Vital immigration documents are lost by British Home Office, throwing lives into turmoil
In one inspection, 150 boxes of lost mail, including correspondence from applicants and their lawyers, were discovered in a room in an immigration office.
A wave of devastating incidents of vital personal papers being lost in British immigration cases has led to renewed calls for the Home Office to overhaul the way it handles documents.
The problem has been so severe that at its peak the department routinely mislaid thousands of files, a former senior immigration official said.
In the wake of the coverage of the Windrush scandal, The Guardian has spoken to people whose immigration status has been left in limbo after documents submitted to the UK Home Office have vanished.
Despite this the Home Office has never made a voluntary self-referral to the data protection watchdog over lost papers.
The Home Office, is now facing questions from the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office. The new Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, took over from Amber Rudd in April, after she resigned over the Windrush scandal, in which the Home Office reportedly destroyed thousands of landing cards documenting the arrival of long-term migrants to Britain, who were subsequently threatened with deportation, sacking and the removal of their health care.
Yvette Cooper, the chair of the influential home affairs select committee, said: “This is a question of basic competence. Too often we have heard about lost documents and simple errors by the Home Office that can have deeply damaging consequences for people’s lives.
“The Home Affairs committee and the independent inspectorate have warned the Home Office repeatedly to improve the competency and accuracy of the immigration system.
“But ultimately this is linked to weaknesses in the Home Office casework system that urgently need to be sorted out. The immigration system is far too important a public service for these kinds of mistakes to be acceptable, or for repeated warnings from the inspectorate and the select committee to be ignored.”
The cases range from lost birth certificates, to children’s passports going missing, education certificates disappearing and appeal bundles misplaced.
Among them are a 36-year-old woman from a post-Soviet territory whose passport was lost by the Home Office, ultimately leaving her destitute for 10 years. One woman has been fighting removal for years, despite meeting requirements to remain in the UK and having lived here for over 21 years. Her application was refused and documents she sent were never returned. The situation has left her suffering significant financial losses.
There have been numerous references to missing files in reports by the borders and immigration inspectorate and MPs have raised the issue in parliament.
“In more recent times, increased delays in processing cases has also meant people often being without key documents for months or even years on end.”
The former borders and immigration inspector, John Vine, previously told MPs the issue of lost documents features “in every inspection”. In one inspection, 150 boxes of lost mail, including correspondence from applicants, MPs and their legal representatives, were discovered in a room in the immigration office in Liverpool.
Campaigners have said the problem of lost documents has been compounded by data protection legislation that came into power on Friday that gives the Home Office sweeping exemptions that will limit anyone seeking information about their immigration status in future.
The changes brought in by the data protection bill deprive applicants of a reliable means of obtaining files about themselves from the department through what are known as subject access requests.
Charities and campaigners have warned they are each dealing with hundreds of cases in which original documents such as birth certificates, payslips and marriage certificates have gone missing.
Satbir Singh, the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) charity, said: “We would have had hundreds of these cases. That’s just us. We’re one of the larger organisations, but we’re still small compared to the vast ocean of people who require assistance.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Home Office takes its data protection responsibilities extremely seriously and have robust safeguards in place to make sure we handle the millions of documents we receive in the appropriate way.
“When documentation goes missing we make every effort to locate it. Each case should be reported to Home Office Security who will assess whether the Information Commissioner’s Office should be informed.”
