lora

UK GOVERNMENT SACKED ITS OWN BORDER WATCHDOG David Neal was the man the government hired to inspect UK borders and make sure they actually worked. He did exactly that. What he found was not good. He wrote it all up in official reports. The Home Office locked those reports in a drawer. When he finally went to a newspaper to warn the public that private planes were landing in the UK with almost nobody checking who was on them, the Home Secretary James Cleverly @JamesCleverly fired him. Here is what Neal actually found. At London City Airport, only 21% of flights flagged as high risk were checked by immigration officers. Not some of the time. As a yearly average. He said it was a scandal and dangerous for the country. The Home Office said he had the numbers wrong. Then they fired him. At the moment he was sacked, the @HomeOffice was holding back 15 of his finished inspection reports. Some had been sitting there for 18 months without being shown to the public. The agreed deadline for publishing them was eight weeks. Not one report met that deadline across his entire three years in the job. When they finally released 13 of the reports, they chose to do it on the same afternoon that a separate major inquiry published its findings... Draw your own conclusions. What was actually in those reports? Border control posts left with nobody manning them. Officers at e-passport gates described as distracted and without basic radios. The whole airport border operation rated as neither effective nor efficient. Neal told MPs directly: I have been sacked for doing my job. He also told @BBC the Home Office is dysfunctional and described senior officials rolling their eyes when he brought them his findings. He said the government contacted him three separate times warning him not to speak publicly about the unpublished reports. He had almost no other way to get the information out. The people who fired him for raising border security concerns were the same people who spent years promising the public they had taken back control of the borders. Sources: @BBCNews @guardian @DailyMail @CommonsHomeAffs