The Guardian reports that the Home Office has apologised to asylum seekers who were granted leave to remain in the UK, only to have their approvals retracted. Some applicants, who had been mailed official residency permits, were instructed to destroy them. The Home Office has explained this was due to a ‘technical fault in our system’.
Charities have suggested there are multiple cases where individuals and their families had been celebrating being granted leave to remain in the UK to then be informed of Home Office’s error. The number of individuals affected by the error has not been disclosed.
The Guardian article gives an insight into the impact this has had on those involved. One asylum seeker explained: ‘I was so happy to receive this letter… I and my family had been left in limbo for two years not knowing what was going to happen to me. But then a few weeks later I got another letter telling me the Home Office had made a mistake, that I hadn’t received refugee status after all and that I had to destroy the biometric residence permits they sent me’. This was followed by a letter apologising for the ‘technical error’ and ‘inconvenience caused,’ but he was asked to ‘cut up the cards’ and ‘take a picture of the pieces’ to send via email.
Another case involved an Iranian couple who had been informed via telephone by Migrant Help, a Home Office contractor, that they had been granted asylum after 19 months of awaiting a decision. Yet, only 2 days later, they received another phone call where they were informed this was a mistake. After another 2 months passed, they were eventually told a permanent decision had been reached to grant them asylum for the second time, but they ‘doubted it was true’. The couple described the entire ordeal as an ‘emotional rollercoaster’.
In condemnation of the situation, Lou Calvey, director of the charity Asylum Matters, stated: ‘It’s sheer torment. It has devastating consequences on people that have often waited for years for their decision, only to then have the rug pulled out from them’. Calvey further said: the ‘chaos in government processing & decision-making’ is ‘palpable’ and called upon the new Labour government to ‘urgently’ rebuild the basic functions of our asylum process.
This news follows the publication of a letter last week calling for the new government to fix the ‘fundamentally broken’ immigration policy. As reported in the Justice Gap, the letter suggests necessary improvements include repealing the Illegal Migration Act and the Nationality and Borders Act, opening safer routes for refugee resettlement, providing community housing, and restoring asylum seeker’s right to work.
As the Guardian notes, a spokesperson for the Home Office concludes that they are ‘committed to improving the quality and accuracy of our decision-making, which will maintain the integrity of the system and help reduce delays’ and prevent similar mistakes in the future.
