Privatisation, 'Mission Creep' and lack of Home Office legal conscientiousness in the immigration application process

In 2005, the Home Office privatised the visa application service. From May 2017, the visa applications customer enquiries service was contracted out, introducing a charge for emails and telephone calls. During 2018, instead of presenting supporting documents at a pre-booked appointment at a British embassy (or outsourced office), applicants had to post documents 'to Sheffield', to an address hidden on a broken website: subsequently, it remains unclear whether, for any given entry clearance post, documents should be presented, posted or uploaded. From November 2018 the Home Office began transferring in-country applications, both immigration and nationality, to online-only, requiring biometric enrolment and provision of supporting documents through a privatised charged-for service. The privatised entities offer additional charged-for services, while applicants not wanting those face a bewildering and often broken chain of 'click-through' web pages. Immigration lawyers' blogs and representative bodies' formal briefings are currently overflowing with strategic and specific criticisms.

However, this is not just another tale of unsuccessful government IT projects, or even risky reliance on outsourcing companies showing diminishing enthusiasm for providing a loss-making 'public' service. UK immigration and nationality law is laid down in statute, in the Immigration Rules and Home Office policies, and in legal cases. Hidden in the transfer of application processes to online platforms and in the transfer of responsibility to outsourced entities are actual, significant, changes in procedures, 'mandatory' information, requirements and documents, not presented to Parliament. Similarly, the new EU 'settled status' scheme relies in part on algorithms applied to HMRC records, not presented to Parliament. Refusals may be susceptible to challenge under Alvi,1 but, beyond the sheer inefficiency inherent in this, the whole shift to a privatised, for-profit application process amounts to a lack of democratic accountability, lack of Home Office legal conscientiousness, and a formal and substantial 'legal distancing' of applicant migrants from a transparent, accessible application process.