The UK’s sacked borders watchdog has urged James Cleverly to shake up the Home Office or risk further major security breaches amid warnings that key immigration policies including plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda will now lack oversight.
David Neal, who was fired last week as the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, said that ministers will have to “depend on the judgment of senior officials who in the past failed to expose security risks” because no one has been recruited to replace him and scrutinise the department.
It comes as Whitehall sources said that the government is expected this week to release some of the 15 reports written by Neal’s team which have remained unpublished.
In an article for the Guardian, Neal wrote the home secretary must overcome “desperately poor leadership” in the department because “the confidence of the public demands it”.
“Without the independent scrutiny of a chief inspector, minsters will depend on the judgment of senior officials who in the past failed to expose security risks in the response to the small boats operation at Tug Haven in Dover in 2022 or the appalling conditions at Manston detention centre, Kent, later that year.
“I implore [the new ministerial team] to look over the heads of their officials and find out what is really happening on the ground; the security of our country and confidence of the public demands it.
“While [Cleverly] will understandably be defending the Home Office in public, he will be gripping his folk and shaking things up in private,” he wrote.
Neal was sacked by video call by a senior civil servant on February 19th after being accused of breaching his contract by disclosing security failings at City Airport to the media. He insists that he spoke out because he was unable to pass on the findings to a minister and received little interest from civil servants. Fifteen reports submitted by his office to the Home Office dating back to April are yet to be published.
Neal’s rushed exit means that he leaves several incomplete investigations including inquiries into conditions in Rwanda, and asylum accommodation such as the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset and Wethersfield in Cleverly’s Essex constituency.
“With no independent chief inspector to publish the reports, and my ability to comment gagged by the continued binding terms of my contract, these critical areas of inspection remain open, unsatisfied and unresolved,” he wrote.
He also warned that other planned inquiries such as immigration detention, the processing of asylum seekers arriving in small boats across the Channel and the Home Office’s methods for assessing asylum seekers’ ages will not be launched.
“There will be no work commissioned to provide scrutiny, at this critical time, of new material produced by the Home Office in relation to Rwanda,” he wrote.
Neal was sacked after providing data to the Daily Mail which purported to show UK Border Force failed to check passengers on hundreds of private jets arriving at City Airport.
He said the alleged lack of checks meant criminals, illegal immigrants, trafficking victims and extremists may have entered the UK without undergoing scrutiny by the authorities. The government has strongly denied the allegations.
