26 April 2006 Blog Home : April 2006 : Permalink
Home Secretary Charles Clarke is due to explain to MPs how 1,023 foreign prisoners came to be released without being considered for deportation.
New figures show 288 of those were freed after the government became aware of the problem last summer.
The words "organize" "pissup" "brewery" "could" "not" seem to be coming into my mind and while he's a bit more diplomatic they clearly came into Stephen Pollard's mind too. Michelle Malkin and others have called similar policies in the US "catch and release", they may be happy to see that the US is not alone in its inability to handle criminal immigrants, but I doubt it.As usual, Charles Clarke has found someone else to blame. But this time the scapegoats are close to home, indeed directly responsible to him: his officials in the Prison Service and the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND). Between them, over the past six years, these services failed to deport more than 1,000 foreign nationals on their release from prison in Britain, of whom three were murderers, five were paedophiles and nine were rapists - not to mention dozens of burglars and violent offenders.
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This tale of incompetence has come to light only because of the assiduity of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, one of the few agents of public accountability we have left in our neutered democracy. Mr Clarke, professing himself keen to "acknowledge and admit it and deal with it", is busy distancing himself from the scandal. Yet a man so happy to pass orders down the chain of command cannot avoid the buck of responsibility passing up it.
The ZANU labour people ask why people don't trust the government. This is why. And it isn't helped by the endless stories of waste and accidental overpayments. The latter link shows precisely why I reckon the ID card scheme is a loser. As the BBC reports:"An element of overpayment to claimants was an inherent part of the design of the tax credits system," said the committee's chairman Edward Leigh.
"What came out of the blue for the government was that overpayment would routinely occur on such a gigantic scale - an estimated £2.2bn for 2003-04 and probably again for 2004-05.
"Doubts about HMRC's controls over fraud were certainly not lessened when evidence emerged late last year of a serious assault on the system by organised criminals."
Suzy Grell, from Tadworth in Surrey, contacted the BBC with details of the problems she's encountered.
"I received a letter about an overpayment for 2004 for over £500.
"I've been trying to sort it out but recently received another letter for the same period stating that I have been overpaid by over £5,000.
"Their systems are obviously struggling and making mistakes and we have to suffer the stress of not knowing how much we owe them or even if we owe them at all," Ms Grell wrote.
It isn't just the sums it is the anecodotal evidence that they don't in fact know how much they are overpaying and can't get their computers to give them a consistent answer. And we expect these idiots to be able to give everyone a secure ID card without cockups security breaches etc.?