Introduction:
Quality assurance (assurance that services provided are professional and governed by best practice customer/service user [both UKVI visa applicants, and all those using directly and otherwise engaged with the full Home Office to FCO range of different UK immigration services and agencies] care. Quality assurance includes, but is not limited to respect for the service users in all communications & other interactions. It also involves demonstrated clear compliance with safety & safeguarding, and equality & inclusion (including human rights protections under UK law for persecuted, discriminated against minorities such LGBT, etc.), customer care, and other mandatory requirements under UK laws.
Quality assurance statements by the Home Office and its associate Hostile Environment operational level implementation fellow Whitehall directed departments and agencies are revealed as hollow by the Hostile Environment directive that those using UK immigration services, especially UKVI & Immigration Tribunal ones are based on the disingenuous concept that anyone using those services has to prove they are complying with/meeting ‘the Rules.’
What is not shared on the .gov.uk website is that there have been since the start of the Hostile Environment 45,000 changes to those ‘Rules,’ and that most of these have not been directly scrutinised by Parliament, and are all too commonly according to Supreme Court judges, made by ‘back door’ methods through adjustments to interpretations in guidance notes to visa, LTR and asylum applications and the latter’s application forms.
It is a concept that all UK Government departments and associated agencies are required to apply to the services they provide. In practice many struggle to deliver this concept at operational service provision level, and the UK Immigration services are perhaps the most controversial for differences between Quality Assurance (QA) compliance statements, and actual delivery / non-delivery.
One of the most fundamental foundations of real, credibly delivered QA is transparency— real [not ‘tick-box’] Transparency — (upon which the related concept of Accountability for actions by those in the public service is directly linked) regarding mechanisms, processes at operational delivery level, who has what powers where and how they use or abuse those powers, essential need-to-know information.
UK Immigration services delivered by a plethora of UK government different agencies/entities and some for-profit sub-contracted businesses, are on the basis of countless revelations since the inception and subsequent implementation & expansion of the Hostile Environment, perhaps the most non-transparent of UK government, Whitehall led British Civil Service delivered, services.
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On the .gov.uk Home Office and on the Justice.uk websites, policy statements regarding customer/service-user care professionalism, equal rights & anti-discrimination and human rights compliance standards, are many.
Quality assurances and related statements on government websites are only assurances and statements, when without independent genuinely independent detailed scrutiny and especially service-user/customer substantial, unambiguously and statistically clear witness evidence to verify them.
Here are some statements from the .gov.uk website, and in government minister level letters, and emails The …
The British Government is an inclusive and diversity-friendly employer. We value difference, promote equality and challenge discrimination, enhancing our organisational capability. We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. We do not discriminate on the basis of disability, race, colour, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, veteran status or other category protected by law. We promote family-friendly flexible working opportunities, where operational and security needs allow.
This statement at the head of a webpage advertising for an Entry Clearance Manager post in South Africa at the British High Commission (and also found at the head of other similar UKVI overseas posts by the FCO) – source: https://fco.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/appcentre-ext/brand-0/candidate/so/pm/4/pl/1/opp/4157-Entry-Clearance-Manager-PTA17/en-GB
At best such statements – made for positive ‘human rights & inclusion & diversity’ PR for the UK, and of course for the UKVI through the FCO [as elsewhere with its Home Office dimension to cover itself in regard to the Equality Act 2010 – are vacuous, and at worse, given the Hostile Environment operational level implementation record by both the FCO and Home Office, offensively disingenuous.
‘Values’ orientated statements of these kinds are meaningless and only fool those who don’t have direct relevant [minorities communities] service user experience (particularly for Commonwealth & N0n-EU nationals) service-user experience, when there is no supportive detailed and evidencing information and related webpage links.
Particularly wonting being, for credibility of such statements purposes having webpage links in regard to the ‘the strategy by which those values are implemented at operational level, and how performance and delivery of them is independently monitored [rather than self-monitoring which only brings contempt for the given organisation, business or system when there is a major history of abuses of power and process, and of protected characteristic communities], and what the results of that independent monitoring.’
One of the most remarkable quality assurance related major credibility issues between public values statements (such as that above) to actual operational level realities, that the Hostile Environment architects in Whitehall have assiduously cultivated from the latter’s earliest days, has been non-transparency / maximum obscurity in regard to often essential information on operational delivery guides/values/standards.
In regard to this one of the major examples is the wont of in the public domain information about the UKVI Operating Mandate, which is referred to frequently in UKVI job application documents for example, but can’t be accessed from the .gov.uk website, such as through Google searches – for example: ‘information on the .gov.uk website about the UKVI Operating Mandate’ – yields no .gov.uk webpage.
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Use of nameless Home Office and/or FCO spokespersons when operational level delivery of the Hostile Environment exposes serious issues of inconsistency and human rights and process and powers abuse scandals revealed by their victims and through investigative news media work:
This practice of ‘a Home Office spokesperson provided the following statement in response to [the given allegation and assertion of abuses of powers and process]’ statements to news media, etc. in response from Whitehall/the strategic leads for operational implementation of the Hostile environment at practical real lives impacted level, scandals, has become in the UK, infamous for its contempt towards victims of the ‘Hostile Environment’ by not even stating a name and position. Such statements, amongst many other proofs by research, scandal, and other revelation demonstrate how false & disingenuous are these statements in regard to the credibility of such statements that are made by the strategic leads in Whitehall of the Hostile Environment through such nameless individuals, who are given guidance from those leads about ‘what to say.’
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A further note on the lack of credibility of UK Immigration quality assurance statements and related .gov.uk website position statements, regarding those UK immigration services employees paid by the UK taxpayer to implement the UK immigration services Hostile Environment – concerns the ‘ISU’ the UK immigration services trades union. The ISU’s membership application for the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was rejected on the grounds that it was not independent, and was too closely associated with an employer.
The details below about the ISU and its members role in implementing (for perceived direct personal pecuniary, and non-support of human rights and protecting lives of genuine users of UK immigration services that are at the heart of the operational level implementation of the Hostile Environment) through their paid work, the Hostile Environment:
The ISU is a trade union representing workers in the UK Immigration Service.
The union was founded in 1981 as the Immigration Service Union. It was a split from the Society of Civil and Public Servants (SCPS),[1] founded in protest as the SCPS calling for the repeal of the Immigration Act 1971.[2]
The union has been associated with campaigns for stricter immigration controls; in 1985, it successfully lobbied for limits to be placed on the ability of Members of Parliament to intervene in favour of people refused entry to the UK,[2] while the following year, it launched a campaign which receive significant press coverage, arguing for visas requirements for people from Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.[1]
The ISU has applied for membership of the Trades Union Congress, but this was refused.[1] Opposition to it comes in particular from the Public and Commercial Services Union, successor to the SCPS, which has described it as a “right wing ‘yellow’ union“* – that is, a company union for the UK Immigration Service. However, the union has been declared independent by the Certification Officer.[3]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISU_(trade_union)#cite_note-cohen-1
* Definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_union ‘A company or “yellow” union is a worker organization which is dominated or influenced by an employer, and is therefore not an independent trade union. Company unions are contrary to international labour law (see ILO Convention 98, article 2) … ‘
Please also visit our Working for UK Immigration Hostile Environment implementing services page for broader information: http://needtoknow-immigrationuk.com/working-for-uk-immigration-hostile-environment-implementing-services/