Where a person is in the UK without valid leave to enter or remain, the Home Office needs to make and maintain contact with them in order to progress any outstanding application, to encourage the person to regularise their stay or depart the UK voluntarily, or in some cases to work towards an enforced removal.
This inspection – which was conducted between September 2024 and February 2025 – examined how the Home Office seeks to maintain contact, what it does to re-establish contact if it has been lost, and the impact of lost contact on both the business of the Home Office and on the migrants themselves. As ever, inspectors focused on the efficiency, effectiveness, and consistency of the Home Office’s efforts.
The sheer scale of the task presents the Home Office with a challenge, and this inspection found that cross-system working to address this challenge is inhibited by a plethora of hand-offs, poor communication, and weaknesses in data collection and sharing (compounded by deficient IT). Some steps had been taken towards promoting a better system-wide approach, but the extent and interdependent nature of what needs to be done means there is a risk that the resources required to deliver further improvements will not be found or, if found, will be diverted to other priorities before the necessary changes can be made and embedded.
The inspection report presents recommendations that are intended to encourage the Home Office to commit to completing a programme of work that would make each point at which it is in contact with a person without leave more efficient and effective, not just to make better use of its resources and to build confidence in its management of this population, but also to improve the experiences and outcomes for the migrants involved.
The inspection report contains eight recommendations and was sent to the Home Secretary on 12 May 2025. I am pleased that seven of the recommendations have been accepted in full, with the other one accepted in part, and that work to implement these recommendations is under way.
John Tuckett, Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration
25 June 2026