00:00An exclusive by GB News can reveal that dozens of skilled worker visas have been granted by the
00:05Home Office despite failing to meet legal requirements. Immigration specialists have
00:11since demanded an urgent review of the visas granted by the Home Office. It follows the
00:17publication of a National Audit Office report that warned the government did not have the
00:20necessary systems in place to stop exploitation of the immigration route. But joining me in my
00:28fantastic all-star panel here, GB News contributor Will Kingston, political commentator Chloe Dobbs
00:34and former Labour Minister Bill Rammel. Bill, look, you've been in government so you understand
00:39the workings of the bureaucracy and you understand the workings of the politics behind that.
00:44How do things like this constantly keep happening, you know? We see stories so often of things going
00:49wrong inside the bureaucracy of government. You'd think that there's strong legal requirements in
00:53place for this. This should be like a red line, shouldn't it? Well, I was at one stage Foreign
00:57Office Minister responsible for entry clearance which is the processing of the visas and one of
01:02the things I learned and one of the flaws in the system is that the average caseworker overseas
01:07spends 10 minutes assessing a form and you can make mistakes. However, I have to say this is
01:13much ado about nothing. Dozens of cases over three years out of 256,000 cases. I think that's 0.002%
01:22of cases. I'm the first person who's prepared to bash the Home Office for its incompetence.
01:27This is not a scandal. Right, okay. We've got a guest here actually, Harjab Singh. We'll welcome
01:33him. Now he's an immigration lawyer. Harjab Singh, thank you very much for coming in. We've obviously
01:38got our panel here as well. You may want to ask you some questions. However, what's going on here,
01:43Harjab? Give us some insight with your background as to how this has happened.
01:47Why on earth visas are slipping through the nets even in the tens? It's still too many.
01:52Okay, well there's nothing new here. Mistakes are made and we know the Home Office is incompetent.
01:58Bill and your guest can confirm. Every year there's a Home Affairs Select Committee report
02:03and they report that the Home Office is not fit for purpose. So what that means is essentially
02:08you've got a machinery trying to produce a product which it's not capable of producing.
02:13So you're not going to get a good product. At one stage the Home Office had gap year students
02:18deciding applications and claims and ex-supermarket workers thrown straight into
02:24the job at the deep end. Now not only is that a disservice to the person who's paying for it,
02:28because the applicant pays thousands of pounds, sometimes five, six thousand pounds
02:33to the Home Office to have their application decided correctly, albeit. And it works both
02:39ways. So people who should get a visa don't get a visa and then they have to go for a lengthy
02:43appeal process. But sometimes people who don't qualify do get through. In this case the numbers
02:49aren't that great and like Bill said, they're minuscule in comparison. That's to be expected.
02:54Some sort of leakage is to be expected. But however, there does seem to be recently
03:00scandals upon scandals. And this is happening since with a highly skilled migrant program,
03:06the ex-point system which used to be a lot of fraud. The fake colleges which were granted
03:11licenses in 2010 and 11 to give visas, which turned some turned out to be about just one room
03:18above a factory. Yeah. Recently this year, just the care sector. We know the recent care sector
03:25scandals. Thousands of workers have been called here to work in their care sector and the jobs
03:30haven't been given to them. And the employers have told them sorry, you have just taken the money.
03:33They've been charged thousands of pounds to get here and left in limbo. Okay, hard job. Look,
03:38part of this could come down to just an ever bloated bureaucracy. Do we need to have a
03:41separate immigration department set up to run these sorts of things? Because we've got millions
03:46of people coming here in decades. That's just too much for one department in the Home Office
03:51to cope with, surely? Well, you'd think in any business where every year you've been told
03:57actually your business is not good, the model's not good, the setup's not good, you know, and you
04:03need to really go to a new business model, that they'd make changes in order to correct that.
04:09However, instead, not only is the department running incompetently, but the people running
04:14it are getting bonuses for running it incompetently. Now, you wouldn't do that. If you didn't
04:19perform in your job every year, and I didn't perform in my job, or anyone of your panel didn't
04:24perform in their job, we'd be out on our rear. We wouldn't get a bonus for it. But I don't
04:28understand, in relation to that, that this Home Office is not fit for purpose. We shouldn't
04:34persevere for it. It's like having cracked walls, putting a roof on and expecting it to, you know,
04:39bear some load. And what we're doing is just what the successive governments, it doesn't
04:44matter which one, they're just papering over the cracks and telling everyone, look with the brand
04:48new wall. And we know that, you know, there are scandals upon scandals, which don't seem to end,
04:53regardless. Look at the fake English language tests. We can go on. The fake income requirements,
05:00they go on and on. And this year, they haven't even stopped this year. So it's something that
05:04the government needs to consider. They can't promise a brilliant product if you haven't
05:09got the machinery to produce it. It's quite simple.
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