Border Agency chief praised after finding ‘lost’ asylum seekers

Rob Whiteman, the chief executive of the troubled UK Border Agency (UKBA), yesterday confessed that mistakes had been made and the agency needed to learn from them.

However Mr Whiteman was praised by Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, for being the first UK borders chief to find “some real live people in what we thought was the tardis where people disappeared for centuries”.

Some 4,500 people have been moved from the so-called controlled archive of “lost” applicants to the “live asylum cohort” in the last three months, the chief executive told MPs.

Mr Whiteman agreed with Mr Vaz that the extra 4,500 cases were “found in the controlled archive”.

Some 60 per cent of applicants in both archived and live asylum cases were allowed to stay in the UK and 40 per cent were removed, figures for the first half of 2012 showed.

Mr Whiteman, who also pledged to close the archive of 74,000 cases by the end of the year, said: “That’s right. As now the Agency looks to the future, as we close the archive, what are the lessons we learn from that? It is clear that in carrying out the checks on the archive some cases were put in there that shouldn’t have been and therefore we need to learn from that.”

He added: “We now expect to conclude, to close the archive by the end of December.”

The archive was described by the committee last year as a “dumping ground” for those the Agency had lost track of.