Senior British border officials misled parliament by claiming they had dealt with a backlog of 147,000 asylum and immigration claims, a report published on Thursday claimed. Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration John Vine said that inefficiencies in the UK Border Agency’s operation to deal with the archive of applications — submitted before March 2007 — meant it had 100,000 items of unopened post at one point. “I found that updates given by the agency to parliament in the summer of 2011, stating that the legacy of unresolved asylum cases was resolved, were inaccurate,” said Vine. “In fact, the programme of legacy work is far from resolved,” he added. Keith Vaz, chair of the Commons home affairs select committee, called it “a devastating report into the way in which the UKBA administrates the immigration system.
