The Daily Mail has a
story today claiming that
Axing immigration staff 'could see Dover overrun'You have to wonder if they actually employ and real journalists any more. Have any of them been to Dover recently? Are they aware that there is no border control function in Dover now? The government having long since given up any hope of removing people thanks to their own human rights fetish has devolved that responsibility to the French Police.
What we have here is a complete non story. Or rather a total lack of any real investigation. The real story for anyone that is really interested is how much money has been spent on refurbishing the former
Borstal in order to make it
suitable to house the poor oppressed failed asylum seekers and over-stayers.
According to the Mail the plan is to cut the number of Chief Immigration Officer posts from seven to five. Well seeing as they only have to manage twenty four Immigration Officers I can't see a major issue there. Having worked in a similar office myself with very similar numbers of EO grades we had to manage with only one HEO but NuLabour seems to think more is better. Maybe this is just another symptom of dumbed down Britain. Where twenty years ago an EO was trusted to do a job. Now it can only be tackled by a CIO on substantially more pay naturally.
They also want to swap Immigration Officers for (presumably) AO (administrative officers.) Well once again I have worked in an office doing removals and by and large the work is administrative. Detention reviews, arranging flights, posting documents to airports for removal etc. It isn't rocket science. Why pay an IO £25,000 a year when the work could easily be managed by AO's on £15,000? At a stroke you save the taxpayer nearly a quarter of a million pounds a year. That isn't chump change.
Personally I would adopt a slightly more radical approach. Since the EO grade is supposed to be a management grade I would cut the CIO posts down to two persons. That would save the taxpayer another 5 x £30,000 at least. Employ maybe three EO grades to manage the twenty odd AO grades.
In any event something needs to be done here to improve the working conditions. According to the
governments own figures ....
Very high levels of staff sickness have again caused major problems. During 2008, 718 working days (involving both permanent and agency staff ) were lost due to sickness. This is double the number of days lost in 2007 and has had a significant impact on the staffing budget. Something ain't right. If these people can't hack it maybe they should find some who can? Perhaps we could advertise in Poland. They seem to be handle the work that British nationals are too good for!