Reward vouchers for immigration officers won't fix a broken system
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Version 0 of 1. Awarding gift vouchers for Home Office officials is not the solution to the sticky issue of the embarrassingly large number of wrongful UK Border Agency decisions. The reward system does include appeals against asylum decisions, but it mostly applies to non-asylum immigration decisions for the sole reason that they represent the overwhelming majority of appeals. In the most recent quarter, 30% of appeals were from the points-based system (the system used for workers and students), 25% were entry clearance and 25% family visit appeals. Asylum appeals represented fewer than one in 10. In the same quarter, 67% of asylum decisions were upheld, compared with only 55% of non-asylum decisions. This is, by any standards, an inefficient process. Why does the Home Office reach the right decision barely half the time? The points-based system is a bureaucratic nightmare that the court of appeal has described as "Kafkaesque" and "Byzantine," and involves a requirement that an applicant provides "specified documents" from torturously convoluted appendices which change every couple of months. Hardly a surprise, then, that appeals are frequently successful and rapidly rising in number. Family visit appeals, by contrast, are set to plummet. Sadly, this is not due to a rise in reasonable decisions, but follows the government's abolition of the right of appeal against a wrongful refusal. Since the chief inspector's global review found errors in 33% and unfairness in 16% of entry clearance cases, this should certainly have the effect of reducing allowed appeals. The number of judicial reviews, however, looks set to climb by the number of family visitors erroneously refused. According to Hansard, eleven presenting officers have been given a £25 reward voucher in a 15-month period. I spoke to a presenting officer who confirmed that this was for meeting targets both inside and outside court and that success rates are only one of the criteria on which they are assessed – these include case preparation. The fact that so few are able to meet the target is not reflective of their abilities but of the quality of the decisions they are sent to defend. News of these vouchers is undoubtedly unedifying. It raises the spectre, familiar from American courtroom dramas, of the caricatured slippery lawyer desperate to win at all costs. Although it is hardly likely that a PO would mislead the court for the sake of a possible £25 voucher, nor that the tribunal would be insufficiently skilled to see through it, the mantra that justice must not just be done but must be seen to be done means target-setting is inherently distasteful for those representing the state. A conviction target for CPS prosecutors would be similarly unpleasant (and I suspect would generate far greater outrage). The state is meant to be an impartial and objective decision-maker, not cast in opposition to the individual. Less abstractly, it misses the point. Even Rumpole would have had difficulty in defending some of the decisions taken at the lower levels of the UKBA. A recent points-based decision letter I have seen asserted that "[the applicant's] name is not on the [mandatory document] and therefore the application does not meet the requirements." The applicant's name was in block capitals on the document. There are no vouchers that could achieve a coherent defence of such a poor decision. A PO with an eye on their targets might however withdraw the decision – meaning that the applicant would have to wait for another few months for a new decision, often a replica of the previous one. If the UKBA genuinely wants to reduce the number of appeals that are allowed, it must start with better quality decision making. That does not mean that they should grant every case, but that where refusal is appropriate, the decision is well reasoned and in accordance with the law. Vouchers as an incentive scheme are peripheral to the problem they seek to solve. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |