News

BID welcomes the range of areas that the Independent Chief Inspector of UKBA intends to cover in 2011/12, including the planned joint inspections with HM Inspectorate of Prisons.  Our comments to John Vine offer suggestions for areas of focus for the planned inspections on ‘Immigration casework in removal centres and prisons’ and the Detained Fast Track.

For the full text of BID's comments click here  

In terms of immigration casework, we suggest that the Inspections specifically consider:

- Delays in the UKBA's processes for obtaining travel documents

- Risk assessments for foreign national ex-offenders in detention

- Families separated by immigration detention

- Behaviour in detention - in impact of the identification, management, and recording of behavioural incidents on immigration casework.

- Removals - the simple caution pilot for those charged with document offences.

On the Detained Fast Track, BID has maintained for a number of years that the Detained Fast Track (DFT) process for asylum claims, in which asylum applicants are detained and their claims decided and appeals heard in an accelerated process over only 12 days, puts such asylum applicants at a serious disadvantage. 

BID believes that in operating the Detained Fast Track process the UK is failing to discharge its responsibility to properly consider protection claims.  The Detained Fast Track process is inherently unfair to asylum applicants.  With only a small number of exclusion categories, in practice any asylum claim can be routed into the Detained Fast Track regardless of the complexity of the case or whether it can be heard properly within the accelerated legal time frame.

BID believes that the Detained Fast Track process is neither proportionate nor necessary, and that the rationale for the Fast Track does not stand up to scrutiny and is not supported by evidence.