One of Britain's top immigration lawyers has declared the Home Office "unfit for purpose" following a bombshell GB News exposé on the state of the country's deportation system.
Speaking to GB News, Harjap Singh stated that "everything it [the Home office] touches, it destroys" as he reacted to Political Correspondent Katherine Forster's sit-down interview with a man "begging" to be sent home.
In a GB News exclusive investigation, Katherine spoke to a Bangladeshi man who has been "begging" to be deported by the Home Office for "eight months".
The man told Katherine: "If you tell me my flight is ready now, I can go now. I want to go now, I'm ready to go. I have nothing, no one to worry here. I got everything, all the worries back home."
Immigration Lawyer Harjap Singh has hit out at the Home Office
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Taking aim at the Home Office, Mr Singh told GB News: "There's many cases like this where people do want to go back, but there are delays. If you have a passport and you're overstaying and your passport is valid, the best way to go back is buy a ticket and you could go back tonight.
"But what happens is a lot of the time travel documents expire, and so new ones have to be made by the respective embassies. And that's where the problem takes place and the delays take place."
He explained: "The embassies are very loath to issue them straight away. They say, 'we want to do an enquiry back home to see who the person is', and that process takes months. Certain embassies are notorious for their delays, the Indian embassy takes months in doing that as well as the Bangladeshi embassy.
"And that's where the delays happen, but there is definitely delay on the side of the Home Office and the Home Office with their procedures."
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In an exclusive interview, a Bangladeshi man told GB News that he is 'ready to go home' after waiting eight months to be deported
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Criticising the Home Office for including voluntary deportations in their removal figures, Mr Singh revealed: "The point is, the Home Office want to include everyone in the removals and the deportation figures, even if people go back voluntarily. So the Home Office say they deported or removed 50,000 people since they came in last July.
"Now, what they don't tell you is that many of them are voluntary, and people have just decided to get up and go, yet the Home Office consider that in the figure. So people might think 'where have the Home Office rounded up 50,000 people and sent them back?', and they'll be right in thinking that many of those people just got up with their passport and went back home."
As host Martin Daubney argued that the deportation system is "slipping into clown world", the lawyer responded: "Everything the Home Office touches it destroys.
"Whether it's passport applications, borders, visa applications, the queues at Dover, this Home Office is not fit for purpose. There's a Home Affairs Select Committee every year for the past 12 or 13 years that says this is an institution not fit for purpose."
Mr Singh told GB News that the Home Office has 'loophole after loophole' with their schemes
|GB NEWS
He added: If you have a factory or machinery that's not fit for purpose, it doesn't matter the quality of worker you have or what manager you have on it. If your machinery can't produce it, you're not going to get a product, and that's the problem. The staff are not trained up to the level.
"You have ex-supermarket staff appointed to make decisions about complex legal matters. And often they get them wrong, leading to appeals and complex situations and waiting times. So this is actually how the Home Office operates, and until this is sorted out, you are going to go from one calamity to another, irrespective of what Governments come in."
Recalling the many "loop holes" in Home Office schemes, Mr Singh concluded: "There's loopholes in the schemes, be it the bogus colleges that were operating above sweatshops, be it a highly skilled visa program that allowed people to come in and the people found to be working there were then not working in highly skilled jobs, they were found to be working in supermarkets.
"Or be it the student visas and the fake marriages being contracted to bring their dependents over, allowing them over and couples over and then realising just before our general election last year, we might want to stop this. So it's loophole after loophole."
In a statement, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said: "Nearly 50,000 illegal migrants have been removed or deported since the election. "We've ramped up enforcement, deported foreign criminals from our streets, and saved taxpayers millions.
"I pledge today to scale up the removal and deportations of illegal migrants and do whatever it takes to secure our borders."