Home Office is 'not fit for purpose', immigration lawyer claims
Apr 7, 2025
The Home Office has been branded "incompetent" by a top immigration lawyer after their latest immigration failure has been exposed by GB News.In an exclusive report by GB News, it was revealed that dozens of skilled worker visas were granted by the Home Office, despite failing to meet legal requirements.FULL STORY HERE.
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An exclusive by GB News can reveal that dozens of skilled worker visas
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have been granted by the Home Office despite failing to meet legal requirements
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Immigration specialists have since demanded an urgent review of the visas granted by the Home Office
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It follows the publication of a National Audit Office report that warned the government did not have the necessary systems in place
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to stop exploitation of the immigration route. But joining me in my fantastic all-star panel here
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GB News contributor Will Kingston, political commentator Chloe Dobbs and former Labour minister Bill Rammel
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Bill, look, you've been in government, so you understand the workings of the bureaucracy
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and you understand the workings of the politics behind that. How do things like this constantly keep happening
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You know, we see stories so often if things go wrong inside the bureaucracy of government
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You'd think that there's strong legal requirements in place for this. This should be like a red line, shouldn't it
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Well, I was at one stage Foreign Office Minister responsible for entry clearance, which is the processing of the visas
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And one of the things I learnt, and one of the flaws in the system, is that the average caseworker overseas spends 10 minutes assessing a form
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and you can make mistakes. However I have to say this is much ado about nothing Dozens of cases over three years out of 256 cases I think that 0 of cases
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I'm the first person who's prepared to bash the Home Office for its incompetence
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This is not a scandal. Right, OK. We've got a guest here, actually, Harjap Singh
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We'll welcome him. Now he's immigration lawyer. Harjap Singh, thank you very much for coming in
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We've obviously got our panel here as well. You may want to ask some questions. However, what's going on here
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Give us some insight with your background as to how this has happened. Why on earth these are slipping through the nets
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Even in the tens, it's still too many. OK, well, nothing new here
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Mistakes are made. And we know the Home Office is incompetent. Bill and your guests can confirm every year there's a Home Affairs Select Committee report
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And they report that the Home Office is not fit for purpose. So what that means is essentially you've got a machinery trying to produce a product which it's not capable of producing
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So you're not going to get a good product. At one stage, the Home Office had gap year students deciding applications and claims and ex-supermarket workers thrown straight into the job at the deep end
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Now not only is that a disservice to the person who paying for it because the applicant pays thousands of pounds sometimes five six thousand pounds to the home office to have their application decided correctly albeit And it works both ways So people who should get a visa don get a visa
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And then they have to go for a lengthy appeal process. But sometimes people who don't qualify do get through
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In this case, the numbers aren't that great. And like Bill said, they're minuscule in comparison
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That's to be expected. Some sort of leakage is to be expected. But, however, there does seem to be recently scandals upon scandals
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And this is happening since with a highly skilled migrant programme, the X point system, which used to be a lot of fraud
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And the fake colleges, which were granted licenses in 2010 and 11 to give visas, which turned some turned out to be about just one room above a factory. Yeah
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Yeah. Recently this year, just the care sector. We know the recent care sector scandals
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Thousands of workers have been called here to work in the care sector and the jobs haven't been given to them
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And the employers have told them, sorry, you've just taken the money. They've been charged thousands of pounds to get here and left in limbo
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OK, Harjot, look, part of this could come down to just an ever bloated bureaucracy
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Do we need to have a separate immigration department set up to run these sorts of things
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Because we got millions of people coming here in decades That just too much for one department in the home office to cope with surely well you think in any business where every year you been told actually your business is not good
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the model's not good the setup's not good you know and you need to really go to a new business model
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that they'd make changes in order to correct that however instead um not only is a department
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running incompetently but the people running it are getting bonuses uh for us being getting
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incompetently. Now, you wouldn't do that if you didn't perform in your job every year and I didn't
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perform in my job or anyone of your panel didn't perform their job. We'd be out on our ear. We
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wouldn't get a bonus for it. But I don't understand in relation to that that this this is not fit for
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purpose. We shouldn't persevere for it. It's like having cracked walls, putting a roof on and
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expecting it to bear some load. And what we're doing is just what the government's successive
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governments, it doesn't matter which one they're just papering over the cracks and telling everyone
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And look, we're the brand new wall. And we know that, you know, there are scandals upon scandals which don't seem to end regardless
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Look at the fake English language tests. We can go on. The fake income requirements, they go on and on
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And this year, they haven't even stopped this year. So it's something that the government needs to consider
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They can't promise a brilliant product if you haven't got the machinery to produce it
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It's quite simple
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