Legal News

The borders and immigration inspector John Vine has said that the UK Border Agency had no clear strategy for dealing with a group of 150,000 foreign nationals typically students on expired visas.
In his report he warned that the immigration officers were not aware of how many of those who were told to leave the UK had actually left.
Immigration minister Damian Green blamed the last government, but Labour said the report was damning.
The problem hitherto unknown to the UKBA concerned people from outside Europe who have been set a deadline to leave the UK. The report focused on such people who were mainly students and when they stay put even after their deadline they are added to the migration refusal pool (MRP).
The inspector said that there were over 150,000 cases nationally of migrants who have been refused an extension of stay in the UK.
Even though the agency had no knowledge of these individuals overstaying their visas there was no clear plan in place with the Agency to deal with the problem which seemingly is leading to another backlog.
He added that the agency needed to and must do more to demonstrate that it was dealing with the issue in a more proactive manner.
The report said the number of MRP cases had grown from 153,000 in October of last year to almost 160,000 by mid-December.
Immigration Minister Damian Green blamed the previous government saying that there was no effective strategy in place to ensure migrants left at the end of their time in the UK. The UK Border Agency is now working through a group of potential over-stayers to identify those who have not left.
This includes checking passenger records using our e-borders database which now covers all flights outside Europe.
This summer the UKBA launched a UK-wide operation to remove over-stayers and the department has already removed 1,800 of these people since the campaign started he said.
But shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the coalition was "failing on illegal immigration."
He said that the uncomplimentary report by the government's own immigration inspector has shown that the government was giving a very low priority to finding and removing people who have been refused permission to stay.