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Home Office

Answer

Mr. Edward Davey: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many (a) individual documents, (b) immigration case files and (c) passports were lost by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in each year since 1992. [127974] Mrs. Roche: The information requested is not available. Since its expansion last October, the Integrated Casework Directorate's (ICD's) Return of Passport Unit has received 11,687 requests for the return of documents and, of those, a total of 147 lost passport letters have been issued. Lost passport letters are issued in respect of items which cannot be traced at the time a request for them is made, but which may subsequently be found. The number of principal files recorded as lost on the Immigration and Nationality Directorate's file tracking system each year since 1993 (when the system was introduced) is as follows: 1993--97; 1994--368; 1995--534; 1996--1,160; 1997--1,599; 1998--2,095; 1999--2,567; and 2000--2,054. There are currently 8,440 files still recorded as lost. A number of measures have been taken to prevent the loss of passports and other documents, including the introduction last autumn of new document handling processes and an expanded Return of Passport Unit in the ICD. Work is in progress on clearing the backlog of general and settlement casework and returning applicants' documents to them. All valuable documents are now returned to applicants by recorded delivery post and new processes are being developed for dealing with packages which are returned undelivered.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

127974; 353 c165W

Session

1999-00

Subjects

Immigration Documents Maladministration Passports Immigration and Nationality Directorate

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk