More than 220,000 files on immigrants who should have been removed from Britain were found rotting in boxes in back rooms in yet another Home Office scandal.

Overall, the number of migrants who are suspected of overstaying their visas has now hit a staggering 263,000.

Yet, according to the chief inspector of immigration John Vine, little or no progress is being made in clearing the backlog.

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Home Secretary Theresa May arrived for a cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street in London this morning ahead of a damning report by the chief borders inspector John Vine

ECHO OF THE LABOUR YEARS The shambles has strong echoes of the 2006 asylum scandal which led to John Reid labelling the Home Office’s immigration and nationality directorate ‘not fit for purpose’. The former home secretary publicly lambasted his own department after 450,000 historic asylum cases were found piled up in boxes. Officials spent years trawling through the cases in a so-called legacy exercise which led to at least 160,000 asylum seekers being granted an effective amnesty to remain. In a further 74,500 cases, the applicants could not be traced. Upon unearthing the debacle, the now Lord Reid damned the Home Office’s immigration operation as ‘not fit for purpose’ with ‘inadequate leadership and management systems’. Since then, the immigration system has undergone a series of shake-ups and re-branding exercises but remains in chaos. Advertisement

A private firm paid £12.7million by the Home Office to improve removals has managed to repatriate less than one per cent of immigrants contacted.

Tactics used by Capita included sending text messages which, in many cases, were simply ignored.

The latest Vine report – which Theresa May’s Home Office has been sitting on for months – examined the department’s so-called migration refusal pool, or MRP. This contains migrants who, since 2008, have overstayed their visas.

Despite ministers promising to clear the backlog, the MRP still contained 173,562 in the three months to June this year, compared to 174,057 in the same period two years earlier. As fast as a case is cleared up, a new one is added.

However, in a new debacle, Mr Vine said that he had also been made aware of a further 223,600 records, pre-dating December 2008, which ministers had not previously disclosed.

Government sources said the files – which date from the New Labour years, when the immigration system was in chaos – had been found piled up in meeting rooms and cupboards at centres in Sheffield and elsewhere.

Incredibly, some documents were found dumped at the bottom of a disused lift shaft, insiders said.

John Vine, the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, found the Home Office have lost 174,000 illegal immigrants

The Border Force has only managed to track down 58,000 illegal immigrants who have gone missing

COUPLE WHO SET UP £8K FAKE WEDDING 'Stooge wife': Naima Makda with boyfriend Ibrahim Mahter BY Andy Dolan The ringleader of a sham marriage gang used his own girlfriend as a 'stooge wife', marrying her to strangers for £8,000. Ibrahim Mahter, 29, organised a string of lucrative fake ceremonies and 'pressured' women to take part. His girlfriend, Naima Makda, 28, was one of several bogus brides who would marry foreign nationals for £8,000 a time so that they could stay in the UK. Mahter, along with Abdulgani Makrani, 66, paid the women to marry strangers from Pakistan and India, a court heard. Both men, along with Makda and two other fake brides were jailed on Monday after a judge said they had shown 'total disrespect for the institution of marriage and UK immigration laws'. Advertisement

Many of the files contained duplicate records, but among the pre-2008 pool are an estimated 89,000 over-stayers who are still here.

Added to the almost 174,000 migrants in post-2008 pool, it gives a total of 263,000 – which is the equivalent of the population of Stoke-on-Trent.

While much of the debacle took place under Labour, Coalition efforts to fix the mess have been faltering according to Mr Vine – who last week revealed how the Home Office had been granting citizenship to foreign criminals and illegal immigrants.

The Home Office signed a contract with outsourcing giant Capita to review and, where possible, close the records of migrants in the MRP. But the deal – worth a potential £40million – has saved the taxpayer far less than anticipated. In around 60,000 cases, migrants could not even be traced.

The inspection also found there were ‘significant inaccuracies’ in Capita’s records – with the number of departures it claimed credit for overstated by more than 1,140 in 2013/14. This represents more than a quarter of Capita’s 4,080 ‘successes’.

Last night immigration minister James Brokenshire said: ‘We inherited an immigration system in complete disarray, which turned a blind eye to hundreds of thousands of people with no right to be here.’

Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, said: ‘To fail to know the whereabouts and precise numbers of thousands who have no right to stay here is a serious indictment of our immigration system.

‘Capita’s contribution has been minimal, but it costs the taxpayer millions. The total of the “disappeared ones” is now the size of a small English city.’

Yvette Cooper, Labour’s home affairs spokesman, said: ‘This report reveals yet another border control failure from Theresa May.’

Capita said it performs only part of the removal process. A spokesman added: ‘It is not contracted to handle, nor able to effect change in the end-to-end process.’



