The Government will give up tracing illegal migrants through National Health Service (NHS) records, as the short-lived ‘hostile environment’ for people with no right to be in the country is dismantled.
Politicians sympathetic to mass migration have used the so-called Windrush scandal as an opportunity to push for the end of policies creating a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal migrants by making it harder for them to access public services, open bank accounts, and so on — including the new Home Secretary, Sajid Javid MP.
The Windrush scandal saw some migrants who arrived in Britain from the Commonwealth legally between 1948 and 1971 — but had no records — being wrongly considered for deportation, leading to significant disruption of their personal lives.
“The Government has reflected… and as a result and with immediate effect the data-sharing arrangements between the Home Office and the NHS have been amended,” announced Margot James MP, Minister of State for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
“The bar for sharing data will now be set significantly higher. By sharing, I mean between the Department of Health, the Home Office and in future possibly other departments of state. No longer will the names of overstayers and illegal entrants be sought against health service records to find current address details.”
The MP for Stourbridge said that, in future, the authorities would only attempt to trace illegal migrants through their health records if they were “being considered for deportation action having been investigated for or convicted of a serious criminal offence”.
What might constitute a “serious” criminal offence was not clearly explained.
Despite the harsh rhetoric surrounding Windursh and the so-called ‘hostile environment’, the British government remains fairly ineffectual when it comes to tackling illegal immigration.
Last year a report — which received scant attention from the mainstream media — revealed that the Home Office has lost track of some 56,000 illegal migrants already scheduled to be deported, including 700 ex-convicts, because it did not detain them ahead of deportation, relying on them to show up to regular appointments with officials on their own initiative.
In 2016, only 57 per cent of asylum removals and departures were enforced, and just 24 per cent of non-asylum removals and departures.
Former Home Secretary Amber Rudd MP admitted last year that former Director-General of Immigration Enforcement David Wood’s estimate of over a million illegal migrants residing in Britain was probably correct.
Wood also said that he thought “no-one could ever remove them, really.”