Immigration enforcement

To improve performance, the Department needs to better understand how its efforts and activities influence its planned outcomes and should: a) Build on its data and analytical capability to better support decision-making, assessment of performance and resource prioritisation. The Department has struggled to provide strong evidence to demonstrate its impacts or justify some of its decision-making. It should develop a stronger evidence base to underpin its decisions, provide more clearly articulated justification for the decisions it makes and develop better systems for learning how to improve its work. This should include setting clear systematic feedback for process inefficiencies when they occur and providing a consistent lessons learned approach to its evaluation work.

b) Expand its knowledge of the scale of irregular migration and the barriers it faces in tackling this. There are opportunities for the Department to build on its demand planning work, external research and other estimates of hidden activity across government, for example elements of serious and organised crime or the tax gap, to improve its understanding of the full scale of the illegal population in the UK and identify new ways to address some of the challenges it faces. These opportunities could involve, but not be limited to: • further analysis to estimate how much of the total illegal population it already interacts with, to understand if its current strategy reaches far enough; • analysis to understand the potential reasons why so few removal directions are currently successful (including reviewing its internal processes), in order to develop a strategy for dealing with late claims to remain in the UK; and • improving its understanding of the flow of cases joining and leaving the population. Building on existing work, it should assess where and how bottlenecks occur in the system and implement work to remove them. This should be done across the wider Borders and immigration system to understand how individuals move between the interdependent directorates. If the Department is successful in building on these work programmes, this could help it to better demonstrate links between its activities and its impacts, or explore whether its strategies are sufficient to help it achieve its vision and objectives.

c) Develop a common understanding of ‘harm’, so that all staff are confident they see harm in a consistent way for their area. Immigration Enforcement’s ongoing work to assess current and emerging threats helps teams focus on harm, but there is no common understanding across the organisation of what the Department means by harm caused by the illegal population. To mitigate against the possibility that teams define harm differently, and to help more clearly demonstrate progress against the vision for reducing harm, the Department would benefit from agreeing and articulating a common understanding.

d) Review Immigration Enforcement’s current responsibilities to identify which ones are most important in achieving its goals. However, to do this it needs to develop clear metrics of performance that are directly linked to what it is trying to achieve. The Department should: • assess its goals and objectives to check they measure relevant indicators.

• have clear, measurable objectives based on outcomes, cost and quality as well as inputs and outputs;

• clearly set out a rationale of how each business area contributes to success against Immigration Enforcement’s overall missions and objectives;

• assess the relative success of each business area; and

• undertake modelling exercises to understand the impact on one area by changing resourcing structures.