Saturday, March 10, 2007

Texting Immigrants Update

Well, I wrote about John Reid's ridiculous proposals here, which included the idea that you could text people when their Visa was up, effectively asking them to leave the country.

According to Iain Dale here, no one told or even discussed this proposal with him first, and he had a "chat" with Liam Byrne afterwards, Liam saying that officials had signed it off.

It seems clear who is running the Home Office, and it isn't John Reid or his junior ministers.

4 comments:

Welshcakes Limoncello said...

First I've read of it but what a ridiculous idea!

Benedict White said...

Welshcakes, yes it is the dumbest idea I have ever heard of! I even sent in an FOI request to get some detail on the proposal!

Anonymous said...

How exactly did you word your Freedom of Information Act Request, so that the exemption under
Section 35: Formulation Of Government Policy
will not be applied ?

Benedict White said...

Watching Them, Watching Us, Short answer is I asked for costings rather than policy detail.

I also asked what systems they already had in place.

Fancy a link swap?