May breaks up ‘troubled’ Border Agency

26 Mar 13
The ‘troubled’ UK Border Agency is to be split up and taken back into the Home Office, the government has announced.

By Richard Johnstone | 26 March 2013

The ‘troubled’ UK Border Agency is to be split up and taken back into the Home Office, the government has announced.

Border Control

Home Secretary Theresa May told MPs wholesale reforms were needed to improve the organisation’s performance, including separating its roles into an immigration & visa service and immigration law enforcement.

 She said that although the government had ‘started to get to grips’ with the UKBA, its performance was ‘still not good enough’.

May split the UK Border Force, which polices entry into the UK, from the UKBA in March last year. Since then the force had improved and was now meeting all its passenger service targets, she said.

Creating two entities from UKBA within the Home Office would also allow each to pursue their ‘distinct’ aims, May added. The immigration service would deal with the ‘high volume’ of decisions about who can come to the UK, and would be focused on customer satisfaction. A separate law enforcement arm would get tough on those who break immigration laws.

A backlog of cases at UKBA was now in the hundreds of thousands, she said, as the agency had struggled with the volume of casework since its inception in April 2008.

Its performance was not good enough, May told MPs.

She highlighted four main problems. The sheer size of the agency meant it had conflicting cultures, and too often focused on specific crises. It also lacked transparency and accountability, had inadequate IT systems and difficulties with the policy and legal framework it had to operate in.

Creating two smaller entities would lead to greater accountability, May added, as these would not be formed as stand-alone executive agencies, as UKBA was. Instead they would sit in the Home Office and report directly to ministers.

These changes were ‘in keeping with the successes of the government's reforms so far’, she said.

‘UKBA has been a troubled organisation for so many years. It has poor IT systems, and it operates within a complicated legal framework that often works against it.

‘All those things mean it will take many years to clear the backlogs and fix the system – but I believe the changes I have announced today will put us in a much stronger position to do so.’


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