THE Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, has made a series of recommendations to the Home Office in his second report into the controversial EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS).
It covers the five months to the end of last August, although Bolt said most of the inspections were carried out between April and June.
His recommendations cover a range of issues, including the ancillary costs of making an application and quality assurance.
However, the charity Migrant Voice said that by focusing on issues raised in the first inspection, the report failed to acknowledge some fundamental problems with the EUSS.
Its director, Nazek Ramadan, said these were covered in an earlier report from Migrant Voice, which found many applicants were unnecessarily being asked to provide additional evidence and wrongly being granted temporary instead of permanent status.
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“The relevancy of today’s report is also called into question by the long delay in its publication,” she said.
“The scheme has seen a big uptick in applications in the six months since the inspection ended and existing problems are likely to have been exacerbated (and new ones generated) in that time.
“The Home Office must urgently provide an explanation for this delay and commit to implementing the recommendations, both from the ICIBI and our November report. Most importantly, the message that EU nationals and their families are welcome here must be made a reality by ending this application scheme that will turn unknown numbers of EU nationals into undocumented migrants, and creating a simple registration scheme instead.”
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