ON the day our headline asked what the Home Office was trying to hide above a story about a continued delay in reviewing a freedom of information (FOI) request, The National yesterday received a response.
We wanted to know how many asylum seekers had been removed from the UK in the year to February 28, through “human error” – similar to the case of Isabella Katjiparatijivi, on which we also reported yesterday.
Our request also asked how many were halted because of a pending judicial review and the number of appeals made.
The Home Office refused our initial FOI request and stalled when we asked for an internal review after we involved the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
In its response a member of the department’s information rights team told us yesterday the request had been completed, but added: “My conclusion is that the Home Office’s original response to your request was correct. With regard to your request for an internal review, we have already explained in our original response that the IT systems used by UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) cannot automatically identify cases where there has been alleged ‘human error’. This is because there is no ‘human error’ category centrally recorded.”
The team member also agreed with the Home Office that officials would have to manually examine more than 3500 case files and would involve “at least 175 hours’ work in total, way in excess of the specified time limit of 24 hours work”.
They said each file would take an estimated three minutes to examine – a “conservative estimate” given that “human error is open to interpretation and that some files might require detailed examination”.
If that is indeed the case, we are left wondering how Immigration Minister Caroline Nokes was able to so quickly identify human error as being behind the attempted deportation of Katjiparatijivi, who had been locked up in Dungavel when she went to report to the Home Office in Glasgow.
We are far from satisfied with the Home Office response and believe it is simply a way to prevent us getting hold of the data we asked for and we have again referred the matter to the ICO.
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