Chief Inspector finds "significant room for improvement" in internal administrative review process
The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, has today published a report on his inspection of the Home Office's processes for administrative reviews of immigration cases.
Image credit: UK GovernmentYou can read the 68-page report here. A Home Office response to the report is available here.
The Home Office's internal administrative review process was put in place when the 2014 Immigration Act removed the right of appeal to the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal for various types of immigration decisions.
The Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration found that overall there was significant room for improvement in respect of the effectiveness of administrative review in identifying and correcting case working errors, and in communicating decisions to applicants.
He also found that the levels of accuracy and consistency varied between in-country, overseas and at the border reviews .
With regard to the independence of the reviewer, the Chief Inspector says in the report that the Home Office had created a separate, dedicated team to handle in-country reviews, but most overseas and at the border reviews were carried out locally, and while the inspection found no indications of bias, it was harder to evidence that overseas and at the border reviewers were truly separate and independent.
Commenting on the report on Free Movement, Colin Yeo said the report showed that the internal review process "seems to be a very poor replacement for appeals. There is a much lower success rate for applicants, the seniority of staff involved has been downgraded, quality assurance is ineffective, feedback is non existent for out of country and at border reviews and training is inadequate."
The Home Office said in its response to the Chief Inspector's report that it was "concerned by the findings, it shows quality has not consistently been of the standard to which we aspire and we have wasted no time in making a series of far reaching changes to the way we operate this activity."