The worst of both worlds? Inspector's report shows UKBA fails to handle intelligence from the public properly

The two reports released by the UK Border Agency Chief Inspector John Vine this week - Preventing and detecting immigration and customs offences: A thematic inspection of how the UK Border Agency receives and uses intelligence and A Short-Notice Inspection of a UK Border Agency Arrest Team (Croydon) - give a great deal of useful information about the current operation of immigration enforcement in the UK. 

Overall the conclusions of Vine’s reports are non-too surprising – few will surprised to hear that the UKBA remains a long way from the operationally oiled immigration enforcement service that ministers no doubt dream of. But one of Vine’s findings, located within the thematic inspection report into intelligence, should worry us in particular – he finds that the increasing use of intelligence in immigration enforcement activities is both inconsistent and inadequately monitored within the UKBA.

Building the UKBA towards becoming ‘intelligence-led’ (i.e. able to use information from “the general public, frontline staff and community organizations” in order to target immigration crime) has been a central objective of subsequent governments over recent years. Over the past decade government ministers, keen to prove their credentials on immigration, have moved towards a framework that would localise immigration enforcement, effectively ‘bringing the borders in-country’. New Immigration Partnerships and Local Immigration Teams were set up under Labour, and the general public was encouraged to report immigration crime in their local area. This approach has been enthusiastically continued under the current administration.

But this strategy has also caused real concerns for those who have felt that drawing the public into making allegations of immigration crime against others could erode trust between migrants and their neighbours, employers and service providers. As shown when employers' immigration control responsibilities were increased in 2008, there are real risks to making immigration status a central concern across society. In particular the costs can be felt by those migrants and ethnic minorities who find themselves objects of suspicion on the basis of their immigration status.

Coming back to the Chief Inspector's report, John Vine finds that the public has proved to be highly enthusiastic in reporting potential immigration offences to the UKBA. The UKBA receives a substantial 2,100 allegations per week from the public, adding up to over 100,000 per year. This seems to demonstrate that all the tough talk about immigration from government and media sources is working in at least one respect – information is flowing into the home office from the public about potential immigration offences.

But on this basis we should also be concerned about Vine’s next conclusion that this public intelligence is currently neither monitored nor properly used by the UKBA. As a result, there are gaps in the records about intelligence leading to enforcement. No account is kept of the outcome of intelligence received from the public, to record whether an allegation led to arrests or removals. This means that we cannot know what proportion of the 100,000 annual allegations resulted in action, and what proportion were false or unfounded. It also means that we (and UKBA staff) can’t systematically work out whether particular allegations or types of sources are more or less likely to lead to enforcement action.

There is potentially a serious accountability issue here. Major UKBA enforcement activities are usually billed as ‘intelligence-led’ and as such, even if they are highly disruptive such as a recent stop and search operation within a Cardiff shopping centre, it is very difficult to find out the background and outcome of operations. But it is worrying that the UKBA does not currently record these incidents in a way which joins the dots between intelligence, enforcement operations, and outcomes so that patterns can be monitored properly.

UKBA's difficulties so far in moving towards 'intelligence-led' operations, exposed by John Vine this week, will no doubt be explained away by ministers as teething problems – and of course major reforms of this nature do take time to get up and running. But with the loss of 5,200 UKBA staff this year as a result of wider budget cuts, it seems more likely we will see no real improvement in the UKBA system for receiving and recording allegations from the public.

In the meantime we are in an uncomfortable place – we have a general public that is willing to make allegations against migrants, whilst the Border Agency remains unable to manage this information properly. That sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.