gently but steadily until there were by 1956 around 100,000 new West Indian migrants in the UK. There were echoes of the public outcry which had brought about the 1905 Act and the political arguments, in public at least, similarly attempted to focus on the economic control of migrant labour and attempted to skirt around the underlying racial prejudices that were voiced by their constituents. Whatever the motivations of those concerned, it was clear that the common citizenship status shared by the various members of the Empire, or Commonwealth
Commonwealth of Nations
The Commonwealth of Nations, normally referred to as the Commonwealth and formerly known as the British Commonwealth, is an intergovernmental organisation of fifty-four independent member states...
, as it was becoming known, was untenable with a world population growing more mobile. There was also a better understanding than there had been in 1948 that Britain’s world position had irrevocably changed as it moved away from the assumptions of empire towards potential membership of the European Economic Community
European Economic Community
The European Economic Community The European Economic Community (EEC) The European Economic Community (EEC) (also known as the Common Market in the English-speaking world, renamed the European Community (EC) in 1993The information in this article primarily covers the EEC's time as an independent...
.
The new Act was seen by its opponents as draconian, "a monstrous Bill", but its limitations were many - some of these are dealt with in the section on the history of in-country enforcement, (see index). The question of what to do with those facilitating illegal entry was addressed but seen as a particularly theoretical clause. The Attorney General did not believe that it would lead to any prosecutions.
"This is a necessary provision, though I doubt very much whether there will be any prosecutions under it, because the difficulties of proving that a particular individual has reasonable grounds for believing the man to be an illegal immigrant, or that he knows it, are not likely to lead to many prosecutions".
Preparations to implement the new Act included a recruitment campaign in 1962 which brought the staffing of the Immigration Service up to 500 ready for the start date on 1 July 1962. At midnight on 30 June 1962 the door was literally closed on some people as newly labelled entrances at Heathrow were uncovered and old ones shut.
The new rules for Commonwealth citizens meant that those determined to settle in the UK, but who no longer qualified, had to find new ways of achieving this. Commonwealth
Commonwealth
Commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. Historically, it has sometimes been synonymous with "republic."More recently it has been used for fraternal associations of some sovereign nations...
governments had warned that the new restrictions would create a black market in forged documentation and they were proven correct. The 1960s saw an emergent boom, in immigration terms, of bogus students who saw study, whether real or not, as a way to get a foot in the door. A market grew in bogus colleges
Bogus colleges in the United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom a bogus college is a fake college or university used as a means to enable people from overseas to apply for a British student visa and consequently reside in the United Kingdom, usually for illegal work purposes. They have also been set up as a money making scam...
and forged documents provided by racketeers who would, for a price, provide a complete package comprising travel, documents and illegal work. They would reclaim their investment, with interest, on a proportion of the migrant’s illicit wages. Other developing trends included bogus marriages and forged birth certificates which were designed to allow “children” to join relatives in the UK as dependants despite being clearly above the permitted age. The ability of either the Immigration Service, or their administrative HQ at Princeton House in High Holborn, to combat these abuses was limited. The entire administrative strength of the Immigration and Nationality Dept at Princeton House was approximately 300 and before 1962 IND was divided into three "Divisions" B1, (casework), B2, (policy) and A2, (admin). In 1962 another Division was created, B3, to deal with deportation casework. No formal operational enforcement and detection structure was to come into being until the 1970s and realistic legal powers to deal with illegal migrants would not appear until 1973 with the implementation of the 1971 Act.
The quality of Entry Clearances, (Visas), issued abroad in the newly controlled Commonwealth countries also gave cause for concern when presented at British ports. The initial assumption when the 1962 Act was introduced was that these would be taken at face value on arrival. There was also an instruction to Immigration Officers and general understanding that written entry conditions would only be recorded and stored in exceptional circumstances. By 1965 new instructions had been issued which, although very liberal by later standards, encouraged control officers to impose conditions more often and to refuse people who had clearly obtained entry clearances by misrepresentation.
Memo to Cabinet by Home Secretary Frank Soskice
Frank Soskice
Frank Soskice, Baron Stow Hill PC was a British lawyer and Labour Party politician.-Background and education:...
29th Jan 1965 (extracts)
Evasion takes different forms. One is for the evader to pass himself off as a person with a legal right of entry. He may pretend to be under 16 when he is older, or the son of a Commonwealth citizen already here. Many of these claims are made more difficult to counter because they are supported by officially issued passports giving false particulars, which can be arranged from some countries without much difficulty...another device is to pose as a student or visitor...there are genuine students who stay on whether or not they complete their studies and genuine visitors who change their minds.
The main type of defence against this type of evasion is for the immigration officer to admit the student or visitor about whom he is suspicious on condition that he leaves the country within a specified time...the power exists but has been little used because the means of enforcement are defective...there is no good way to keep track of individuals admitted under conditions.
Second, there is no simple power to enforce the condition, ie: to require the defaulter, if traced, to leave the country.....The net intake of coloured Commonwealth immigrants, (see footnote), during 1964 was 64,000...I think coloured Commonwealth citizens are coming faster than they can be absorbed into the community”.
(A footnote states): “This expression is used as a term of art to mean those Commonwealth citizens who are not citizens of Canada, Australia or New Zealand. All the statistics in this memorandum relate to coloured Commonwealth citizens”.
The above memo is startling to modern eyes for two main reasons; firstly the candid admission that the control was toothless at the point of entry and non existent afterwards and, secondly, for its relaxed affirmation of a two tier approach to the law by the Home Office on the basis of race. The Home Secretary’s memo does not use the terms “old” and “new” Commonwealth but the division of nationalities described matches the terms as used in published Immigration statistics until the early 1980’s. This differentiation had no basis in immigration or nationality law and, as the memo makes clear, was a simple euphemism, or "term of art", for “coloured”, (as they put it), and white migrants.
There were possible cultural, political and practical reasons to treat the two groups of nationalities differently such as the historic ties of kinship and a lasting gratitude to those countries which had provided commonwealth forces during both world wars. There was also the compelling economic argument that there was more cause for concern over economic migration from countries which were relatively poorer. Whatever the merits of these arguments they are undermined by the evidence within the memo, and elsewhere, that the Home Office and government policy of the time was primarily motivated by a need to differentiate on the basis of race.
In the same way that the advent of aircraft caught legislators by surprise, so too did the invention of the Hovercraft. There was much debate in immigration policy concerning how this strange new machine should be defined. Was it a ship or an aircraft? Were passengers arriving by land,sea or air? A classic Civil Service compromise was reached; the machine was an aircraft which arrived at a seaport. More serious questions were being asked at the end of the 1960s concerning immigration following the infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech
Rivers of Blood speech
The "Rivers of Blood" speech was a speech criticising Commonwealth immigration, as well as proposed anti-discrimination legislation in the United Kingdom made on 20 April 1968 by Enoch Powell , the Conservative Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West...
by Enoch Powell. The highly emotive speech changed the political landscape for anyone attempting to consider practical, administrative issues for many years to come. Thirty-nine Heathrow immigration officers, very unwisely, wrote to Enoch Powell in support of tougher controls whereupon he made their note public. Although their concerns were based on what they saw as a lack of administrative powers to do their job effectively they did, by associating themselves with the speech, damage their impartiality as Civil Servants and they were disciplined as a consequence.
On 8 June 1968 Immigration Officers at Heathrow detained James Earl Ray
James Earl Ray
James Earl Ray was an American criminal convicted of the assassination of civil rights and anti-war activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr....
, the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the...
, attempting to travel on a false passport. Another event in 1968, infinitely less serious but still noteworthy as providing some of the colour of the time, was the refusal of the Captain Beefheart
Captain Beefheart
Don Van Vliet January 15, 1941 December 17, 2010) was an American musician, singer-songwriter and artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. His musical work was conducted with a rotating ensemble of musicians called The Magic Band, active between 1965 and 1982, with whom he recorded 12...
Magic Band at Heathrow Airport. The Refusal of Leave to Land report by the, (sadly), unnamed immigration officer recounts the event with evident relish.
1968 - 1978 New laws, European membership
The key events leading to the hurried introduction of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 were the independence of, first, Kenya and, later, Uganda and Tanzania. Each of these countries at independence had an established minority population which had come from the Indian subcontinent, some of whom had been introduced into East Africa by Britain which, as colonial power, had employed them on construction projects. Many had left India before its independence and before the creation of Pakistan, and their only citizenship was that of the UK and Colonies.The East African countries, on attaining independence, pursued a policy of Africanization that required residents to demonstrate their allegiance to the new state. Many Indians in Kenya
Indians in Kenya
There are currently over 100,000 Indians in Kenya, most living in the major urban areas of Nairobi and Mombasa with others living in rural areas. Most are Hindus and with some Muslims, often with their own businesses and places of worship...
for instance either did not fulfill the conditions for acquiring the new citizenship or did not register within the time limit, preferring to wait and see how their fortunes were likely to go in the new regime before committing themselves. Some may have been reluctant to lose their British connection. For many of those who did not acquire the new citizenship, serious consequences ensued. They lost their employment or their livelihood, and sought to use whatever protection their citizenship of the UK and Colonies could offer them. Their passports had been issued by the British High Commission and, therefore, under the 1962 Act they were not subject to immigration control. They had, as British subjects, right of entry into the UK. In 1967, Asians from Kenya and Uganda, fearing discrimination from their own national governments, began to arrive in Britain.
The potential numbers of those eligible to travel to the UK created alarm, and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 was rushed through Parliament. The new Act provided that British subjects would be free from immigration control only if they, or at least one of their parents or grandparents, had been born, adopted, registered or naturalised in the UK. The issue of a passport by a British High Commission thus ceased to be a qualification for entry free of control. For those subject to control, another voucher system was introduced. This one was based on tight quotas.
The 1968 Act directly, and deliberately, favoured white commonwealth citizens more likely to have British ancestry. Cabinet papers released in 2002 showed that the thrust of the legislation was designed to have this effect.
By the end of the 1960s the previous practice of detaining immigration offenders in prison was increasingly unworkable as numbers of detainees rose. A dedicated facility was opened near Heathrow in a disused RAF base which became the Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre. The accommodation had reminders of its history and enjoyed bomb proof doors among other features. At Gatwick Airport temporary detention accommodation was located in the disused 1930s air terminal and housed around 15 detainees. This building was shared, rather incongruously, with the British Airways social club.
By the end of the 1960s immigration legislation and rules were drawn from too many sources, out of date, clumsily drafted in haste or misconceived. Consensus was reached that a completely new Immigration Act was needed to draw together or re-write the law in a way that would tighten controls and clarify the rules. This major reappraisal and consolidation of immigration law coincided with an expansion of the Immigration Branch administrative HQ, change of name and a change of location. In 1970 the Immigration Branch became the Immigration and Nationality Department and, in 1972, it relocated from High Holborn to Croydon where it took up residence at the recently built Lunar House
Lunar House
Lunar House is a 20-storey office block at 40 Wellesley Road, Croydon, in south London. on the east side, that houses the headquarters of the UK Border Agency, an executive agency of the Home Office in the United Kingdom.-The building:...
.
Immigration Act 1971
The Immigration Act 1971 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom concerning immigration.The Act, as with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, and that of 1968, restricted immigration, especially primary immigration into the UK....
gave right of abode in the UK to those it defined as ‘patrials’. These were:
- citizens of the UK and Colonies who had that citizenship (i) by birth, adoption, naturalization, or registration in the UK;
- citizens of the UK and Colonies whose parent or grandparent had that citizenship by those same means at the time of the birth of the person in question;
- citizens of the UK and Colonies with five years’ ordinary residence in the UK;
- Commonwealth citizens whose parent was born or adopted in the UK before their birth;
- Commonwealth citizens married to a patrial man.
The Act replaced employment vouchers with Work permit
Work permit (United Kingdom)
The UK Work Permit scheme was an immigration category used to encourage skilled workers to enter the United Kingdom up till November 2008, when it was replaced by the points-based immigration system...
s, allowing only temporary residence. Commonwealth citizens who had been settled in the UK for five years when the Act came into force, (1 January 1973), also had the right to register and thus possibly the right of abode. Others would be subject to immigration controls. Apart from the five year residence qualification, the right to live in the UK and to enter free from immigration control was determined by birth or parentage, not by nationality.
On the same day that the new Act came into force, 1 January 1973, the UK entered the European Economic Community (EEC). At the same time that immigration restrictions were confirmed for Commonwealth citizens with a traditional allegiance to Britain, a new category of privilege was created for the European nationals who had formed the bulk of the work of the immigrations service for the preceding 50 years. Membership of the European Community, now the European Union, encompassed the right of movement of workers within member states. The practical reality of membership from an immigration control standpoint was that EU nationals were separated from other arriving passengers. As, in theory at least, they could be excluded or deported, (for instance following criminal conviction), there still continued checks against warnings lists. By 1970 the staff numbers within the Immigration Service had risen to approximately 1100 - rather more than double the administration workers at its London HQ.
"On reading this, it seems to be full of one or other of: 'assumptions'; 'estimates'; 'arbitrary assumptions'; 'uncertainty'; 'projections'; 'scarcely any evidence'; and 'higher and lower projections'... This isn't statistics; it's astrology…This won't alter policy; it won't alter the facts; it will give a certain spurious validity to the future… If this is the best the Astrologer- General can do, I would not publish."
The lack of reliable statistics and access to data was to be a recurring theme throughout the 1980's and beyond. The old "Traffic Index" of manually collated landing and embarkation cards was replaced by a new computer system, (INDECS), in 1979 but the primitive database was hardly an improvement. Immigration Officers working in 24 hour ports-of-entry only had access to the main immigration database via telephone during office hours Monday to Friday. For the most part, immigration officers worked as they had always done, in the dark, on the basis of the story they heard and the documents in front of them.
1979 - 1989 Expansion, new visa controls, carriers liability
The incoming Conservative administration in 1979 acted to introduce more legislation - the British Nationality Act 1981British Nationality Act 1981
The British Nationality Act 1981 was an Act of Parliament passed by the British Parliament concerning British nationality. It has been the basis of British nationality law since 1 January 1983.-History:...
- which again tightened citizenship critera. From an immigration control standpoint there was growing concern, and heated debate, concerning the restrictions placed on foreign spouses joining UK partners. There was evidence that marriage was being used by some as a means to circumvent the stricter settlement rules and a particular focus on applications from the Indian sub-continent. In the absence of overseas visa controls there was an incentive for prospective spouses to attempt to gain entry as visitors and apply for stay on the basis of marriage once in the UK once the marriage had taken place. The attempts by the Immigration Service at ports to investigate suspected bogus marriages impacted on cultural sensitivities where the differences between marriages arranged legitimately according to custom and those arranged for immigration purposes were notoriously difficult to separate. To investigate the complexities of the applications within a port of entry control environment was far from ideal and the Service was criticised for insensitivity in its dealings with these cases, especially in the misuse of medical examinations. In 1983 new immigration rules regarding marriage were introduced which required people to satisfy IND and UKIS that the "primary purpose" of the marriage was not for immigration purposes.
The thrust of IND's policy throughout the 1980's was to continue to reassure public and political opinion that the numbers of those settling in the UK was under control and to try and take the heat out the immigration issue. The published statistics for those being allowed residence during the 1970's have a reassuring uniformity. "About 50,000" seems to have been an accepted norm and the Control of Immigration Statistics documents published by the Home Office continued in to the early 1980's to divide those Commonwealth citizens settling in the UK between "old and "new" Commonwealth to give a further reassurance that the correct emphasis between national groups was being maintained. The emphasis on settlement statistics was the most important statistical indicator until the explosion in asylum numbers in the early 1990's.
The pressures on the inbound controls presented by the growth in numbers and rates of refusal for some nationalities meant that, by 1986, the case for new visa requirements became very strong and, on 1 September 1986, it was announced that there would be new visa restrictions for people of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Pakistan. For reasons which are not readily explainable the visa restrictions did not come into force until 15 October. The ensuing panic over the weeks inbetween the announcement and implementation of the new rules brought Heathrow Airport to a standstill and the evening television news bulletins contained hugely embarrassing images of hundreds of detainees camped in the main arrivals hall at Terminal 3 awaiting processing. Between 1st September and 15th October 8,024 people were detained on arrival at Terminal 3. Hundreds of detainees were taken to hastily arranged reception centres and the low point came on 14 October 1986 when 1020 people were detained on arrival in one day, 580 of which were Bangladeshi nationals.
The imposition of blanket visa controls on these Commonwealth countries in 1986 can possibly be seen as the final stage of the process that had started in 1962 and an attempt to move away from the inconsistencies of the past. There was now an increasingly long list of countries whose people would require visas before coming to the UK, even as visitors. Although the concept was not voiced at the time it was the start of a longer term policy of "exporting the border", that is, to move the border control abroad so as to avoid the costly processes of in-country detention, in-country appeals and combating illegal entry. This was good in theory but had to be balanced against the very formidable costs of setting up visa issuing posts abroad and the fact that the management of those posts came under the purview of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Immigration Officers' sent overseas to staff these posts were seconded to the F&CO. The F&CO had their own proper concerns about maintaining good relations with Britain's trading partners and not creating any barriers to trade.
The growing pressures on detention accommodation resulted in an imaginative attempt to provide new spaces by means of a floating detention centre. The Earl William was an ex cross-channel ferry refitted for a new role as a static, secure holding facility moored at Harwich. The use of a moored vessel provoked hostile opposition from those who saw the idea as a modern day Prison hulk. The Home Office pressed forward with the idea and the Earl William was contracted into service under the management of Securicor, who had been running immigration detention facilities since 1970. Acceptance of the new arrangements required that the Earl William prove itself as cost effective, humane and secure. In October 1987 the strongest gale to hit England in 200 years broke the vessel free of its moorings and it ran aground on a sandbank. Although none of its 78 detainees was injured the credibility of the exercise was fatally undermined and it was not used again.
The 1987 Carriers Liability Act sought to place greater responsibility on those bringing passengers to the UK to verify that their documentation was in order. The Act gave powers to fine the carrier £1000 for each inadmissible passenger. This fine was doubled in August 1991 and two years later extended to cover passengers without transit visas where these were required. This applied as much to lorry drivers and owners of small aircraft as it did to international airlines and was fiercely resisted by the transport lobby. That the Act was needed was evidenced by the rise in the numbers of clandestine illegal entrants that still continued to arrive despite the sanctions imposed. By 1998 8000 illegal entrants were arriving clandestinely and being detected emerging from lorries where in 1992 there had been 500. The Act insisted that carriers, including hauliers, should take responsibility for those they brought to the UK but allowed that carriers could not be expected to be experts in forged or counterfeit documents. The fine was applied however where, in the opinion of the Immigration Service, the forgery was "readily apparent". Carriers were also fined for the more demonstrable errors of transporting people without identity documents or without a visa where they were required to have one. The 1987 Act was later repealed and replaced by provisions within the 1999 Act. Between its implementation and 1991 approximately £30m in fines were imposed. The practical effect of the Act from an Immigration Service perspective was to create a great deal of additional work in collecting evidence and debating with carriers whether or not they were liable. The service received no part of the revenue from the fines to offset its additional costs.
The numbers of "designated" ports, ie: those licensed to allow international passengers rose in 1987 to include Leeds/Bradford Airport, Newcastle and Edinburgh and a new terminal opened at Gatwick in 1988.
The fall of the Berlin Wall
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...
brought with it a new political landscape, opened up travel routes long closed and meant the re-emergence of nationalities which had been submerged within the Soviet bloc. For immigration officers at ports prior to 1989 the arrival of a person with an East German passport was a notable event which would involve the interest of Special Branch. The way in which they were subsequently dealt with went from one extreme to the other and were soon accepted as readily as other German passports. The other side of the coin was the concern at the potential movement of labour from other countries in Eastern Europe and visa controls were applied in 1992.
1990 - 1997 The growth in asylum
The number of asylum seekers before 1979 is difficult to determine as no separate statistics were collated before this point. A Parliamentary answer indicated that in 1973, 34 people had been granted refugee status. Asylum was a niche market within the administration of immigration control where the entire asylum casework effort in 1980 was delivered by a team largely located in a single room within the Lunar HouseLunar House
Lunar House is a 20-storey office block at 40 Wellesley Road, Croydon, in south London. on the east side, that houses the headquarters of the UK Border Agency, an executive agency of the Home Office in the United Kingdom.-The building:...
HQ in Croydon. The application of the 1951 Convention dealing with the treatment of refugees was still being applied, to a large extent, to those people fleeing persecution from behind the Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain
The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989...
.
The total number of asylum applications in 1979 was 1563 and by 1988 had risen, fairly steadily but not too dramatically, to 3998. In 1989 the numbers of applications rose sharply, to 11640, and by 1991 had reached 44840. The reasons for the dramatic rise are complex and have to be seen in the context of international travel patterns to other European nations.
Some saw the general drift of migration away from legitimate to various illegal routes and then on through the asylum system as a linked process. Peter Tompkins CBE was HM Chief Inspector of the Immigration Service between 1981-1991 and, in 1994, wrote;
"As migratory pressure began to increase, governments reacted with tougher legislation in relation to settlement, only to experience a rise in the number of those seeking intial entry as visitors, or students, and overstaying. Closing these loopholes was followed by additional evasion though marriages of convenience. The imposition of fresh visa requirements as governments sought to relieve pressure on frontier controls led directly to an upsurge in the use of forged and falsified travel documents which, in turn, sparked off penalty legislation putting pressure on carriers to check documents prior to embarkation. The latest development is the so-called inadmissable passenger who arrives with falsified documents, or no documents at all, and goes on to claim asylum.....the reality is that increased migratory pressure has created an environment where most immigration policies are irrelevant because they bear so little relation to what actually happens".
Peter Tompkins was the last HM Chief Inspector to have risen through the ranks steeped in the gritty practicalities of front-line border control. His 1994 essay also made some astute predictions for the future;
"Politicians... will produce rhetoric about quotas, family unification and special skills togther with undertakings to maintain a strict line on enforcement. They will have little or no chance of succeeding because, like their predecessors, they will neglect to provide adequate control machinery for their policies....The most revolutionary change, already well under way, will see the transfer of activity from airport arrivals to airline check-in desks at departure points...these pre-entry controls need to be supplemented by equally radical changes in after entry enforcement. Three essential requirements are comprehensively enforced employer sanctions, full exchange of information from central and local government authorities to control authorities and, most importantly, the provision of sufficient detention accommodation.."
These prescient recommendations from Peter Tompkins could have provided the blueprint for immigration control for the next 15 years. All of these things came to pass to one degree or other but only after many false starts.
Only a very small proportion, 5% in 1994, of applicants were granted full refugee status. Of the others a larger number were granted Exceptional Leave, (later re-titled Discretionary Leave), usually on the basis that other compassionate circumstances applied such as family ties.
The rates of refusal highlighted a growth in applicants whose motive was found to be economic migration rather than genuine fear. The reasons for the rapid increase in arrivals included increasing availability of cheaper air travel, the existence by then of community groups able to provide support on arrival, relative economic prosperity that made employment possible, the availability of Legal aid
Legal aid
Legal aid is the provision of assistance to people otherwise unable to afford legal representation and access to the court system. Legal aid is regarded as central in providing access to justice by ensuring equality before the law, the right to counsel and the right to a fair trial.A number of...
to pursue the claim and eligibility to certain benefits and accommodation. For those who might otherwise have intended to enter and work illegally the benefit of an outstanding asylum claim was the legitimacy it conferred and safety as regards arrest.
The administrative processes governing asylum applications were overwhelmed and a backlog started to accumulate. The increased delays meant more applicants eventually found themselves eligible for concessions based on the length of time the process had taken and this, in turn, encouraged speculative applications from those who saw no future in pursuing the difficult alternatives offered of seeking permission to remain through legitimate settlement or approved employment. As numbers rose, a decreasing proportion were found to qualify for refugee status. In 1980, in the United Kingdom, 64 per cent. of claimants were recognised as refugees. In 1990, the figure was about 25 per cent.
New challenges emerged for the Immigration Service who encountered asylum seekers at ports and in-country. Between 1995 and 2000 the newest problem the Immigration Service faced was the growth in asylum seekers entering via the Channel Tunnel
Channel Tunnel
The Channel Tunnel is a undersea rail tunnel linking Folkestone, Kent in the United Kingdom with Coquelles, Pas-de-Calais near Calais in northern France beneath the English Channel at the Strait of Dover. At its lowest point, it is deep...
with 700 a month presenting themselves at Waterloo station
Waterloo station
Waterloo station, also known as London Waterloo, is a central London railway terminus and London Underground complex. The station is owned and operated by Network Rail and is close to the South Bank of the River Thames, and in Travelcard Zone 1....
. Waterloo, as an international terminal, was later replaced by the control at the impressively refurbished St Pancras station and the creation of "juxtaposed controls" agreed by the Sangatte Protocol of 1992 which was itself brought into being by the Channel Tunnel (International Arrangements) Order 1993. This allowed for control zones to be set up at each end of the tunnel; the British end at St Pancras operated by French officers and the French control zone at Coquelles staffed by UK Immigration Officers. A passenger at Coquelles was still legally in France; the international frontier was at the mid-point of the tunnel. In immigration terms a person did not enter the UK until they left the terminal at Cheriton. This brought about some complex scenarios; it was not possible to claim asylum in the UK at Coquelles but it was possible to enter the control area illegally and be treated as an illegal entrant.
Most asylum applicants detected at ports of entry had no identifying documentation but the asylum legislation trumped the immigration rules and it was not legally or physically possible to detain all those who arrived. The Immigration Service at ports did its best to intercept new arrivals as they emerged from inbound aircraft before they could destroy the passports they had used to travel. The realities of the numbers of people arriving and the sheer scale of aircraft movements made 100% interception impossible and, often, the first that immigration officers at ports knew of an undocumented asylum seeker was their appearance at the passport control. Efforts would immediately be made to identify by which route they had travelled and, equally importantly, the agents or "facilitators" who had accompanied them. Arriving asylum seekers would then enter into an increasingly well worn process of documentation, medical checks and contact with refugee support bodies and Local Authorities.
A new team to counter the growing trend of facilitation of asylum and illegal entry at seaports, both clandestine and documentary abuse, was created at Dover in 1994. The Facilitation Support Unit (FSU) was jointly staffed by the Immigration Service and Kent Police. The unit was to develop essential expertise in bringing prosecutions against those people smuggling
People smuggling
People smuggling is defined as "the facilitation, transportation, attempted transportation or illegal entry of a person or persons across an international border, in violation of one or more countries laws, either clandestinely or through deception, such as the use of fraudulent documents"...
illegal entrants. A report to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2001 said,
"In 1999, the FSU investigated 299 incidents and arrested 410 persons suspected of facilitating a total of 1,803 illegal entrants/asylum claimants. In the same period, 105 trials were completed involving 120 defendants and resulting in 106 convictions. Custodial sentences exceeding 172 years were imposed".
The efforts made to identify and document the arriving asylum seeker were vital to the end of the process where an application was refused. Without proof of identity and nationality it was impossible to document the person so as to ensure that they could be removed. Proof of an inbound carrier allowed the removal of the person to their last port of embarkation. Without evidence of any of these removal would be very much more difficult whatever the outcome of the claim. Fingerprinting of asylum seekers was vital to this process, and was being considered by 1991. Legal powers to fingerprint asylum seekers were finally given within the 1993 Asylum and Immigration Act in the teeth of strong opposition from those who viewed this as criminalising asylum seekers.
The gaps in the identification process presented opportunities to fraudsters to make multiple applications in various identities so as to duplicate payment of benefits; in 1991, for instance, eight asylum applicants were found to have made 100 asylum and social security applications between them. One applicant had 49 identities and another had 34. One suspect was found in possession of 14 Department of Social Security payment books. Such instances provided some evidence that some asylum seekers were motivated by the availability of benefits but this was disputed by those who cited as an alternative incentive the length of time that applications took to be resolved.
In 1983 the total Immigration detention
Immigration detention
Immigration detention is the policy of holding individuals suspected of visa violations, illegal entry or unauthorised arrival, and those subject to deportation and removal in detention until a decision is made by immigration authorities to grant a visa and release them into the community, or to...
space available to the Immigration Service was approximately 180 spaces located at the major London airports. Elsewhere, other ports made use of local prison spaces. The relatively small number of beds were designed to cater for short stay cases of people soon to be removed from the country having been refused at a port of entry.
By 1987 it was recognised that the available space was woefully inadequate and an attempt was made to address this by use of a floating detention vessel, (see above). The failure of the Earl William was a severe blow which meant that the numbers of those who had to be released on temporary admission, (immigration bail), grew. The situation did not improve until the opening of Campsfield House
Campsfield House
Campsfield House is a privately run Immigration detention Centre near Oxford, England. It has been the site of a number of protests from human rights campaigners and has seen a number of hunger strikes and one suicide. The former Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons condemned conditions at...
Detention Centre in 1993 which provided 200 extra spaces. The expansion led to a more centralised management of the detention estate whereas before the centres had largely been managed by the airports that they served. On 25th May 1995 the total number of people held in immigration detention centres was recorded as 381 with a further 508 being held in prisons under immigration powers.
The pressure on the detention estate grew as the numbers of asylum applicants rose during the 1990’s. As detention usage grew so did the costs - £7.76m in 1993/4 rising to £17.8m by 1996/97. Tinsley House, which opened in 1996 at Gatwick, was the first purpose built immigration detention centre.
Fairer, Faster, Firmer
In 1998, the new Labour administration published a white paperWhite paper
A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that helps solve a problem. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions, and are often requested and used in politics, policy, business, and technical fields. In commercial use, the term has also come to refer to...
titled Fairer, faster and firmer - a modern approach to immigration and asylum which promised an expansion of the detention estate. The result was a flurry of Public Finance Initiatives to build centres at Oakington
Oakington Immigration Reception Centre
Oakington Immigration Reception Centre was a UK Home Office immigration detention centre located in Cambridgeshire, England.Originally a World War II airfield, RAF Oakington, during the war it was used for Short Stirling bomber forces, as well as other assorted units...
, (Cambridge), Yarlswood (Bedford), Dungavel
Dungavel
Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre is an immigration detention facility in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, near the town of Strathaven that is also known as Dungavel Castle or Dungavel House...
, (Scotland) and a new expanded centre at Harmondsworth near Heathrow which increased the overall capacity by over 1500. Expansion brought the total capacity of immigration detention centres to approximately 2,800 by 2005.
This massive expansion was driven by the need to maintain control not only of people arriving in the UK who had been refused, but also by the dramatic rise of enforcement within the UK over the period. The removal of those whose asylum claims had failed became the top priority but the job of tracing and detaining failed asylum seekers was only the beginning of an often tortuous process of dealing with many barriers to their removal. These included renewed applications, resurrected appeals, judicial review, MPs representations, applications to stay on the basis of marriage, human rights appeals on the basis of family ties and the problems associated with obtaining travel documentation that would actually allow the removal to take place. Maintaining control of the person during this process was, and is, seen as essential to successfully enforcing immigration removals for adults.
The announcement in 1998 that IND had published its instructions on the internet was a tangible sign that the organisation was looking to the future possibilities offered by the IT revolution and was set for modernisation. The document "Fairer, faster, firmer" outlined what it considered to be the failings of the previous decade and set out its ideas for the future. One of the major successes of recent times, (as noted by Peter Tompkins above), had been the establishment by the Immigration Service of a team of Airline Liaison Officers whose job was to stop inadmissible passengers at their point of departure abroad. The first of these had been posted to New Delhi as long before as 1993 and quickly established good links with local police and immigration officials. There were some notable successes and, although undocumented arrivals had risen by 17% the previous year, this was not the case where the ALO’s were deployed. In 1998 ALO's in five locations, working under a code of conduct ratified by the Air Transport Association Control Authority Working Group, prevented 2095 passengers travelling with suspect documentation. In 1999, 4999 inadmissable passenger were identified in 17 locations. By 2001, 57 ALO's had been deployed abroad.
Another key change was a reappraisal of how and when people should be notified of their permission to enter the UK. This work was conducted under the banner “flexibility” and reconsidered how it was best to give people permission to enter, whether it was still necessary in all cases and whether permission could be granted as part of the visa process abroad. This was part of a move to modernise working processes at ports which had barely changed in their basics since 1962. The general aims, as reported to the Home Affairs Select Committee, were to speed up passenger flows and to make better use of data supplied by carriers to identify facilitators and racketeers. Flexibility was contained in the Immigration (Leave to Enter and Remain) Order 2000 and came into effect 30th July 2000. It paved the way for:
- advance clearance to enter the UK for low risk groups such as tour parties
- permission to enter to be given in writing, by fax, electronically or orally
- permission to be given through a third party rather than directly
- for the control can be operated abroad
- capacity to keep pace with new developments such as identification by use of biometrics.
There were moves to set up a more joined up intelligence network, based on the police's National Intelligence Model, whose intention was to ensure " that information is fully researched, developed and analysed to provide intelligence which enables senior managers to provide strategic direction, make tactical resourcing decisions about operational matters and manage risk". It was planned to expand the use of fingerprinting and, for enforcement, there was a major change of direction with ambitious plans to train immigration officers to make use of their powers of arrest, give them more powers of search and make them less reliant on police resources.These were just a few items on a lengthy programme of changes, backed up by substantial promises of money and legislative time in Parliament. The document was a serious statement of intent and bore the hallmarks of a small organisation evolving into a larger and very much more professional organisation but, at its heart, was a central IT project that was intended to be the hub of all the administration of casework within the Croydon HQ.
IND Casework Programme
In 1995 IND entered into an agreement with an IT consortium to develop a new computer system. The IND casework programme was a Private Finance InitiativePrivate Finance Initiative
The private finance initiative is a way of creating "public–private partnerships" by funding public infrastructure projects with private capital...
, (PFI) agreed between IND and an IT consortium led by Siemens Business Services signed in 1996 and scheduled for completion in 1998. It was a well meant but ultimately over ambitious venture intended to provide the department with a “paperless” office where cases, especially asylum cases, would be electronically prioritised and actioned without the old fashioned processes involving transport and storage of thousands of paper based files. The system, it was hoped, would not only speed up the process but would pay for itself through a 40% reduction in staff. The new system would also do away with the need for the department to be divided into separate administrative “Divisions”. The new team based casework teams would be formed within a new multi-skilled “Integrated Casework Directorate”.
There was an urgent need to modernise the casework systems in IND. The case management systems had barely changed since the 1970’s when staff had been counted in hundreds. By 1997 they numbered over 5000 and were dealing with an ever increasing backlog of asylum cases. All cases were considered on paper files and the separate “Divisions” within IND would deal with a particular aspect, eg: applications to stay longer in the UK were dealt with by B1 Division; if there was an appeal a separate appeals file would be raised and tied to the first file; if an asylum claim was being considered or deportation action was being considered then more files would be added and so on. These ever weightier files would make a stately progress from one area of IND to another by hand – conveyed by a battalion of messengers and their movements recorded on card indices, until an electronic tracking system was introduced in the 1980s. The Immigration Service, for its part, also produced paper files and, if there was no bar to removing the person, would have no need to liaise with the centre. But, as further appeals were introduced, asylum applications rose and other barriers were raised that according to standing rules needed the scrutiny of an HQ caseworker. The numbers of requests for “authority to remove” that were passed to Croydon rose and added yet more pressure to the creaking system. The delays in the process were exploited by legal advisors who realised that any removal could be delayed by continued representation, renewed appeals and applications to stay, threats of Judicial Review and, last but by no means least, after 2000, Human Rights Act appeals. The Casework Programme went further than merely providing a database tool to IND caseworkers. The programme was intended to restructure the department into a new Integrated Caseworking Directorate, (ICD), which would comprise huge, multi-skilled teams. Steps were taken to prepare for the changes by selecting the staff who would transfer to the new area and prepare the way for reducing the overall numbers of staff. So confident was IND in this programme that it commenced plans to make staff redundant and advertised terms.
The delivery of the IT system in 1998 was delayed but there was an interim rollout of a computer network in readiness and the old caseworking teams were disbanded. These included the various teams such as those dealing with deportation of foreign national criminals and the teams which had provided support to the Immigration Service at ports and in enforcement. The assumption behind the programme was that these specialisms would be absorbed within the new multi-skilled teams.
The reorganisation which started in December 1998 had an immediate impact in that the system ground to halt. Urgent steps were taken to restore some kind of service but the infrastructure that had previously supported the thousands of enquiries, the requests for return of passports for travel, the MPs representations, enquiries from Courts, Prisons and legal representatives, the review procedures that allowed the Immigration Service to continue with removals – had all been seriously damaged or destroyed. Frantic efforts were made to repair the damage against the expectation that all would be well once the promised IT system was actually rolled out. In early 2001, as reported by Computer Weekly at the time, Siemens conceded that they were unable to deliver the IT system that was supposed to form the heart of the process. The impact on IND of dismantling its administrative machine and losing experienced staff while dealing with a continuing rise in workload was catastrophic.
Home Affairs Committee - report of January 2001
By 2000, the height of IND’s administrative crisis coincided with a new peak in asylum claims of 76,040. In February 2000 the Parliamentary Home Affairs Select CommitteeHome Affairs Select Committee
The Home Affairs Select Committee is a Committee of the House of Commons in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.-Remit:The Home Affairs Committee is one of the House of Commons Select Committees related to government departments: its terms of reference are to examine "the expenditure,...
, (HAC), started a wide ranging enquiry into the reasons for the rise in asylum and the way that IND and the Immigration Service had handled the issues. During the course of collating evidence for the enquiry the HAC visited the Red Cross centre at Sangatte near Calais and saw for themselves the numbers of would be refugees waiting to try and enter the UK clandestinely. The issues were pushed higher up the political agenda by an awful tragedy that that took place on 19th June that year when 58 Chinese people were found dead in the back of a sealed lorry at Dover. The Dutch driver was later charged with manslaughter. The deaths of the Chinese people at Dover brought about a new focus on the fact that the trafficking of people was now more than the exploitation of displaced people by opportunistic individuals it was the now, (in this instance Triad based), organised crime. There was nothing new in this, Chinese trafficking
Human trafficking
Human trafficking is the illegal trade of human beings for the purposes of reproductive slavery, commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, or a modern-day form of slavery...
had been noted before World War 1, but the scale of the business was growing. The HAC discussed what they described as the "pull factor", what it was that made Britain an attractive destination relative to other countries and what might be done to reduce this.
Another event in February 2000 also put asylum seekers of the newspaper front pages. A group of nine Afghan nationals hijacked an aircraft and forced it to fly to Stansted Airport whereupon they eventually surrendered themselves. They and 79 of the passengers claimed asylum. The Afghan hijackers case was to become a political headache that highlighted the lack of powers the Home Office actually had. The then Home Secretary, Jack Straw
Jack Straw
Jack Straw , British politician.Jack Straw may also refer to:* Jack Straw , English* "Jack Straw" , 1971 song by the Grateful Dead* Jack Straw by W...
, promised tough action but, a court ruled in 2004 that, under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, they could not be sent back to Afghanistan because their lives would be endangered. By 2006 the hijackers eventually won both their release and permission to stay in the UK. The ruling that allowed the hijackers to stay was roundly condemned by the Prime Minister, who described it as an "abuse of common sense", and Home Secretary who blamed it on misinterpretation the Human Rights Act 1998
Human Rights Act 1998
The Human Rights Act 1998 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom which received Royal Assent on 9 November 1998, and mostly came into force on 2 October 2000. Its aim is to "give further effect" in UK law to the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights...
which had come into force in 2000. The Joint Committee on Human Rights
Joint Committee on Human Rights
The Joint Committee on Human Rights is a select committee of both the House of Commons and House of Lords in the Parliament of the United Kingdom...
defended the decision and was itself critical of ministers' comments.
The HAC report noted the underlying issues of staffing within Immigration Service operational areas between 1995 and 2000 where numbers had been frozen or reduced. The HAC welcomed the plans to expand staff numbers. In fact, numbers were set to sky rocket as money was freed up to throw numbers at the “immigration problem”. IND having based its strategy on reducing staff in the 90’s was set to recruit 850 new staff as soon as they could and between 1997 and 2003 staff in IND would rise from 5000 to 11,000 The HAC was informed that on 1 July 2000 there were 2,567 staff in post in IS Ports Directorate and that this figure was due to increase to 3,050 by 31 March 2001.
The report saw an overarching need to join up the threads of law enforcement and recommended that people-smuggling should be treated as per any other area of organised crime and that the Immigration Service should develop joint intelligence cells to enable it to liaise more effectively with other law enforcement agencies. It noted as well that the controls on movement across Europe were only as strong as the weakest point within the member states and that 61% of forgeries were European documents.
The HAC launched a scathing rebuke as part of its conclusions:
“We conclude that the Home Office has been dilatory in enforcing the removal of people whose asylum claims have been refused and others who have gained illegal entry to the UK. This in itself has attracted more people to the UK”.
The HAC also directed criticism at IND for failing to provide the Immigration Service in either ports or enforcement with up-to-date IT and commented.
"The Immigration Service does not have at ports a single computer system on which details of names, dates of birth, nationality and passports on passenger lists on incoming flights or sailings can be checked automatically against databases of criminal records, driving licence applications, credit card holding, house occupation, in real time.".
Of the greatest long term significance was recommendation 14:
“We recommend that existing border control agencies should be combined into a single frontier force on the basis of secondment and direct employment, but with clear lines of communication back to the parent agencies. Pending the creation of a single frontier force, strategic co-direction of better joint working should be provided by a ministerial group to which the official Border Agencies Directors Group should report at least four times a year”.
This was not a recommendation for full scale merger but it was a prescient objective. It excited little comment within IND and the Immigration Service at the time and was probably seen as “blue sky” thinking rather than as a realistic possibility.
Intelligence led controls and organised crime
A new emphasis was emerging around the professional management of intelligence and the recognition that racketeering, facilitation and identity fraud were now big business rather than a back-street industry. Statistics for the later 1990’s showed that the most commonly forged documents encountered at UK ports were EU documents. A report to the Home Affairs Committee by the IND Intelligence Section, (INDIS), noted that there was a general consensus among European law enforcement agencies that provision of such documents was being conducted on a commercial level and that,“the gangs have transferred the knowledge, facilities and networks used for smuggling drugs and other commodities to a highly profitable new endeavour. Many actively recruit potential immigrants in source countries, provide escorts and safe houses en route and are increasingly providing support on arrival such as legal advice to lodge asylum applications. Opportunist illegal entry is becoming rarer. The trade is now firmly in the hands of organised crime”.
INDIS believed that the documents were targeted at the points of the immigration control that were perceived as weakest – in this case the British and European Union channels. This created a conflict with the idea of flexibility at the controls which sought to move passengers quickly. How this might have been resolved is now immaterial because outside events provided a new focus on the security of border controls with the attack on the World Trade Centre
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
in New York on September 11th 2001. The future emphasis was to be very much more stringent at the point where the traveller came into contact with border controls but the new thinking did have the effect of moving some of the consideration away from the airport queues. The reappraisal of the UK's security needs in the wake of 9/11 would ultimately lead to the creation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency
Serious Organised Crime Agency
The Serious Organised Crime Agency is a non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom under Home Office sponsorship...
.
Better liaison and better intelligence started to bring rewards - Operation Gular disrupted a network responsible for smuggling over 400 people into the UK over a two year period. Five men were sentenced to a total of 20 years as a result of closer working with the French authorities.
Secure Borders, Safe Haven
In 2002 Immigrations Service Ports Directorate achieved its highest number of refusals at the border ever, 50,362 as compared with 17,220 refusals at port in 1994. The gradual impact of more visas being issued abroad and the greater emphasis on screening people pre-entry reduced the figure, as did the general fall in non-EEA passenger from its peak in 2000. By 2004, 31,930 passengers were refused entry at port and subsequently removed and, in 2010 the figure had markedly fallen to 18,276.In February 2002 the government published the White Paper “Secure Borders, Safe Haven”. In many ways this was a continuation of the modernisation policies set out in its predecessor “Fairer, Firmer, Faster” in that it outlined plans for more electronic mechanisation of the controls such as iris scanning, heartbeat sensors, x-ray and gamma ray scanners which would be used at Dover and Coquelles to spot hidden illegal entrants. The new technology would be used, to speed through frequent travellers so that resources were better targeted at those more likely to present a problem.
The document went beyond the creation of new technologies though and has to be seen in the context of its time. Numbers of new asylum seekers peaked in 2002 at 84,130, (the highest it would reach), keeping the issue of asylum firmly at the top of the political agenda. It was a document that highlighted the changes in thinking and social attitudes that had taken place since the 1950’s and 60’s when the background social policy assumptions had centred on the concept of assimilation. That idea had been replaced by multiculturalism
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...
and social cohesion
Social cohesion
Social cohesion is a term used in social policy, sociology and political science to describe the bonds or "glue" that bring people together in society, particularly in the context of cultural diversity. Social cohesion is a multi-faceted notion covering many different kinds of social phenomena...
. The document set out ideas as to how the difficult balance could be struck between controlling migration, promoting cultural acceptance, combating social exclusion and promoting a cohesive, modern sense of what it meant to be British.
The document advocated a policy of “managed immigration” to allow more people to enter the UK legally, (especially for work), and tougher mechanisms and rules to prevent those working illegally. It linked immigration policy to an oft repeated assertion that migration provided a positive resource for the economy. The white paper said,
“Migration is an inevitable reality of the modern world and it brings significant benefits. But to ensure that we sustain the positive contribution of migration to our social well-being and economic prosperity, we need to manage it properly and build firmer foundations on which integration with diversity can be achieved”, and;
“The Government will initiate and open and constructive debate about citizenship, civic identity and shared values”.
The practical intention was to seek to drive asylum applications down by a "carrot and stick" approach. The "pull" factors which encouraged asylum seekers to come to Britain would be reduced,(by, for instance, removing access to support for destitute asylum seekers who did not claim asylum immediately upon arrival), and an incentive to follow the mainstream immigration route would be encouraged by relaxing the rules on those coming to work. This would test the assumption that most asylum applicants were actually econonomic migrants and that by freeing up the legal labour market it would take the heat away from the asylum pressure-cooker.
The rules on young people coming for “working holidays” were to be relaxed and a new, “Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme” introduced which would be extended across the economy with set quotas for industries short of labour. Under the scheme a worker could stay up to six months but would have no right to bring dependants. The work permit scheme would be extended to those with medium skills from outside the EU coming for a specific job. Permit holders would be able to apply to stay in Britain after four years.
The changes were introduced by the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. The most controversial area was that of cutting off support to asylum seekers. The Refugee Council
Refugee Council
The Refugee Council is the United Kingdom's leading organisation working with refugees and asylum seekers. The organisation provides support and advice to refugees and asylum seekers, as well as support for other refugee and asylum seeker organisations...
said that the law would “"potentially affect the lives and wellbeing of thousands of asylum applicants in the UK forcing them into extreme poverty and making it more difficult to pursue their asylum application". This aspect of the law was challenged and, in 2004, the European Court held that it breached Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights
European Convention on Human Rights
The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms is an international treaty to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms in Europe. Drafted in 1950 by the then newly formed Council of Europe, the convention entered into force on 3 September 1953...
and the policy was dropped.
Despite these future setbacks the numbers of asylum seekers started to fall. This was brought about by many factors, the better casework processes, faster removal rates, new appeal regulations and other factors such as the 33,000 people who were denied boarding in 2003 by ALO's abroad. During the 1990’s the Airline Liaison Officers abroad had been an essential component in preventing undocumented passengers reaching the UK and driving down asylum claims, (see previous sections). The impact was significant - numbers of Inadequately Documented Arrivals (IDAs) detected after arriving by air fell from 14,071 in 2003 to 6,831 in 2005. This though was only one of the measures taken to regain control of the border together with more casework and enforcement staff, restricted public benefits, improved casework processes and streamlined appeals procedures. The ALO network underlined the benefits of driving down the routes which organised criminal facilitators could exploit and more thought and effort went into refining these ideas and tightening the control.
There had been a belated recognition that the Immigration Service had been left behind in the development of technology and there had been a flurry of activity as the controls on the border caught up. (In-country enforcement continued to lag behind). Measures included:
- Heartbeat Technology - special sensors to detect and analyse clandestine movements within freight vehicles via the vehicle chassis and super-structure,
- X/Gamma Ray Scanners and CO2 probes used to detect the exhaled breath of clandestine entrants in the trailers of vehicles.
In 2003, 3,482 clandestine entrants had been detected at the on-entry controls; in 2005 this had been reduced to 1,588. More effort was directed into de-briefing new asylum seekers during initial screening to gather intelligence about the facilitators and routes used. In 2005 Iris screening underwent live testing at ports for the first time.
The downward trajectory was steep enough to prompt the Prime Minister when speaking at the 2004 Labour Party conference to set a target for IND and the Immigration Service that, by 2006, the numbers of failed asylum seekers removed from the UK would exceed the numbers of new applications. This became known as the “Tipping The Balance” target and the work to meet the target became the organisation's top priority.
Development of child protection
Immigration Officers operating port controls have always been acutely aware of the risks posed to children by traffickers and others who pose a risk and have worked with police and social services to ensure that the interests of the child are put first. The role of immigration staff in child protection is a vital one where, for foreign children coming to the UK, the immigration staff may be the only government officials with whom they come into contact.In 2003, the Metropolitan Police and Immigration Service, together with other government welfare agencies and the NSPCC
NSPCC
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is a United Kingdom charity campaigning and working in child protection.-History:...
, piloted an operation known as "Operation Paladin Child" to monitor the arrival of unaccompanied children at Heathrow Airport. Social services were asked to undertake assessments of any child who was a non-EU passport holder, under 18 years of age, who was travelling without a parent, legal guardian or older sibling, and not part of a recognised school, church or sporting group visit. The operation, as well as addressing an important issue head on, had the wider benefit of building an understanding between social workers and law enforcement officers of each others needs.
Between August and November 2003, 1,738 unaccompanied children arrived from non-EU countries. Most of these were travelling legitimately for education or holidays but a small number of children gave 'grave cause for concern' and police were subsequently unable to locate 12 of the children.
IS at Heathrow Airport led the way in the UK in setting up sensitive and sophisticated reception arrangements for children and developed facilities and training to identify children at risk – work which has continued and flourished. A programme of specialist training for immigration officers in dealing with children at risk resulted in 495 immigration officers being trained in interviewing children by 2006.
EU accession - ministerial resignation
2004 saw the arrival of eight new countries into the EU, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The government predicted that 15,000 new workers would arrive in the UK but, by 2006 around 430,000 had registered for work and this rose to 683,000 by 2007, 70% of which were from Poland. The history of Polish migration to the United Kingdom gives an indicator of why Poles predominated so much. A large number of Polish citizens had been allowed to settle after World War 2 in a resettlement programme for those who had no wish to live under the new Communist Polish regime, (see earlier section).The possibility that numbers might cause alarm seems to have been acknowledged by the Home Office who fast tracked visa applications in Romania and Bulgaria between 2002 and 2004. A later Home Office investigation showed that junior staff had taken short cuts to clear a back-log.
The National Audit Office
National Audit Office
National Audit Office can refer to:* Australian National Audit Office* National Audit Office * National Audit Office of the People's Republic of China* Swedish National Audit Office...
expressed concern at the lack of checks that had been conducted and the Home Secretary admitted that the system had been “insufficiently robust”. It transpired that warnings had been given by the visa issuing post in Sofia that checks on applications were being waived in London against their wishes.
The Immigration Minister, the energetic and highly regarded Bev Hughes, told the BBC and the House of Commons that she had been unaware of the allegations but later confirmed that she, or her office, had been notified of the problems 18 months before and that she had inadvertently misled the House. Although the most likely cause of the confusion was that she had been misled by her own office and let down by its record keeping the minister was bound by the convention of ministerial responsibility
Ministerial responsibility
Ministerial responsibility or individual ministerial responsibility is a constitutional convention in governments using the Westminster System that a cabinet minister bears the ultimate responsibility for the actions of their ministry or department...
and resigned.
Having grossly underestimated the numbers for the first eight countries there was concern about allowing unlimited access to Romania and Bulgaria when they joined. A particularly unexpected aspect of those coming was the impact on child benefit payments with 68,000 new applications. Restrictions were placed on Romanian and Bulgarian citizens when they joined in 2007 which slowed their flow into the job market. Concerns among some government agencies about benefit fraud
Benefit fraud
Benefit fraud is a form of welfare fraud as found within the system of government benefits paid to individuals by the UK welfare state.- What is benefit fraud? :...
by EEA citizens and concerns within the NHS about illicit "health tourism" by foreign nationals meant that closer working and "joined up" government became newly fashionable concepts; but the constraints of the Data Protection Act and the nervousness of government agencies in identifying foreign nationals meant that progress in tackling identity fraud
Identity fraud
Identity fraud may occur when someone steals personal information, opens credit card accounts in the victim's name without permission, and charges merchandise to those accounts. Conversely, identity fraud does not occur when a credit card is simply stolen. Stealing one’s credit card may be consumer...
would be slow.
The impact for the Immigration Service was not so much the new arrivals as the opportunities that their national documents presented for fraud. A growing number of migrants from neighbouring countries used fraudulently obtained “accession” documents as a means of entering the UK. The wider impact on IND and the Home Office was to undermine the positive work that had been achieved in restoring its reputation in the wake of the asylum crisis and once again damage its credibility and operational integrity.
One Step Ahead – dealing with organised crime
The 2004 white paper “One Step Ahead - A 21st Century Strategy to Defeat Organised Crime” set out, among other things the role and responsibilities of the new Serious Organised Crime AgencySerious Organised Crime Agency
The Serious Organised Crime Agency is a non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom under Home Office sponsorship...
in tackling organised crime. The paper made it clear that it was intended that the various agencies already working together on these issues would do so ever more closely but that there was no need to create a new border agency.
“In light of the creation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the opportunity for that new body to establish close working partnerships with the existing border agencies, it is not proposed to create a single border agency”
The agency, SOCA, would be a “non-departmental public body”. Rather ambiguously, the paper said that although the Home Secretary would be “accountable to parliament for the agencies performance”… “The Agency will enjoy full operational independence from Ministers”. The arms length relationship that agencies’ provided clearly had attractions and may have provided a model for the future of IND.
“Controlling our Borders” – 2005 Five Year Plan
The hundredth anniversary of the 1905 Aliens Act passed uncommemorated and unremarked. It was not a fashionable time to look backwards given the amount of effort that was being expended in dealing with future strategy and investment.The high level thinking around security and intelligence meant that, even without the July 7th terrorist bombings that year, there was a new appetite for greater cooperation and better use of data. The Immigration Service distinguished itself after the attacks and displayed the “can-do” attitude that was in the best traditions of the service. The order was given to work with the police to re-establish embarkation controls at all ports in the wake of the bombings and the service was able to report that it had completed the task in four hours.
The 2005 white paper “Controlling Our Borders - Making Migration Work for Britain” outlined the new “e-Borders” programme;
“a joined up modernised intelligence-led border control and security framework” to “allow Immigration Service and other agencies including Police, Customs and Excise, Security Services to work more closely together”.
It went on to explain how this would be achieved;
“The e-Borders systems will collect both arrivals and departure information … Carriers will provide advance passenger information (API) and passenger name records (PNR) electronically. Passenger details (including names, dates of birth, nationality and travel document details) will be checked against multi-agency watchlists prior to boarding a flight….we will have a much clearer picture of passengers’ movements in and out of the country. This wealth of information will help border control, law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and other Government departments to target their activity”.
This was a hugely ambitious project to join up various agencies and utilise both public and private data, both inside and outside the UK, in ways that had never been attempted before. It had already started in 2004 as Project Semaphore which was to test the principles in a limited way and act as a proof of concept for the full implementation of e-Borders. Semaphore went beyond the theoretical though – it would actually start producing data on routes of interest.
“Controlling our Borders” also outlined two other planks that were to underpin future strategy. The Points Based System for issuing visas would not become reality until 2007 but was already in planning. More immediate was the “New Asylum Model”, (NAM), for dealing with asylum applications. This was a combination of existing fast track processes, which would be extended, and another attempt at single owner caseworking whose aim was to ensure continuity through the entire decision making process. Caseworkers would be expected to perform a far wider range of duties including the presentation of case at appeal hearings and the casework surrounding a person’s removal. The new casework teams would be the machine that would track and manage failed asylum seekers towards removal as a “ready to go product” in much the manner championed by the Home Affairs Committee.
Border and Immigration Agency to UK Border Agency 2007-2008
The events of 2006 involving the foreign prisoners crisis, (see Part 2), prompted a "re-branding" exercise combined with the move to turn IND into an executive agency. It might be perceived that it was in 2006 that the government finally lost patience with both the Home Office and IND. Since 1999 a huge amount of legislative time had been allocated to immigration issues and there had been an equally huge expansion of resources and development capital. The mistakes that led to the resignation of Beverley Hughes and Charles Clarke were possibly the last straw and led to consideration of whether more fundamental change was required.The Border and Immigration Agency was created on 1 April 2007. This was not the unified border force that had often been suggested and had been recommended by the Home Affairs Committee in 2001. The creation of the new agency took place in the wake of the, still toxic, Foreign National Prisoners scandal and the resignation of Charles Clarke as Home Secretary. The publicly stated benefits were that the agency would be more accountable. The key organisational change was that of regionalisation. The new agency would be divided into six new regions each under the command of a Director. Border staff would not be regionalised owing the fact that their workforce was inextricably tethered to ports in London and the South East. The Immigration Service Ports Directorate would, for the first time, be uniformed. The case for regionalisation was set out on the basis that local teams would form closer links with other regional government offices and with local communities. The Unions suspected another motive of creating an environment where national pay scales would be ended in favour of local rates. The practical argument for regionalisation appeared to undermined by the fact that most migrants lived in the South East.
The fate of Immigration Service enforcement staff was less clear cut. They already had a regional structure but the directorate would again be disbanded and reorganised along the new regional structure. The central management structures for enforcement were disbanded and their functions dispersed, and duplicated, among the new regional commands. As the new agency was created so the Immigration Service ceased to exist. There is little room for sentiment in government reorganisation and the end of the service was simply announced, in passing, as a short global e-message without further comment.
Although the Immigration Service had officially ceased to exist it was not quite the end of the story. Having set up the Border and Immigration Agency the re-branding, was hardly underway before, on 1st July the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown
James Gordon Brown is a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007...
, announced that he was going to;
“reform the UK’s border arrangements, integrating the work of Customs, the Border and Immigration Agency and UKvisas, overseas and at the main points of entry to the UK, and establishing a unified border force”.
The Cabinet Office
Cabinet Office
The Cabinet Office is a department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for supporting the Prime Minister and Cabinet of the United Kingdom....
quickly published a “review” document “Security in a Global Hub - Establishing the UK’s new border arrangements”.
Significantly, the foreword was attributed to the Prime Minister without any contribution from the Home Secretary. Whether or not the Home Secretary or Immigration minister had been privy to the announcement is unclear. If they were it is difficult to understand why the BIA was set up only a few months previously and, it would appear that, either the decision was taken quickly or the ministers with responsibility for immigration did not know about it. Further evidence the decision was taken with some speed was that there appears to have been none of the preparatory Civil Service policy documents that usually accompany such a major move. There was for instance, as far as can be determined, no publically available impact assessment.
The lack of analysis is made stranger by the many previous words of caution that had been offered concerning the possibility of a unified agency. The Home Affairs Committee in 2001, while being broadly supportive of the idea took note of the then Home Secretary’s warnings regarding a separate Border Agency which stood separately alongside the existing agencies:
" you may end up with very, very significant problems in the relationship between the new border police and its work with the former parent agencies, namely Customs, immigration service and the police”…. "to work together, but to ensure that they still had professional and practical lines back into their respective agencies ... you get people to co-operate much more effectively on the ground ... but bear in mind the real importance of those links back to the parent agencies".
They took note and recommended that the transition should take place in cautious steps;
“We recommend that existing border control agencies should be combined into a single frontier force on the basis of secondment and direct employment, but with clear lines of communication back to the parent agencies. Pending the creation of a single frontier force, strategic co-direction of better joint working should be provided by a ministerial group to which the official Border Agencies Directors Group should report at least four times a year”.
Nobody had, until then, proposed the “big bang” approach of merging Immigration, overseas visa issuing posts and Customs. There was much to be said for the idea but to simply announce that it would happen was a political decision rather than the usual Civil Service approach. The new UK Border Agency, a huge international organisation, came into existence on 1st April 2008. Until that point the staff of what had been the Immigration Service would have noticed few changes but it was after this point that the nature of control of UK borders changed and the serious work of unifying different functions began.
That then was, for practical purposes, the real end of the Immigration Service rather than the bland announcement of a year earlier. It could be argued that this, after 103 years, is where the story comes full circle. Before 1905 the control of migrants and the control of dutiable goods operated under the same banner. It was felt then that the control of people and the control of goods were so inherently different that they should be managed separately. It remains to be seen whether UKBA eventually reaches the same conclusion.
The Immigration Service was by no means a perfect organisation; it had at various times been hidebound and resistant to change. It had also been at various times a hugely capable, experienced and practical organisation that rose to the occasion when demanded. It also, very unusually among Civil Service organisations, had a strong sense of identity. The merger with HM Customs & Excise, with their even longer history and equally strong sense of identity, means that it will take time for a new sense of common ownership, identity and tradition to develop within the UKBA. It is safe to assume that those who share the unique experience and responsibility of working in law enforcement will ensure that this will happen.
1962 - 1973 Limitations of in-country enforcement
The Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 placed new restrictions on Commonwealth citizens entering the UK and was seen as severe at the time but with regard to after-entry enforcement it can, with hindsight, be seen as a very tentative piece of legislation. While it allowed conditions to be imposed on those previously allowed unfettered access it provided no powers to do anything about those who evaded the border controls altogether. In fact, the Act gave Commonwealth citizens a positive incentive to try and evade the control because, if they did so and evaded detection for 24 hours, they were deemed to have been allowed to stay permanently.“A person shall not be required to submit to examination under this paragraph after the expiration of the period of twenty-four hours from the time when he lands in the United Kingdom. …” (Para 2 Sch1, Commonwealth Citizens Act 1962).
MP's were very loathe to impose controls beyond the token gesture of a passport stamp at a port of entry. It was not an oversight; it was intended by the legislators that the new controls on Commonwealth citizens should be as relaxed as possible but the effect of the law was to provoke a growing industry in people-smuggling across the English Channel. Arrival on a dark beach was by far preferable to being grilled by immigration officers at Heathrow when you knew that, if you stayed out of reach for 24 hours you could legally stay forever.
This was partially addressed by the 1968 Act after which Commonwealth citizens were at least required by law to submit to immigration control on arrival. But even then, for those that evaded the border controls, the law stipulated that there were only 28 days in which to apprehend them. In the event of their being captured the person was awarded an in-country right of appeal that would mean they could not immediately be removed. If they were not caught within the 28 days then the only recourse was to the courts. Even then, prosecution was only allowed where this was within six months of the person’s appearance at a Magistrates’ Court otherwise, once again, they would be deemed to have been given the right to stay permanently. Where court action was initiated the only way of enforcing the person’s departure was if the court recommended deportation. Whatever the obstacles put in the way and despite the fragmented liaison between police and immigration 122 Commonwealth citizens were detected and removed as illegals between June 1968 and July 1970.
The system was then convoluted and unwieldy but the problems were largely irrelevant because there was in any case no such thing as a permanent in-country enforcement arm of the Immigration Service to try and find offenders. Immigration control was something that generally happened on the border or not at all. It was assumed, as it had been since 1905, that the problem of people evading immigration control was a police matter and that those people arrested should be put before the courts whereupon they would be prosecuted and go through the bureaucratic deportation process. This was a classically cumbersome Judicial and Civil Service process which involved the court making a recommendation , IND considering it, drafting a submission to the Home Secretary, (no less), and the Home Secretary agreeing to personally sign a deportation order. The deportation order would be sent to the police who would try and find the person.
This process did not then lend itself to hot pursuit and, although it was probably adequate for dealing with seamen deserters and petty crooks in the 1920’s when such cases were counted in dozens it had no practical relationship to the emerging modern world of the 1960’s and the boom in international air travel. Still less did it take into account the rise in the numbers of potential offenders after 1962. The apparent growth in people smuggling was evidenced by the conviction in 1970 of a trafficker who rejoiced in the nickname Harry the Greek who allegedly smuggled 2000 Indian and Pakistani nationals to the UK from West Germany and Belgium. But, Harry the Greek was successfully prosecuted and convicted in Belgium, not the UK.
The 1971 Act removed the 28 day limit and created a right of appeal that could only be exercised from abroad. It also attempted, at last, to define what an illegal entrant was but it was only through testing the law through various judgements and challenges that the principle was established that someone arriving illegally did not have to go through the judicial process and deportation consideration, they could be “administratively” removed on the direction of an immigration officer acting on the authority of the Secretary of State. The evidence of how badly new powers were needed was provided in a parliamentary question from 1972 which gave the bald facts that 13 people had been successfully prosecuted in the previous 12 months for facilitating illegal entry and 10 people had been treated as illegal entrants.
1973 - 1985 Formation of enforcement teams
Control of immigration in the UK was, until the 1980s almost exclusively a process conducted on the border. The law regarding the treatment of immigration offenders within the UK was a mess and would not start being resolved until the mid 1970’s. Attitudes by legislators towards immigration control appear to have been rather disjointed in that the efforts made to extend controls at the border contrasted sharply with the lack of powers to do anything about those who evaded them. It may be that this can be explained by a private reluctance to extend controls to white Commonwelath citizens while pandering to the public disquiet about increased afro-Caribbean and Asian migration and evidence for this is given in previous sections. This emphasis on control at the point of entry also owed itself to the geography of Britain as an island and an innate distrust of internal restrictions such as those identity cards and police checks commonly found in other European countries. The Labour government of 1974-79 maintained a policy of opposing internal immigration controls in favour of putting more resource into the border control and visa offices abroad.Even after the 1971 Act any action to detect immigration offenders in the community was still considered a police matter and largely limited to the detection of seamen deserters, absconders from ports or those who were subject to deportation action. The powers in the 1971 Act focussed on the offences of overstaying and assumed that those who did so would be prosecuted and deported. Although it defined what an illegal entrant was, it did not provide sufficient clarity as to how the law should be applied. The concept of illegal entry as laid out in the 1971 Act did not extend to those who simply presented false documents or lied to the immigration officer on arrival about what they were going to do or. It was only by establishing legal precedent
Precedent
In common law legal systems, a precedent or authority is a principle or rule established in a legal case that a court or other judicial body may apply when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts...
through judgments’ that a consistent set of powers emerged. The evidence of a lack of understanding on the part of those who drafted the Bill of operational reality is illustrated by the fact that the law did not recognise the possibility of illegal entry across the land border with Ireland.
The police who dealt with foreign nationals acted on the information passed to them according to whether the person had been posted "wanted" or not and were reliant on IND records of who had overstayed. The police set up their own Immigration Intelligence Unit in October 1972. The Immigration Act prosecutions recorded at the time are then police prosecutions rather than Immigration Service ones. The police enjoyed some success in this work but their job was that of proving a case and prosecuting it; it was not the job of actually removing people from the UK - this was the job of immigration officers using powers under the Immigration Act and there was a clear need for the Immigration Service and police to cooperate better. The immigration enforcement offices evolved in the early 1970s to meet this need.
The process where overstaying was suspected did not lend itself to deterrence; IND would write to the persons last known address and then send warning letters to any further addresses supplied. In the absence of any evidence of departure, and the overstayer having been fully awakened to the prospect of their impending arrest, the police would be invited to visit the last known address. When police encountered other foreign nationals in the course of normal police work they might verify that the person had a valid document and entry stamp but it did not form part of their work to second guess the Immigration Service and investigate whether the person had obtained it by deception.
It was only after the new Act came into force in 1973 that any real effort was directed to the detection and removal of illegal entrants. The Act was based on a concept of illegal entry which imagined illegal entry via clandestine landings on dark beaches. This had some basis in fact given the incentive within the 1962 Act to enter this way but even with the new laws it was a slow start; the total number of illegal entrants, overstayers and seamen deserters detected and removed in 1973 was reported as 44 but, in 1977, when answering a question on the numbers of deportees in 1973 the minister stated that 147 had been removed. Early immigration enforcement statistics are difficult to interpret as the terms "illegal entrant" and "illegal migrant" seem to have been used interchangably and, at various times, encompassed overstayers, deportees AND illegal entrants which are all different types of offender in later reports. The lack of a cohesive enforcement structure must have played a part in this confusion but, overall, the clear message was that the numbers of enforced removals were very small.
The state of affairs brought about by the 1960’s Acts was confirmed by the House of Lords judgement in 1972, (DPP v Bhagwan). This judgement led to the gaping hole in the immigration control being known as the “Bhagwan gap”, and drove a coach and horses through any attempts to deal with people who had arrived illegally in the 1960’s. In June 1973 The House of Lords ruled that Commonwealth and Pakistani illegal entrants who had arrived in the UK between 1962 and 1968 were all legally irremovable; that those same nationalities entering illegally between 1968 and 1973 were also irremovable if they had been in the country longer than 6 months and that only those who had arrived after 1/1/73 were subject to illegal entry action. In 1974, as a result of the judgement, an amnesty was directed at Commonwealth and Pakistani illegal migrants who had arrived before 1973. The amnesty provoked its own high level of fraudulent claims from people now intent on proving that they were illegal entrants so that they would be allowed to remain. This led to the topsy-turvy scenario of immigration officers investigating people with the aim of proving that they were actually legally in the UK. By 1976 the amnesty had allowed approximately 1800 people to remain. A further amnesty for illegal entrants was announced in 1977 which resulted in 460 further applicants being allowed to remain. In 1978 the Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees announced to the House of Commons that, in his opinion, immigration on 1960s levels was over.
Immigration enforcement during the 1970s remained low key and sparsely resourced. Enforcement work, such as there was, was done by immigration officers who were otherwise normally engaged on passport controls at ports. In London the main enforcement effort was based at King George V Dock in the Port of London with a staff of two immigration officers whose duties included making enquiries regarding seamen deserters. Port managers would allow officers to pursue enforcement cases during off-peak periods when staff were available. As the work of the Port of London diminished the office, affectionately known as KGV, closed in 1976. The main offices after 1976 were based at Harmondsworth near Heathrow and at Adelaide House, London Bridge. The Harmondsworth office was the Immigration Service Intelligence Unit which, by 1976, had 29 officers, responsibility for managing the Immigration Service Intelligence database and a remit of assisting the police. By 1980 major operations were possible and were being mounted with particular emphasis on the hotel and restaurant trade.
1985 - 1993 Growth, specialisation and PACE
Enforcement work became increasingly diverse and relatively more sophisticated during the 1980s. The London offices developed specialist teams targeting foreign vice trade workers, marriage fraud and West Indian gang crime. The central London office at Isis House near London Bridge, (having moved from Adelaide House), worked closely with police to play a key role in the detention and removal of a number of high profile "YardieYardie
Yardie is a term stemming from the slang name originally given to occupants of "government yards", social housing projects with very basic amenities, in Trenchtown, a neighborhood in West Kingston, Jamaica. Trenchtown was originally built as a housing project following devastation caused by...
s" and other criminals associated with Jamaican drug crime including Ranking Dread
Ranking Dread
Ranking Dread was a Jamaican reggae deejay who grew up in the Kingston ghettos of Rema and Tivoli. He became famous for his work with the Ray Symbolic sound system in the 1970s...
. Combatting bogus colleges, (already noted above), was also an ongoing theme in enforcement work with some particular successes, including the closure of the "Advanced College of Business and Cultural Studies" where 63 people were arrested. Another regular source of work was the "marriage visit" to a home address to test whether the relationship was a genuine one. Marriage abuse was, and is, an embedded feature of immigration enforcement work and the Enforcement Directorate sought to combat it directly by allowing specialist teams to develop. "Operation Goldring" was a long running exercise operated by a central London unit at Isis House in the late 1980's early 1990's.
Immigration Service enforcement continued to grow in strength through the 1980s and, in 1992, the service was split to form separate Ports and Enforcement Directorates. The split did not immediately solve the issue of those “hybrid” ports which dealt with both areas of work or an underlying cause of friction where the Enforcement Directorate tended to draw on the most experienced staff within the Ports Directorate.
By later standards enforcement immigration officers were badly trained and equipped. In those days before mobile phones their lack of communications, including no radio access, meant that they were heavily reliant on police support. Although immigration officers were conferred powers of arrest under the 1971 Act they did not use these as a matter of policy and they were reliant of police officers and police facilities to perform their duties. When conducting pro-active investigations to private addresses immigration officers would take the lead in identifying immigration offenders and ask police to execute the arrest on their behalf.
Those offenders thus detected would be interviewed at a police station under caution in the presence of a solicitor, (if requested), in accordance with Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 is an Act of Parliament which instituted a legislative framework for the powers of police officers in England and Wales to combat crime, as well as providing codes of practice for the exercise of those powers. Part VI of PACE required the Home Secretary...
, (PACE), which governs the conduct of arrests, detention and investigation of criminal matters. A large proportion of available resources was dedicated to responding to police requests for assistance. By 1989 the two main London offices at Isis House and ISIU Harmondsworth were responding to thousands of calls per year. Isis House identied 1,402 offenders as a result of police call-outs in 1989 and ISIU 1,230.
In 1993 an attempt by an immigration officer and police in London to arrest a Jamaican woman, Joy Gardner
Joy Gardner
Joy Gardner was a 40-year-old British African-Caribbean community mother and illegal immigrant from Jamaica who was killed during a struggle with the police at her home in Crouch End, London on 28 July 1993.-Death:...
,went tragically wrong when she suffocated during attempts to restrain her. The incident, and the subsequent investigation, halted most pro-active immigration enforcement for a substantial period and was the cause of a reappraisal by police of their role in immigration enforcement which would have far reaching implications. The Metropolitan Police
Metropolitan police
Metropolitan Police is a generic title for the municipal police force for a major metropolitan area, and it may be part of the official title of the force...
, and other forces, had worked hard during the 1980s to build community trust and confidence and senior officers were understandably concerned not to undermine this. The police insisted on new safeguards and processes to better communicate the nature of joint operations and assess risks. Although police assistance continued to be the norm it was the beginning of a shift towards greater self reliance by immigration enforcement.
Police confidence in immigration was further undermined by a developing circumstance beyond the control of the Immigration Service. The beginning of the 1990s saw a rapid escalation of immigration offenders claiming asylum shortly after arrest. These applications had to be considered by due process but the release of those detained caused police to question the worth of assisting UKIS. Senior police officers also expressed concern at the escalating use of police stations as places where immigration offenders were required to report having been released.
In 1993 asylum seekers were give the right of appeal before removal as part of the Immigration and Asylum Appeals Act 1993. Where before there had been delays to removals caused by speculative and "vexatious" asylum applications the introduction of the appeal undermined the ability of immigration enforcement to maintain control over an immigration offender up to the point of removal. The numbers of asylum applications began to rise even more quickly. Enforcement offices had little administrative support and operational grades were often required to undertake the casework that ensued from various representations as well as the time consuming logistical work of actually arranging removals. This growing volume of work ate into their, already limited operational capability. In 1993 there were only 120 immigration officers undertaking enforcement work for the whole of the UK. It clearly was not enough to make an impact on illegal working or to combat the true scale of illegal entry but to create an effective in-country control would require a raft of new legislation and a vast expansion of detention faclities and enforcement immigration officers. In general it would require the sort of intrusive powers that were common in other countries such as employment checks and ID cards and no political party wanted to sign up to this. In 1992 the Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker
Kenneth Baker
Kenneth Wilfred Baker, Baron Baker of Dorking, CH, PC , is a British politician, a former Conservative MP and a Life Member of the Tory Reform Group.-Early life:...
, ruled it out and opined, against all evidence, that the UK was far better off with controls on the border.
1994 - 1997 In-country asylum claims and focus on illegal working
As the 1990s progressed the Immigration Service enforcement offices found more and more of the offenders that they detected were claiming asylum. Statistics from the time do not show the exact numbers claiming when detected but the trend is evidenced by the numbers who had to be released after detection rather than removed from the UK. Between 1994 and 1996 there is a rising trend in detection of illegal entrants but the numbers released on Temporary Admission, (a kind of bail), climbs steadily upwards.- 1994 – Detected – 7390; released on TA – 4080; (55% of all detections)
- 1995 – Detected – 10240; released on TA – 7330; (71% of all detections)
- 1996 – Detected – 14000; released on TA – 11700; (83.5% of all detections).
These cases were referred to Croydon for consideration and the prospect of enforcing the person’s departure was remote given the ever increasing length of time that asylum applications were taking to be resolved. Where, like all law enforcement agencies, the officers are judged by their results, there was a positive disincentive to target nationalities with a high incidence of asylum claims. There was a natural inclination to favour operations that were more likely to produce quick removals with a minimum of casework. This was clearly short sighted and was recognised as such but there was at that time insufficient work done within the administrative core of IND to coordinate its processes and identify and prioritise its work to prevent such trends. The organisation of IND favoured distinct silos which failed to acknowledge or understand each others' needs. Asylum casework at that time was prioritised according to its own process requirements. Enforcement offices would detain people that they believed presented a high risk but would have to release them when it became clear that resources did not exist to speed the application and appeal to a conclusion within a reasonable timeframe. Those that were detected by enforcement offices and treated as illegal entrants might later find that the person had been refused asylum but then granted permission to stay under some other concession without any reference to them.
This was not the only frustration and cause of wasted effort; before 1993, when an asylum application was nearing completion enforcement immigration officers would be asked to re-interview the applicant and serve them with a “minded to refuse notice”. This, as the name suggests, was a letter informing the applicant that the Home Office was thinking of refusing their application and inviting them to come up with more grounds to support their asylum claim. This process, apart from ensuring that the officers had to effectively interview the person all over again, meant that the applicant was thoroughly alerted to their impending refusal and were thus given every opportunity to abscond if they so wished. By 1999 there were 20,000 asylum absconders recorded.
After 1993, when asylum decisions were eventually made, the applicant would exercise a new right of appeal and the file would enter another long queue. The logical point at which to detain and remove the person, at the point they were told of their appeal outcome, was missed because it was deemed to be against natural justice to detain someone at the closure of a hearing. Enforcement officers grew used to following a very cold trail when acting on information passed from IND and were forced to rely on other intelligence.
Those that were detected were increasingly difficult to remove. The additional appeal against asylum that came into force in 1993 was combined with a growth in immigration legal "advisors". People with no legal qualification could set themselves up as advisors and tap into the badly regulated legal aid
Legal aid
Legal aid is the provision of assistance to people otherwise unable to afford legal representation and access to the court system. Legal aid is regarded as central in providing access to justice by ensuring equality before the law, the right to counsel and the right to a fair trial.A number of...
scheme. Legal aid costs rose dramatically between 1988 and 1992 as did the numbers of applications for Judicial Review
Judicial review
Judicial review is the doctrine under which legislative and executive actions are subject to review by the judiciary. Specific courts with judicial review power must annul the acts of the state when it finds them incompatible with a higher authority...
. By 1997 25% of all Judicial Reviews lodged were related to immigration cases.
Growing numbers of those detected were being found working illegally, 10,000 in 1994 as opposed to less than 4000 in 1988. It is likely however that the lesser total is reflective of fewer staff in previous years. The topic of illegal working had continued to move up the political agenda since Kenneth Baker had rejected more internal controls in 1992. In 1995 a private members Bill had proposed that it should be illegal to employ illegal workers. This was dismissed by its opponents as a "nasty, vicious little proposal" but what is probably more surprising to the lay person is that it was not already the case. Until 1997 it was only possible to work illegally if you had been placed on a restriction on entering the country prohibiting employment. People who had entered illegally would of course have no such restriction. In practice this made little difference given that an illegal entrant found working would be arrested as an illegal entrant, not an illegal worker. It made little difference to the employer either - there was no sanction for employing an illegal entrant other than the possibility that they would fall foul of tax and national insurance regulations. The issue of National Insurance numbers provided no effective regulation on foreign nationals intending to work. A report of the Social Security Select Committee of 1996 stated that there were 20 million more national insurance numbers in circulation than those entitled to them.
1997 - 2001 Employer sanctions - impact of reorganisation
The expectation raised by the 1996 Act was that people employing foreign nationals would be prompted to ask more questions about their status and would be deterred from employing cheap, illegal foreign labour. Section 8 of the Asylum Act of 1996 made it an offence to employ an illegal worker with a potential fine of £5000. The Act came into force in 1997 and the law possibly drew on some of the earlier experience in implementing the Carriers Liability Act in that it put the onus squarely on the employer to provide a clear defence, ie: that they had seen and examined proof of the persons right to take employment. Opponents of the measure said, with justification, that the employers were being expected to take on the role of immigration officers. The idea that there was a wider responsibility on both private and public organisations to check the status and rights of foreign nationals that they encountered was to be an emerging theme in future years but the reality did not match up to the expectations as the law was not robust enough to compel employers to seek out and keep adequate proof of entitlement to work. Employers found that by simply keeping a record of a person’s application and National Insurance number they were able to beat off any attempted prosecution. The numbers of employers prosecuted was negligible and the law was not strengthened until 2006.The impact of the collapse of the IND Casework Programme project, (see earlier section), did not affect the work of tracing immigration offenders but the chaos in the Croydon HQ eventually had the effect of stopping the essential casework machinery that supported enforced removals. IS enforcement was supported by two units whose function was to log new cases on the central database for this purpose, (HOMIES). They also arranged consideration of any barriers to removal including representations and new applications. It was they who gave authority to remove the person in all but the most straightforward cases, told ports to stop removals when there was a legal challenge and gave advice on how to proceed. These units, along with their database, were abolished as part of the Casework Programme on the assumption that their functions would somehow be taken up by the caseworkers within the massive new teams. What actually happened was that these specialists were diverted to deal with the asylum crisis that arose as the result of staff lay-offs and the failure of the Casework Programme to deliver its promised IT. As part of the general restructuring that the crisis provoked the Immigration Service was again divided into two different management structures. The previous Ports Directorate and Enforcement Directorate were done away with and the service was partially regionalised under the command of "Immigration Service Regional Operations" and "Immigration Service SE Operations".
Of particular significance in the context of later events was the disintegration, by 1999, of the processes for dealing with foreign national criminals held within UK prisons awaiting deportation. This process was administered by IND in Croydon and had built up long standing processes to liaise with prisons, courts and the Immigration Service in arranging the deportation of those who had been recommended for deportation by courts or whose removal was “conducive to the public good”. It was supported by “Convictions Clerks” and other specialist teams whose job was to log the notifications of new foreign national criminals and set the wheels of consideration in motion. All of these functions were dispensed with without any reference to the courts or Prison Service who were left without the means of liaising with IND.
The published statistics of 2001-2003 show no record of how many people were removed as immigration offenders. For two of these years the figures are only estimates and for one year there is no published figure at all. These were the visible signs of organisational sclerosis and there were many others that occupied MP's who queued to criticise IND. For enforcement offices around the country the effect was to see their casework backlogs build up with no prospect of their being resolved. By 2000 tentative steps were being taken to re-establish these vital cogs in the machine which included the creation of a small “Enforcement Liaison Unit” to allocate cases to the few remaining enforcement caseworkers and deal with the most urgent cases of foreign national criminals.
Despite this dispiriting picture the problems with the Casework Programme and the crisis within asylum casework did not put a stop to modernisation and the continuation of vital longer term strategic planning. In many ways these few years were to provide the foundations for future successes such as the development of intelligence led operations, the development of professional management skills and project management, the development of prosecutions capability, joint working with other agencies, the growth in numbers and prosecutions capability for arrest trained officers, (including use of the new powers contained in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002
Proceeds of Crime Act 2002
The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which provides for the confiscation or civil recovery of the proceeds from crime and contains the principal money laundering legislation in the UK.-Background:...
which allowed the confiscation of the criminal assets of traffickers, among others). The development of better IT systems continued, (albeit not so grandiose as the project now abandoned).
Neither did the hiatus stop the increasingly useful liaison work with police in combating organised crime. The disruption of West Indian organised or semi-organised crime continued to be a theme of immigration enforcement work with particular success in the early 2000s in dealing with Yardies. Immigration enforcement forged a close partnership with police and played an important role in the ongoing operation to combat black-on-black crime, Operation Trident which started in 1998.
2001 - 2004 - Development of Arrest and Prosecutions capability
The state of enforcement as the new millennium started was not a healthy one in that the new efforts to increase enforcement resources had yet to kick in and the mechanisms to support the casework for difficult removal cases was still being re-established. Despite this there were signs of a new momentum and new sense of purpose. A new large London office had been established in Croydon following the closure of an enforcement office at Gatwick in 1998. Removals of immigration offenders were up, but not spectacularly so.Behind the scenes a hugely ambitious plan was unfolding following the commitments made as part of the 1999 legislation. In 2000 a pilot in London established the Immigration Service’s first arrest team which was set up trained and equipped to operate independently of the police for the first time. By the end of the pilot three London Arrest Teams had been established and had conducted 413 operations.
In a 2001 report the Home Affairs Select Committee welcomed a commitment to increase enforcement staff but was more wary regarding the ambitious target for enforced removals:
"The target of 30,000 removals in 2001-02 - a ten-fold increase over the 1999 figure - seems a very ambitious goal".
They clearly believed that the 30,000 removal target for in-country enforcement was unachievable and they were ultimately proven correct. How the target was arrived at and how it was considered achievable is unclear. Numbers of enforcement staff were certainly set to rise but there was no prospect of training and deploying staff to make a significant impact in the time available. Public documents offer no clue as to how this figure arose.
The numbers of enforcement staff had risen from 1,677 in 2002 to 2,463 in 2003. A reorganisation of enforcement resulted in the setting up of a number of "co-located" offices. These were enforcement units that drew in a support network of mainstream IND caseworkers whose role was to deal with "barrier" casework, ie: the vital casework to deal with late applications to to stay in the UK, Judicial Reviews and appeals which were part and parcel of the legal hurdles placed by legal advisors seeking to block someones removal. The results of the co-locations were disappointing but the principle was one that stuck and evolved later in the development of regionalisation and the setting up of Local Immigration Teams.
Developing Enforcement Capabilities project
The “Developing Enforcement Capabilities” project grew in size, scope and importance between 2000-2004 and transformed the Immigration Service enforcement arm into a law enforcement agency. The establishment of the arrest teams went hand in hand with a new system of tasking based on a National Intelligence Model to make best use of information and ensure that the work was better tied to national targets. By 2003 there were forty new Intelligence Units in operation and the level and standard of training for operational staff had been greatly enhanced.Over and above the formation of the arrest teams whose remit was the detection of immigration offenders, was the establishment, in January 2002, of an Immigration Crime Team to tackle organised immigration related crime such as identity fraud, forgery and trafficking. Early successes included the arrest of 29 persons connected with British passport fraud and the arrest of two men for the manufacture and supply of forged British passports one of whom received a five year sentence and the other 18 months. The operation resulted in one of the largest ever seizures of high quality forged passports believed to have a street value of over £2 million.
The ICT operated as part of Reflex, the Government's inter-agency task force created to combat organised immigration crime. Immigration enforcement also contributed to a joint intelligence unit under Operation Maxim involving the Immigration Service and UK Passport Service (UKPS) with a remit to investigate identity fraud alongside related criminality. In 2001 the numbers of fraudulent British passport applications detected was 161. In 2002 it was 1360. The ICT also contributed to Operation Wisdom, targeting individuals who obtained passports using the identities of dead children which was co-ordinated by the National Crime Squad and involved 18 UK police forces and the Immigration Service. In 2003-04 ICT made 115 arrests related to organised crime.
Cockle-pickers tragedy - Gangmaster licensing
In February 2004 at least 23 Chinese nationals were drowned in an horrific disaster at Morecambe Bay2004 Morecambe Bay cockling disaster
The Morecambe Bay cockling disaster occurred on the evening of 5 February 2004 at Morecambe Bay in North West England, when at least 21 cockle pickers were drowned by an incoming tide off the Lancashire/Cumbrian coast....
, Lancashire when cut off by tides while cockling – digging for cockles. This tragedy, and crime, was the result of a number of factors; the fact that the people had been trafficked by "Snakeheads"
Snakehead (gang)
Snakeheads are Chinese gangs that smuggle people to other countries. They are found in the Fujian region of China and smuggle their customers into wealthier Western countries such as those in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and some nearby wealthier countries such as Taiwan and...
and then used for illegal labour by a Gangmaster who had no regard for their safety, (and who was subsequently jailed).
In the subsequent investigation and enquiry there was much confusion as to whether the Immigration Service had been aware of the illegal workers at Morecambe bay and might have prevented their exploitation and deaths. It transpired that the local office did, on occasion, support police in similar circumstances and first of all said that they thought had been involved in supporting a police operation to target cockle pickers but then discovered that this had been a different group on a different day. This confusion was embarrassing and highlighted the lack of management information systems to record the nature of operations conducted. The operational side of IND had been largely left out of the IT development that took place after the failure of the Casework Programme and the tragedy was the cause of a review of systems and processes and quickly led to the introduction, in April 2005, of a new National Operations Database, (NOD), developed by enforcement staff themselves, to better manage and record operational activity.
The Morecambe Bay disaster highlighted facts that were already well known, that large numbers of illegal workers were being exploited, and was a key element leading to the passing of the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004
Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004
The Gangmasters Act 2004 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that regulates the agencies that place vulnerable workers in agricultural work, and the shellfish collecting and packing industries . It is the most recent plank of UK agency worker law...
and the creation of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority
Gangmasters Licensing Authority
The Gangmasters Licensing Authority is an agency in the United Kingdom regulating the supply of workers to the agricultural, horticultural and shellfish industries...
.
Growth in marriage abuse
The Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 required registrars of civil marriages to report suspected sham marriages to the Home Secretary. Unfortunately it did not contain any power to carry out investigations into the genuineness of an intended marriage or to delay or refuse to conduct the marriage.By the early 2000’s the numbers of suspect marriages being reported by registrars rose alarmingly:
- 2001: 756
- 2002: 205
- 2003: 2,712
- 2004: 3,740
In presenting evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2005 the Registrar for the London Borough of Brent estimated that, between 2001 and February 2005, approximately 20% of all marriages in Brent were bogus, equating to approximately 250 marriages a year. He suggested that the incidence of sham marriages increased dramatically in late 2003 and early 2004 and that marriages between foreign nationals and EEA nationals were a particular problem.
In response to registrars' concerns and media coverage of the issue, the Government established a "Bogus Marriage Task Force" in 2004 which included representatives from the Immigration Service, local government, the registration service and IND policy officials. This proposed a new scheme to govern marriages where one or both parties were subject to immigration control and did not have entry clearance as a spouse or fiancé(e). The scheme was enacted in section 19 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004
Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004
The Asylum and Immigration Act 2004 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It set various rules for immigrants to the United Kingdom...
and came into force on 1st February 2005 with the following rules:
- Notice to marry must be given by both persons attending together at one of 76 Designated Register Offices'Register officeA register office is a British term for a civil registry, a government office and depository where births, deaths and marriages are officially recorded and where you can get officially married, without a religious ceremony...
in England and Wales or any Register Office in Scotland or Northern Ireland - The foreign national must either have entry clearance specifically for the purposes of marriage or apply to the Home Secretary for a Certificate of Approval, at a cost of £135, before being allowed to marry in a civil ceremony (Church of England ceremonies are exempt)
- In order to qualify for a Certificate of Approval the applicant must have leave that was granted for more than six months and at least three months of that leave must be remaining at the time of making the application.
The exemption for Church of England marriages was to be part of the legislation's downfall but, when the new provisions came into force, the London Borough of Brent
London Borough of Brent
In 1801, the civil parishes that form the modern borough had a total population of 2,022. This rose slowly throughout the 19th century, as the district became built up; reaching 5,646 in the middle of the century. When the railways arrived the rate of population growth increased...
experienced a drop of 50% in the overall number of marriages taking place. The numbers of reports from all registrars of suspicious marriages dropped from 3,740 in 2004 to fewer than 200 between February 2005 and March 2006.
In 2003/04, in the London area alone, there were 114 people arrested in connection with taking part in or arranging sham marriages. Of these 43 people were charged and given custodial sentences of up to 18 months. The offences ranged from: conspiracy
Conspiracy (crime)
In the criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to break the law at some time in the future, and, in some cases, with at least one overt act in furtherance of that agreement...
to commit perjury; offences under the Immigration Act 1971; offences under the Conspiracy Act. During 2004-05, 100 people were arrested of whom 59 were charged and received sentences from three months to nine years.
The new laws was challenged by The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants,(JCWI), who argued that the new requirements were in breach of the right to marry contained in Article 12 of European Convention of Human Rights; a "disproportionate and ineffective response to the alleged problem of 'sham' marriages"; and potentially discriminatory on faith grounds. The Courts agreed and the law was repealed.
2005 - 2007 - Record enforcement performance
Focus on illegal workers and employers
The growth in enforcement resources, the increase in removals and the focus on illegal workers are all illustrated by the rise in illegal working operations between 2004 and 2006. In 2004 there were 1,600 enforcement operations against illegal workers , a 360% increase on the previous year, which detected 3,330 people working illegally. In a parliamentary reply in 2009 the Home Secretary reported that, in 2005/06, there had been 2915 operations targeting illegal workers which resulted in 3819 arrests. By 2007/08 this had risen to 7178 operations and 5589 arrests.The failure of the 1999 Act to impose fines on employers for using illegal workers was now addressed by the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006
Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006
The Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.It is the fifth major piece of legislation relating to immigration and asylum since 1993.-Commencement Orders:...
which created a new Civil penalty
Civil penalty
A civil penalty or civil fine is a term used to describe when a state entity, government agency, or private party seeks monetary relief against an individual as restitution for wrongdoing by the individual. The wrongdoing is typically defined by a codification of legislation, regulations, and decrees...
for employers who hired illegal workers,(Section 15), and separate criminal offence of knowingly employing an illegal worker, (Section 21). The rules imposed much stricter rules than the 1999 legislation as to the level of evidence that employers needed to keep regarding proof of employment rights and carried a potential £10,000 fine for each illegal employee. The Act came into force on 29 February 2008.
Home Affairs Committee 5th report 2006 and enforcement targeting
The HAC in 2006 expressed their general frustration at enforcement, stating “Current enforcement efforts are clearly inadequate”. This was unfortunate given that removals of immigration offenders, including illegal entrants, had risen dramatically. In 2000 the total offenders removed had been 13,815. By 2006 it had risen to 31,970 of which 18,280 were failed asylum seekers, the highest ever.Although the proportion of asylum seekers would afterwards fall, in line with the falling numbers of applicants, the overall numbers of offenders removed continued to rise year on year until, by 2010, over 39,000 offenders were removed.
2006 was notable for enforcement in other ways, (apart from being their most productive year to that point). The Prime Ministers “Tipping the Balance” target was met - asylum removals outstripped applications for the first time - and it was a watershed for immigration enforcement in being the first time that the enforcement arm of the service removed more people than those refused and removed at ports of entry.
In particular the HAC expressed concern that there did not appear to be any mechanism for “tracking” individual asylum seekers through the system. This was based on the idea that recently failed immigration and asylum applicants should be fed logically though the casework machine and pushed out of the end to enforcement offices as “ready to go” products.
The, (then), Director of Enforcement & Removals, David Roberts MBE, a hugely experienced manager and one of the early pioneers of immigration enforcement, outlined to the HAC what he saw as the competing priorities that had to be balanced.
“If we are to target individuals whose leave may have expired...then we would need a very different system of internal immigration control than we have at the moment, and targeting individuals in order to ensure that they are removed is not, I believe, an effective enforcement strategy. What we need to have is a very clear set of priorities which are ranked…in terms of the harm that people who are here unlawfully cause the UK and target our resources accordingly”.
What Mr Roberts was explaining was that chasing individuals based on poor data quality and old intelligence was an ineffective way of dealing with the worst offenders, achieving high numbers of removals or providing an effective deterrent to rogue employers and traffickers. Enforcement work did not easily fit into neat and tidy models and did not fit easily with a “deal in date order” ethos. It was recognised however that only looking at “easy” targets was unacceptable and that a balance should be struck where high “harm” cases such as criminals should be given more priority.
The HAC made the valid point that the “wide net” approach used by enforcement meant that it was more likely that they encountered people who had established themselves in the UK and were more difficult to remove;
“It is difficult to reconcile the removal of vulnerable individuals or those with strong links in the UK with the principle of harm reduction set out by the IND”...“By failing to prioritise the removal of those who are newly illegal, the IND is ensuring that a proportion of those singled out for removal are people who have established themselves in this country, perhaps with children who have known only this country, and who—despite the public's general hostility to illegal migration—command significant community support”.
The HAC did note however that enforcement managers were constrained by the fact that the data concerning who was still in the UK was, to say the least, incomplete. They recommended, not for the first time, the reintroduction of the embarkation controls which had stopped in 1998. The issue about embarkation controls was to rumble on for many years to come but the general issue of the quality of data was one that concerned the HAC who saw this as a barrier to properly prioritising enforcement work and to understanding the scale of the problem. The HAC disliked widely based operations and wanted a more focussed approach.
The experience of immigration enforcement managers was that, although pursuit of recently refused individuals was important, it was expensive, labour intensive and, too often, unproductive where they were under pressure to meet targets. Where possible, they worked to maximise their resources, and removals, by using recent intelligence, improving liaison with other agencies, (especially the police), and by maintaining contact with offenders through use of Reporting Centres. Targeting large work-places had the dual benefits of combating illegal working and providing the best opportunity for detecting immigration offenders and failed asylum seekers in large numbers. The “pool” of data which immigration Service enforcement had available was relatively limited. The main Case Information Database, (CID), used by IND had been in existence only a few years. Cases may have taken years to resolve and the information available about a person’s whereabouts and circumstances was of limited value either because of its age or because of poor data quality. On the latter point, enforcement, being by the nature of the job at the end of the process, was particularly hit by poor data quality from earlier stages and was forced to spend time and resources checking and re-checking case data.
Although there were comprehensive records of how many applications had been refused over the years it was simply not known, and could not be known, how many people had managed to stay in the UK illegally. It was clear that, until 2006, the numbers of people applying for asylum was greater than the numbers being removed but simply subtracting one from the other did not work. Many people left the UK voluntarily, (not necessarily in the same identities in which they were known to IND), many case records were duplicated and there were substantial numbers of cases of people making asylum claims in multiple identities. Over and above this there was no way of knowing how many new illegal entrants had successfully entered and had yet to be detected. A 2005 Home Office study into the numbers of illegal migrants in the UK gave an estimate of 430,000 while conceding that it could be as high as 570,000 or as low as 310,000. Many MPs had asked for estimates of illegal entrants in the UK and had been given a consistently vague response. It was hoped that many of these issues would be solved by the proposed e-Borders data system which was already in development, (since 2003), and whose aim was to provide data on all people entering and leaving the UK. A “proving” system called Semaphore had started testing in 2005.
In 2006 Dave Roberts was asked by the HAC how many illegal entrants there were in the UK. Knowing his audience to be knowledgeable on the issues involved he answered simply that he didn’t have the “faintest idea”. His answer was not treated as remarkable by the HAC but he was pilloried by the Press.
Background and context
Foreign nationals committing crimes in the UK have always excited attention and public outcry. Before World War One, in 1909, this included some outrage that there were 441 aliens in UK prisons. Of these, 306 had been imprisoned for trivial offences against property and received sentences of less than three months. Alien’s represented about 2% of the prison population. In 1924 the total number of convicted aliens in UK prisons was 136.Jumping forward to April 1996 the total % had reached 7.8%. By 1999 it was 8.1%, 2002, 10% and in 2003, 12%. These percentages have to be seen in the context of a rising prison population.
Numbers of Foreign National Prisoners in prison between 1993 and 2005:
- 1993 - 3,503
- 1994 - 3,781
- 1995 - 4,089
- 1996 - 4,259
- 1997 - 4,677
- 1998 - 5,133
- 1999 - 5,388
- 2000 - 5,587
- 2001 - 6,926
- 2002 - 7,718
- 2003 - 8,728
- 2004 - 8,941
- 2005 - 9,651.
By 2006 the foreign prisoner population had peaked at 14% and, at the time of writing in 2011, the figure has dropped slightly to 12.8%. The total prison population in September 2010 was recorded as 85,458 suggesting a total foreign prisoner population of 10,255.
The criminal deportation process is different to that action taken against illegal entrants, is based on some of the oldest immigration legislation and rooted in a very different world. It is a process for dealing with those who have broken the criminal law and, before Court Recommended deportation was discontinued, could be thought of as falling into two main areas:
- Deportation recommended by a court as part of a persons sentence,
- Deportation decided on by the Secretary of State on the basis that the persons presence was "not conducive to the public good".
It was, and is, a cumbersome process starting at the point of arrest. Whether or not the court could recommend a person for deportation required the police, or whoever performed the arrest, to know that the person was a foreign national subject to immigration control. This might not be obvious and the Immigration Service might be called upon at that stage to interview the person to establish their status. Assuming that it could be established, then the court needed to be informed of the fact that the person was liable to be deported within a statutory time limit. If the court was informed in time then the Judge could recommend deportation as part of the sentence. If the court knew that the person was a foreign national then they would usually inform IND of the sentence.
The Judge might have good reasons not to recommend deportation, or might quite properly prefer to pass the decision to the Home Office, but these reasons would not be automatically communicated to IND. If IND wanted to find out what they were, (and they were bound by policy and precedent to do so), then they had to write to the court and pay for a transcript of the Judges remarks. Having collated all necessary information the caseworker would then be able to assess the case and submit a proposal up though the numerous levels of Civil Service management to the Home Secretary. The Deportation Order would then be personally signed by the Home Secretary, served by an immigration officer and the Immigration Service would make arrangements for the person’s departure, (provided that they could prove who he was, what nationality he was, could obtain a travel document and overcome any appeal rights and other barriers).
Court recommendations for deportation meant that the person had a right of appeal against this part of the sentence that might have to be disposed of before any further action could be taken. If the court did not recommend deportation it was still possible for deportation to be taken on "conducive" grounds, (see above). Whatever route was chosen full consideration had to be given of the persons other circumstances - such as family ties and length of residence.
Tracking the prisoner through the criminal justice system was then a difficult task and would continue to be a difficult task after 2006. Assuming that IND knew of the prisoners existence they then needed to keep track of the prisoner as he or she moved through the prison system and find out what their likely release date might be. Tracking them involved telephone enquiries to the, (possibly), many prisons that the person had been lodged in and the release date was in any case never clear cut; it all depended on the findings of the Parole Board
Parole Board
A parole board is a panel of people who decide whether an offender should be released from prison on parole after serving at least a minimum portion of their sentence as prescribed by the sentencing judge. Parole boards are used in many jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and the United...
.
Where a prisoner had spent a long time on remand awaiting trial then there was every chance that they might be released immediately on being sentenced having already served their time. IND would then have to decide quickly whether to hold the person in prison under immigration powers or whether to release them on restrictions pending further consideration of their future immigration status. In 2002 it was agreed with the Prison Service that immigration detainees would no longer be held in prisons and the options, (where the immigration detention estate was hard pressed to meet demand), were often limited. As staffing fell and backlogs grew the numbers of prisoners falling into this category for emergency consideration started to grow.
The amount of liaison and casework involved in this process was very laborious and a well established system was dismantled in 1999 during the IND Casework Programme restructuring, (see previous sections). This instability coincided not only with a steep rise in the numbers of foreign prisoners as described above, but also with the growth of asylum applications. All available IND resources were diverted to deal with the asylum backlog and the Criminal Casework Team that was gradually re-formed after the Casework Programme crisis, was left under-funded and under staffed. The problem was partially addressed in 2003 when extra staff were allocated but it was insufficient to deal with the growing backlog of cases.
An additional factor, which proved fatal, was the lack of centrally available data on either the numbers of prisoners or the stage at which their case had reached. The development of IT systems within IND had focussed almost entirely on asylum. The Case Information Database, (CID), which was hurriedly rolled out in the wake of the Casework Programme failure did not cater properly for either deportation or other casework relating to immigration offenders and prosecutions. This was not apparently seen as much of a problem in 1999 where the minister replied to a question:
"There is no pressing operational need to collect centrally separate information about the number of people in prison custody or otherwise detained who are subject to deportation action"...."It is our practice to complete the necessary administrative action associated with deportation before the person concerned has completed his sentence so that deportation can take place on release from custody. Where it is not possible to do this for legal reasons such as an outstanding appeal, or where the person is not immediately removable for other reasons, consideration is given to whether they should be detained under Immigration Act powers or whether they can be granted temporary release".
This was a confirmation that some cases could not be easily resolved within the term of a persons custodial sentence but the statement that there was no pressing need for information was most definitely not the case as subsequent events proved.
Within a very short time of its development the organisation was dependent on CID for its management information but, because of its limitations, IND’s senior managers were left effectively blind to the full implications of the rise in the numbers of foreign criminals - as evidenced by numerous parliamentary replies explaining that no data on deportation cases existed or was difficult to obtain.
This was the general combination of circumstances as it stood in 2005. The Criminal Casework Team had previously navigated these difficulties as part of IND’s National Caseworking structure but it was decided that it made more sense to place the team under the general umbrella of the Immigration Service Enforcement and Removals Directorate.
Impact and aftermath
On 14 July 2005 the National Audit Office published a report concerning the removal of asylum seekers. On page 22, almost in passing, it reported that;“The Criminal Casework Team did not have figures available on how many failed applicants had been released from prison because removal could not be arranged”.
This triggered a chain of events which involved the Public Accounts Committee asking for further clarification. IND had difficulty answering the questions relating to the numbers involved and had to revise the figure upwards on more than one occasion which undermined its credibility. It emerged, by April 2006, that 1023 foreign prisoners had been released at the end of their sentence between 1999 and 2006 without deportation consideration having been completed.
By May it was confirmed that 880 of the cases had been considered for deportation but it was too little too late and the Home Secretary Charles Clarke
Charles Clarke
Charles Rodway Clarke is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Norwich South from 1997 until 2010, and served as Home Secretary from December 2004 until May 2006.-Early life:...
resigned. On 23 May 2006 the new Home Secretary John Reid stated to the Home Affairs Committee:
“I believe that… in the wake of the problems of mass migration that we have been facing our system is not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of its scope; it is inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management, systems and processes; and we have tried to cope with this new age, if you like, with a system that has been inherited from an age that came before it”.
The phrase “not fit for purpose” reverberated long and loud across the political landscape. If IND was not fit for purpose then the Home Office as a whole was also under the spotlight. The foreign national prisoner crisis had only come to light because the National Audit Office had refused to audit the Home Office’s accounts. The Home Office itself would be split in two and a new department would be formed, the “Ministry of Justice
Ministry of Justice (United Kingdom)
The Ministry of Justice is a ministerial department of the UK Government headed by the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, who is responsible for improvements to the justice system so that it better serves the public...
".
In the aftermath of the scandal the trigger point at which foreign nationals would be considered for deportation was reduced from two years imprisonment to twelve months and plans were put in place to introduce “automatic deportation”. It is unclear whether cases with lesser sentences were considered – in a statement to the HAC in 2008 the head of IND, Lin Homer, insisted that this was the case.
In the subsequent investigation into the background to the problem an accusatory spotlight eventually settled on the management of the Enforcement Directorate on the basis that the Criminal Casework Team had been under their command when the problems came to light. The timing was deeply unfortunate in that it detracted from the substantial progress that had been made in enforcement and undermined it at a time a debate was being conducted as to its future role. The Enforcement & Removals Directorate was broken up for the second time in seven years and its resources distributed among a network of new regional Local Immigration Teams. Its central management support functions were disbanded.
That was the rather sad end of immigration enforcement as it had existed as part of the Immigration Service because, in April 2007, the Immigration Service itself was, if not physically disbanded, then discontinued as a distinct body. The future of immigration enforcement was, until at least the time of writing in 2011, to be an adjunct of the general in-country immigration management structure rather than having a coordinating policy and organisational structure of its own.
The final end of the Immigration Service as a whole is described in Section 1.
Immigration Offences and types of enforcement action
Most people removed or deported from within the UK are not convicted criminals but immigration offenders; those who have for instance overstayed their visa or have been found to have entered the country illegally. These are not usually deported but made subject to administrative removal under powers found within Section 10 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and Schedule 2 of the Immigration Act 1971Immigration Act 1971
The Immigration Act 1971 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom concerning immigration.The Act, as with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, and that of 1968, restricted immigration, especially primary immigration into the UK....
. Where a person is removed from the UK, they can still make an application to return to the UK, but under new immigration rules introduced in October 2008, a person who has been removed from the UK may not apply for a visa for a period of 1,5 or 10 years, depending on whether they voluntarily left or were removed.
Deportation
DeportationDeportation
Deportation means the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. Today it often refers to the expulsion of foreign nationals whereas the expulsion of nationals is called banishment, exile, or penal transportation...
is the lawful expulsion of an undesirable alien, usually following a criminal conviction but also in cases where there are grounds “conducive to the public good”. Section 5 of the Immigration Act 1971—provides the power for the Secretary of State
Secretary of State (United Kingdom)
In the United Kingdom, a Secretary of State is a Cabinet Minister in charge of a Government Department ....
to make or revoke a deportation order (DO). This requires a person to leave the UK and prohibits them from re-entering the UK unless it is revoked. Any leave to enter or remain which a person gains is invalid whilst a DO is outstanding against them. There is no expiry date to a DO. A person who enters the UK in breach of a DO is an illegal entrant (see below) and may be removed as such.
Deportation Orders were once always signed by the Home Secretary but are now more commonly signed by a senior official. They place a bar on return to the UK for lengths of time which vary according to the severity of the offence. Deportation Orders stay in force until revoked.
Section 32 of the UK Borders Act 2007
UK Borders Act 2007
The UK Borders Act 2007 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom about immigration and asylum. Amongst other things, it introduced compulsory biometric residence permits for non-EU immigrants and introduced greater powers for immigration control...
places a duty on the Secretary of State to make a deportation order in respect of a person who is not a British citizen who has been convicted in the UK of an offence and sentenced to either:
- a period of imprisonment of at least 12 months; or
- a period of imprisonment of any duration for a particularly serious offence.
This duty applies to all foreign criminals except where they fall within one of the exceptions in section 33. Where an exception does apply, deportation may still be pursued.
Section 33 of the Act details those who are exempt from the provisions of automatic deportation. There are certain exemptions:
- where an individual raises a claim for Asylum and Human Rights.
- where the foreign criminal was under the age of 18 on the date of conviction the individual will be exempt from automatic deportation.
- where the foreign criminal is an EEA citizen or immediate family member of an EEA citizen.
- subject to extradition, Mental Health Provisions or a recognised victim of trafficking.
Illegal entry
Illegal entrants fall into a number of types:- Clandestine - those who have entered the country by evading the controls, eg: hidden in a vehicle, and there is no evidence of lawful entry. This category will be unable to provide any evidence of their entry to the United Kingdom. However, absence of a passport is not in itself sufficient grounds for dealing with a person as an illegal entrant. Full checks must be made to establish the person's identity and method of entry as far as possible.
- Deception - those who have entered by verbal or documentary deception, eg: by falsifying their account when applying for a visa or for leave to enter. It is an offence under section 24A of the Immigration Act 1971 to obtain or seek to obtain leave to enter or remain by deception. This can be either verbal or documentary deception. A person can be an illegal entrant if a third party has secured their entry by deception, even if they were unaware of it. If a person seeks entry to the UK as a visitor when their true intention is to claim asylum, then they are an illegal entrant as, had the immigration officer known the facts, he would not have granted leave as a visitor.
- Seamen deserters - Crew members, both sea-crews and air-crews are subject to different immigration rules and procedures to normal arrivals. When ships dock in the United Kingdom, it may be that crewmembers "jump" ship, without permission. Seaman deserters may not have a passport but rather hold a Seaman's Book, (a national identity document issued to professional seamen that contains a record of their rank and service career).
Those absconding from port arrival areas are also technically illegally entrants but, when detected, may be dealt with under port arrival procedures for administrative convenience. Those returning to the UK in breach of an existing deportation order are also treated as illegal entrants.
The powers to remove illegal entrants are found in paragraphs 9 or 10 of schedule 2 to the Immigration Act 1971. These enable an Immigration Officer to give any directions for removal as are authorised in paragraph 8 of schedule 2 to the 1971 Act.
A series of court judgements in the late 1970's and early 80's clarified some aspects of the law regarding illegal entry. The definition of what constituted illegal entry was gradually extended to include entry by deception. These included the Zamir judgement, which concerned a person who obtained a visa to join his father as his dependant while omitting to mention that he was married. The judgement held that people applying to come to the UK had a "duty of candour" to reveal any factors relevant to their stay. The House of Lords later changed its mind and it was not until 1983, with the Khawaja judgement, that a settled definition of illegal entry by deception came about.
The case of Norman (Court of Appeal 1985) established that a person who sought entry as a visitor when his true intention was to claim asylum was an illegal entrant. Had the Immigration Officer known on arrival that asylum was intended, then he would not have granted entry as a visitor.
Overstaying
Overstayers are those who stay beyond the time limit imposed on them when they enter the country. Those detected are removed under administrative powers found in Section 10 of the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act.Overstayers were, until the end of the 1990s, treated as potential deportees – a cumbersome administrative process which involved a written submission to the Home Secretary in each case. Until the mid 1980’s there were attempts to prosecute overstayers but this was seen to be both expensive in terms of court time and of little deterrence value as well as further delaying the persons departure. A further difficulty was the interpretation of the law by the courts which held that an overstayer had to be detected within three years and proof had to be offered that the person knew that they had overstayed. This was later overturned by the 1988 Act.
The process by which overstayers were detected before 1998 was ostensibly based on the system of landing and embarkation cards. Landing cards were, and are, completed by arriving foreign nationals, (not EU nationals). A small percentage of arriving passengers had their arrival conditions recorded for later embarkation checks. These were placed on conditional “coded” landing by the immigration officer on arrival and would be required to fill out an embarkation card on departure. These cards were tallied by a small army of junior clerical staff in the Croydon HQ and those who had no “pair” could be assumed not to have left. In practice, the value of the cards as a clear indicator that a person had overstayed was limited and its value as a trigger for pro-active investigations was questionable. Embarkation controls were ended in 1998 at a time when savings had to be found. The landing card did though often contain a useful written record of the person intentions on arrival and evidence of their inbound carrier who would be liable to pay for their return trip. Overstayers were most likely to emerge in the course of other enquiries or as part of a police investigation. Assisting police to establish nationality of arrestees was, and is, a major part of immigration enforcement work.
Marriage abuse
Marriage abuse has a long and ignoble history within the story of immigration control. Measures to combat bogus marriages for immigration purposes had been taken as long ago as 1925 when the Home Office agreed with the Superintendent of Registrars to receive notifications of suspect applications. It was enough of a problem in the 1930’s to prompt questions in the House of Commons which, unfortunately, only give a tantalising glimpse of the background. The main difference in those days, and until after World War 2, was that it was a problem restricted to the marriage of foreign women to British men. British women, if they married a foreign national, lost their British nationality on the assumption that they would take on that of their husband. During World War 2 thousands of British women who married American GI’s lost their national status and were required to register with the police.The investigation of bogus marriages was, especially during the 1980’s and 90’s, a bread-and-butter activity for Immigration Service enforcement. There were occasional operations to stop marriages at Registry Offices where firm intelligence suggested a fraud but the majority of this work was conducted at residential addresses at the behest of IND caseworkers who referred applications for further checks. Immigration Officers would visit the marital address and assess whether there was evidence that the marriage was genuine and subsisting and not a “marriage of convenience”. Officers would assess the domestic setting and draw obvious conclusions where there was only evidence of one person living there. That might conclude matters but, in cases of doubt, the couple would be interviewed in detail and asked questions regarding their domestic life together and the history of their relationship. Some marriage visits did not fall into this category and were altogether sadder. It was common for immigration offices to receive letters, particularly from young anglo-asian women, asking for help to prevent a forced marriage
Forced marriage
Forced marriage is a term used to describe a marriage in which one or both of the parties is married without his or her consent or against his or her will...
. The ability of immigration officers to provide help in these scenarios was fatally limited by the fear the women had of the consequences of presenting evidence in a public immigration appeals hearing. Some protection was eventually provided by the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007
Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007
The Forced Marriage Act 2007 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It seeks to assist victims of forced marriage, or those threatened with forced marriage, by providing civil remedies...
.
The information available to the Immigration Service regarding bogus marriages was hindered by the proper concerns that registrars had of breaching confidentiality. The 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act introduced new powers for registrars’ to demand that both partners attend in person to give notice, provide proof of identity and a declaration of nationality. Under the terms of the Act registrars had a duty to report to the Home Office any marriage that they have reasonable grounds for suspecting to be a sham marriage.
Although the Act required registrars of civil marriages to report suspected sham marriages to the Home Office it did not contain any power to carry out investigations into the genuineness of an intended marriage or to delay or refuse to conduct the marriage.
Marriage enquiries continued to be part of the general remit of operational enforcement but the numbers of enquiries possible became less as the focus was put on tracing failed asylum seekers and illegal workers. It remained a background issues rather than a primary concern with relatively little information gathered regarding success and failure. At one point a Home Office minister even denied that it was his responsibility.
Section 24(5) of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 provides the following definition:
“Sham marriage” means a marriage (whether or not void) –
- (a) entered into between a person (“A”) who is neither a British national nor a national of an EEA State other than the United Kingdom and another person (whether or not such a person or such a national): and
- (b) entered into by A for the purpose of avoiding the effect of one or more provisions of United Kingdom immigration law or the immigration rules.
Organisational structure
The UK Immigration Service officially ceased to exist as a distinct entity in 2007 when the former Immigration and Nationality Directorate was re-branded to become the short lived Border and Immigration Agency and, although at the time of writing, (2011), the historic grades remain, they have no unifying command structure. The work of front line border control and inland enforcement is now conducted by the same staff within the UK Border Agency, but with greatly changed working conditions and a range of duties that encompasses the work previously performed by HM Customs and Excise.UK Immigration Service grades are/were reflective of the legislation
Legislation
Legislation is law which has been promulgated by a legislature or other governing body, or the process of making it...
that stipulates that the decision to refuse a person leave to enter
Leave to enter
Leave to Enter is the technical term for someone granted entry to the United Kingdom by British immigration officers.According to the United Kingdom Border Agency, a person who is neither a British citizen nor a Commonwealth citizen with the right of abode nor a person who is entitled to enter or...
the United Kingdom is taken by an Immigration Officer
Immigration Officer
The role of Immigration officers are to ensure that immigration legislation is enforced. This can cover the rules of entry for Visa applicants, foreign nationals or those seeking asylum at the border, detecting and apprehending those that have breached the border and removing them, or pursuing...
only with the authority of a Chief Immigration Officer or an HM Immigration Inspector. The decision that a person inside the UK is in breach of immigration law
Immigration law
Immigration law refers to national government policies which control the phenomenon of immigration to their country.Immigraton law, regarding foreign citizens, is related to nationality law, which governs the legal status of people, in matters such as citizenship...
and liable for administrative removal or deportation
Deportation
Deportation means the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. Today it often refers to the expulsion of foreign nationals whereas the expulsion of nationals is called banishment, exile, or penal transportation...
can be taken by an Immigration Officer or a caseworker of Executive Officer grade or above acting on behalf of the Secretary of State
Secretary of State
Secretary of State or State Secretary is a commonly used title for a senior or mid-level post in governments around the world. The role varies between countries, and in some cases there are multiple Secretaries of State in the Government....
, with the authority of a Chief Immigration Officer or Higher Executive Officer. The removal of such offenders may only be enforced with the authority of an HM Inspector or Senior Executive Officer. Immigration Officers also have the power to deal with immigration offenders under the criminal proceedings part of the Immigration Act 1971
Immigration Act 1971
The Immigration Act 1971 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom concerning immigration.The Act, as with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, and that of 1968, restricted immigration, especially primary immigration into the UK....
and prosecute through the Criminal Justice System.
Assistant Immigration Officers' were common in the early days of the service but were dispensed with when the age bar on becoming an Immigration Officer was abolished, (date uncertain but probably before WW2). The grade of Assistant Immigration Officer was revived in 1991 but the role was initially badly defined and the scope of their work subject to ongoing dispute with the unions representing the Immigration Service grades, the Public and Commercial Services Union
Public and Commercial Services Union
The Public and Commercial Services Union is the sixth largest trade union in the United Kingdom. Most of its members work in government departments and other public bodies although some work for private companies.- Membership and organisation :...
, (PCS), and Immigration Service Union, (ISU).
Culture
The culture of the Immigration Service is difficult to define owing to its long history influenced by regional and organisational circumstances. Most importantly its culture is inescapably a reflection of the common social attitudes and culture of the times. The attitudes and assumptions of the Service before the Great War are not those of the generation which implemented the 1962 Act or those who entered the service in the wake of European Union membership. The attitudes are also inescapably those of the wider population.Accusations of racism are an occupational hazard for immigration officials but there have been relatively few substantiated cases of immigration officers abusing their position based on their own prejudices and the checks and balances within the administrative processes mitigate against one person being the only arbiter in reaching a decision on a case. There is then little direct evidence to substantiate overt prejudice but, where there was Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
in pre-World War 2 Britain it would be naive to assume that those prejudices not shared by some within the service and, where there was colour prejudice in post war Britain, this was probably shared by some staff within IS at that time. Until as late as the 1970s women were subject to institutional discrimination - women were only admitted to the Service in 1971, on a trial basis. Only in 1973 did they become a permanent fixture. In the wider Civil Service women had, only short time before, been expected to resign on marriage. Those trail-blazing women who eventually did join the Immigration Service were made to feel unwelcome by a misogynistic culture which changed only slowly and reluctantly but soon proved their worth. Similarly, as Britain became more multi-cultural so did the service but, as this coincided with an expansion of the service and an influx of young blood this was an easier, if too long delayed, transition.
There are some threads that are found within the culture of the service at all times in the reports and recollection of its staff. There is a distinct pride in uncovering deception and safeguarding, as they saw it, the public purse and domestic employment market. The attitude of the service was always primarily driven by the practicalities of law enforcement rather than by the abstract ideas of social engineering that provided the sub-text of the 1905 and 1960s Acts. The Service’s political masters were more ambiguous in their aims and unsure of what immigration control was for and what it was they wanted to achieve. This lack of clarity cannot translate itself into an operational law enforcement environment which depends on clear rules and the service, where there was a lack of clarity of purpose, defaulted to its core tasks of applying the rules as literally as it could, identifying breaches of the law, identifying deception and removing as many people as possible who failed to qualify. The relationship between the service and Home Office ministers was not always an easy one.
The internal culture of the service was driven and formed by its public facing role. A common theme among its staff was to feel, (in common with all law enforcement officers), that the practicalities of enforcing controls was little understood by its political masters or administrative HQ whose senior managers generally had no practical experience of its work. The transient nature of the senior managers within the Home Office was in stark contrast to the immobility of Immigration Service staff. It was common for staff to remain in the service their entire careers owing to the system of allowances which made it financially ruinous to transfer to a mainstream Civil Service job. Another factor influencing lack of movement was the flat pyramid structure which offered little opportunity for advancement. In the 1970s and 1980s an immigration officer could expect to wait 12–13 years before being promoted to Chief Immigration Officer. This was a recipe for insularity but the positive effect was to foster a strong group identity uncommon within the Civil Service and to create a huge depth of experience and specialist knowledge within the service. This was added to by the common circumstance that many officers would at some point in the careers take posts overseas within Visa offices at British High Commissions and Embassies before returning to their home port. The added knowledge of the culture and circumstances "on the ground" made an immeasurable contribution to the experience and skills of the service.
The very separateness and strong identity of the Immigration Service was long a cause for concern for senior IND and Home Office managers who sought at various times to foster a more corporate culture. There was a long standing aversion among senior Home Office managers to the idea of a separate service but the Immigration Service saw itself as separate and distinct on the basis of its very different working environment operating a 24 hour 7 day a week shift pattern. The Immigration Service Union gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee in 2001 and said,
" The Immigration Service is at present part of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. The two organisations have conflicting cultures, the IS providing immediate decisions face to face and IND making paper based decisions without direct responsibility for the welfare of applicants. The two organisations remain in a state of conflict, each struggling to impose its cultural values on the other. Until the IS obtains a proper higher management structure of its own and the two organisations recognise their differences, adopt what is best about the other and find ways of accommodating each other's needs, there is little prospect of real progress".
Conflict may have been too strong a word but there was certainly, at best, a deep seated lack of understanding between the operational grades and their administrative managers within IND as to each others needs and the ISU's statement was representative of that of operational grades. It is ironic therefore that since the Immigration Service was abolished and subsumed into the UK Border Agency the operational border control has, for the first time in immigration terms, become a uniformed service with a distinct identity that separates it from the rest of Home Office staff. Some of the issues surrounding immobility have been addressed but changes forced on operational staff, who in the case of enforcement staff have to earn formal accreditation, have included the imposition of non-qualified managers. This, and the dramatic planned reductions in staff which, in 2011, are already seeing the most experienced officers leave, may have long term consequences which are impossible to predict.
Ports of Entry working practice
The working environment for the Immigration Service differed greatly dependent on whether the work was performed at a port of entry, or in an after-entry environment within the community. All staff were, and are, governed by the overarching laws found within the various Immigration and Nationality Acts but the everyday application of the law at ports of entry is made through the application of the Immigration Rules – these are published rules that explain how the law is to be interpreted and applied.It is the interpretation of the rules that makes immigration law so controversial. The practicalities of assessing large numbers of people arriving at ports mean that a great deal of discretion is given to the immigration officer, (although less now than was once the case). While the officer must obtain the approval of a Chief Immigration Officer or Inspector to refuse someone entry the way in which interviews are conducted and recorded are based on a lower level of proof than those in other areas of law enforcement. The immigration rules for visitors say that the immigration officer must be “satisfied” that the person is a genuine visitor not intending to stay longer than the rules allow and is not intending to seek employment. The idea that a relatively low ranking officer merely has to satisfy himself or herself as to the persons intentions rather than prove an offence, as is the case in criminal matters, is a long standing cause of legal and legislative tension. The level of proof is effectively a balance of probabilities rather than that of an overwhelming case being proven against the arriving passenger. In practice the immigration officer is required to conduct an in-depth interview, seek corroborative evidence from other sources and present a compelling case to a Chief Immigration Officer before refusing the person. The work of a port based immigration officer is to sift arriving passengers to detect those whose accounts of their intentions give some cause for concern. The officer will briefly interview all arriving people who are not British Citizens or EU nationals, check their document for alterations or forgery, verify any entry clearances held, assess their travel history against the stamps in their passport, check them against warnings lists and do all of this, usually, in less than two minutes. If the officer is satisfied they will stamp the passport with one of a variety of wordings, (conditions), depending on the reason for the persons stay and apply a time limit according to pre-set criteria. The pressure on port immigration officers is to do this quickly so as to satisfy various targets concerning waiting times. There has never been a quota or target for detecting and refusing inadmissible passengers – the performance standards for immigration officers at ports have always revolved around the quality of interviewing, decision making and their investigative qualities.
Enforcement working practice
Working practice for enforcement immigration officers is based on the fact they are seeking to arrest or detain people who are already in the UK and have committed indictable offences. People arrested under immigration law are treated in the same way as those arrested by police for other offences. They are subject to the provisions of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and, when arrested, are usually interviewed under caution in a police station and may have access to legal representation. The major exception to the foregoing is in the case of known immigration offenders, eg: absconders, who may simply be re-detained under powers contained in Schedule 2 to the Immigration Act 1971. Although immigration offenders may, in theory, be prosecuted for illegal entry or overstaying it is usual practice to seek to remove the person from the UK as quickly as possible.Immigration enforcement has, during the 2000’s and after, undergone a long process of reform where immigration staff have been trained and equipped to perform their own arrests rather than rely on police support. Not all enforcement work is based on visiting addresses to arrest or detain suspects; much effort is dedicated to attending police stations and interviewing suspected offenders who have been arrested by police.
Where private addresses are visited in an effort to trace offenders officers generally seek to gain the cooperation of those present but do have certain powers of entry and may obtain warrants to search premises. Enforcement visits are intelligence led and must, in accordance with agreements with police, be risk assessed.
The aim of the investigation is to prove the offence of illegal entry or overstaying and the aim of most searches is to seek evidence of the person’s identity and immigration status to establish when, where and how they entered the UK. Where interviews at ports of entry are based on the idea of establishing a person’s credibility on a balance of probabilities, the aim of the enforcement immigration officer is to prove an offence has been committed at a certain point in time, at a certain place and to a high degree of probability. Having successfully completed an investigation the officer will refer the case to a Chief Immigration Officer or above who will take note of any compassionate circumstances and, if authorised, serve formal notice on the person that they are an offender and are liable to be detained. Where there are no barriers to removal, eg, outstanding criminal matters or other legal barriers, the person is taken to an immigration removal centre and arrangements made for their departure. In practice there are a multitude of potential obstacles to removing a person from the UK which may include outstanding applications or appeals, legal representations and lack of essential documentation.
Further reading / see also
- Roche, T.W.E. (1969). The Key in the Lock: a history of immigration control in England from 1066 to the present day. London: John Murray. ISBN 0-7195-1907-1. In fact, not to the present day, only until 1969 but is an invaluable insight into the development of the immigration controls.
- History of immigration in law - Oxford University Press website History of immigration law
- Bloody Foreigners - The Story of Immigration to Britain; Robert WinderRobert WinderRobert Winder, formerly Literary Editor of The Independent for five years and Deputy Editor of Granta magazine during the late 1990s, is the author of Hell for Leather, a book about modern cricket, a book about British immigration, and also two novels as well as many articles and book reviews in...
; pub. Little Brown 2004. Does not deal with the administration of immigration control but provides a liberal overview of British cultural attitudes to immigration and seeks to explore the experiences of those coming to live in the UK.
- Immigration to the United Kingdom since 1922Immigration to the United Kingdom since 1922Immigration to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland since 1922 has been substantial, in particular from Ireland and the former colonies and other territories of the British Empire - such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Caribbean, South Africa, Kenya and Hong Kong - under...
- Historical immigration to Great BritainHistorical immigration to Great BritainHistorical immigration to Great Britain concerns the inward movement of people, cultural and ethnic groups into island Great Britain before 1922, Immigration during and after 1922 is dealt with at the article Immigration to the United Kingdom .Modern humans first arrived in Great Britain during the...
- History of British nationality lawHistory of British nationality law- Early English and British nationality law :British nationality law has its origins in medieval England. There has always been a distinction in English law between the subjects of the monarch and aliens: the monarch's subjects owed him allegiance, and included those born in his dominions and...
- Asylum and Immigration TribunalAsylum and Immigration TribunalThe Asylum and Immigration Tribunal was a tribunal constituted in the United Kingdom with jurisdiction to hear appeals from many immigration and asylum decisions...
- Refugee CouncilRefugee CouncilThe Refugee Council is the United Kingdom's leading organisation working with refugees and asylum seekers. The organisation provides support and advice to refugees and asylum seekers, as well as support for other refugee and asylum seeker organisations...
- Marriage related migration to the UK - Home Office report - August 2011
External links
- UK Border Agency
- UK Visas
- Liverpool Maritime Museum - home of UKBA history and artifacts
- About immigration - general guidance
- Migrationwatch
- Refugee Council (for background on asylum law and processes)
- House of Commons - Home Affairs Select Committee
- Operation Maxim
The UK Immigration Service in print and film
- The only published history of the UK Immigration Service is "The Key in the Lock - Immigration Control in England from 1066 to the Present Day", by T.W.E. Roche, published by John Murray, 1969. The book, as the title suggests, covers a swathe of early history as well as addressing the period covered above. Anyone attempting to write a history of the immigration control owes a debt of gratitude to Mr Roche who mined the collective memories of his time which would otherwise have been lost. TWE Roche was particularly well placed to comment on the Immigration Controls of the post-war period having risen to the rank of Assistant Chief Inspector - a fact he modestly overlooks to mention. Mr Roche had private interest in Medieval history and wrote and had published another book on the subject of Richard of Cornwall called The King of Almayne. The obvious limitation of Mr Roche's book is that it only covers the period to 1969 and so misses the expansion that took place after the 1971 Act and the development of enforcement.
- In fiction - the most notable novel dealing with the work and culture of the Immigration Service is "Refusal Shoes" by ex-Immigration Officer Tony SaintTony SaintAntony David Saint is an English writer.-Early life:He had contact with the theatre through the People's Theatre in Heaton. Whilst at university he was guitarist in the courageous but ultimately unsuccessful rock band The Little Caesars.In 1993, he joined the UK Immigration Service where he worked...
, Pub. Serpents Tail, 2003. Refusal Shoes is an extremely unflattering but funny caricature of life on the immigration controls in a not very carefully disguised Heathrow Terminal Three in 1998. The book deals with what the disenchanted main character sees in his colleagues - overwhelming cynicism, casual racism and abuse of power. Tony Saint followed up the success of Refusal Shoes with a sequel, "Blag" ISBN 1852428449, 2004, which dealt with work in immigration enforcement. Like all good caricatures immigration officers who have read the books, of which there are many, can see situations and characters with which and whom they can relate but it needs to be emphasised that the work is not quite as bad as depicted - honestly.
- On television the first serious attempt to show the work of the Immigration Service was the 1959 BBC series "The Net" which was what might be termed now as a drama-doc. In five parts the series depicted the work of an airport immigration officer and his career which culminated in his promotion to Chief Immigration Officer at a seaport. More recently, the work of on-entry control officers and enforcement officers has been depicted in the fly on the wall, Sky TV, documentary series UK Border ForceUK Border ForceUK Border Force is a Sky fly on the wall documentary series narrated by Bill Nighy. The series focuses on the UK Border Agency and reveals the action behind the scenes of immigration....
which first screened in 2008. The BBC series AirportAirport (TV series)Airport is a British documentary television series based at London Heathrow Airport, the world's busiest international airport, broadcast by the BBC and syndicated to Dave, part of the UKTV network....
, which ran from 1996 to 2008, included views of immigration work at Heathrow Airport and focussed on the work of three Immigration Officers. The Airport series was lampooned by David Walliams and Matt Lucas in their series Come Fly with MeCome Fly with Me (2010 TV series)Come Fly with Me is a British mockumentary television comedy series created by and starring Matt Lucas and David Walliams. Narrated by Lindsay Duncan, the series launched on 25 December 2010 on BBC One and BBC One HD...
. One of the characters is the unappealing and officious airport Chief Immigration Officer Ian Foot. The sketches were particularly appreciated by Immigration Service enforcement staff and the researchers deserve congratulations for the accuracy of of the accommodation and operational detail.