What tickbox did to the Home Office

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I normally agree with nearly everything my esteemed colleague Simon Mundy says – especially about the Home Office. The issue is why it is quite so dysfunctional.

This is where I disagree:

“Are recruits predominantly from the outer suburbs of our cities, the white hinterland of the poorer parts of the home counties, from communities convinced that ‘they’ (the incomers) are deliberately coming to Britain to disrupt the lives of the inept locals? Is the answer to the second part that the officials leading the recruitment are looking for employees who will put every obstacle in the way of requests to cross the sea?”

The truth is that as I discovered when I was researching my Tickbox book, they are mainly recruited from among the people who have recently been through the same system.

The French IT solutions company Sopra Steria took on the Home Office visa contract in 2018 when I was still researching my book. A closer examination of the way they work goes some way to explain how the tickbox system – the mixture of online tickboxes, KPIs, targets and centralised controls that their managers rely on to monitor performance – works so badly for those unlucky enough to require its services.

I had hoped to talk to people from the Home Office immigration service when I was writing the book, but nobody would talk to me. Since then, I have talked to a number of those working for Sopra Steria.

The company was taken on in the aftermath of the Windrush Scandal, which left some people drained, bankrupt or deported, despite spending most of their lives in the UK perfectly legally. They provide services to applicants at 60 centres around the country, helping them get their papers together, copying them and sending them to the Home Office.

The centre they run next to Lunar House, the notorious immigration service headquarters in Croydon, sees up to 900 people a day. You can see them queuing up outside, come rain come heat.

What they need to know is that those employed by Sopra Steria are, despite appearances, emphatically not on their side.

They are forbidden by Home Office rules from telling applicants what is wrong with their application. Their employers also discourage staff from telling them that papers are missing, in case they cancel their appointments and mess up the schedule.

Like most outsourcers, they don’t employ enough staff to deal with the demand, which means that existing staff – or agency workers – get more inflexible pressure on them to work harder, which exacerbates the staffing problems.

When they first opened, staff were contracted until 8pm, but the final appointments of the day – which could sometimes take hours – were timed for 7.45pm.

The question of what documents applicants need for different visas – to prove, for example, that their business makes money – but the Home Office refers people to Sopra Steria for advice on this, and vice versa (a £2.50-a-minute helpline).

It is Sopra Steria’s task to verify their scanned documents. This can be time-consuming, so they have introduced a button that says ‘Verify all documents’, which they are encouraged to press once they have checked the ‘mandatory documents’ – the passport and so on. Which means that the rest of the documents are not checked and the application may be rejected just because their scans were not adequate.

And they won’t be told the reason either.

All this goes some way to explaining how Windrush generation applicants could have been treated with the kind of boneheaded ‘computer says no’ which so staggered the Commons committee which investigated last year.

You can see why the Home Office, more than other departments of state, dreams of tickbox solutions. It means nobody has to actually take a human decision. Nobody has to take responsibility either

But that is the problem, of course. If we hand over our decisions to algorithms, we will simply become their slaves – and, if they are based on previous decisions by an institutionally racist organisation – some people will continue to face discrimination.

Most of us know precisely what is wrong with Tickbox – that most of these measures or targets either miss the point or get finessed by managers.

Those who can’t see it tend to be the elite forces who run the world – and who believe what they are told by the frontline. And who dream of automated systems that can manage organisations without what they fear are messy human interventions or decisions.

The result is that officials tick boxes to allow them to move on but where nothing has changed (as they seem to have done at Grenfell Tower), or we get tickbox targets which focus on the wrong things because what we really want – love, care, education – isn’t measurable.

It’s a sad indictment. Find out more here (only £1..99 on kindle!).

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Radix is the radical centre think tank. We welcome all contributions which promote system change, challenge established notions and re-imagine our societies. The views expressed here are those of the individual contributor and not necessarily shared by Radix.

Comments

  1. Trin Gong says

    Thanks David – interesting to read. As an Australian on a visa – I’ve had to use these services (not the one in Croydon, I went to another one – deliberately, because I avoid Croydon if I can) because the amount of documents you need to upload is insane and I just wanted the reassurance of someone else doing it for me. While I agree there are serious problems with the tickbox approach, I wonder what you think about the capacity for massive human error?

    I also commented on Simon’s post as I had some knowledge of the behind the scenes in Australian immigration (concerning that some of the people processing immigration claims are really not qualified to do so) and they also had massive human error issues (see e.g. the Cornelia Rau case which is an extreme example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Rau).

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