Amber Rudd faces questions over immigrant removal targets

Amber Rudd will be hauled back before MPs on Thursday to explain how she did not know that her own department had set strict targets for the voluntary removal of undocumented immigrants.

The fallout from the Windrush scandal intensified after it emerged that targets for immigration enforcement teams existed, hours after the home secretary claimed they did not.

Rudd will now have to clarify her department’s position in a Commons showdown on Thursday morning with Labour’s Diane Abbott after the shadow home secretary was granted an urgent question.

An inspection report from 2015, seen by the Guardian, reveals that the Home Office set a target in 2015 of 12,000 voluntary departures of people regarded as having no right to stay in the UK. It is not clear whether the target is still in force.

The figure was a 60% increase on the previous year, prompting concerns that immigration officials may have been under so much pressure to meet the target that legal migrants who struggled to prove their status could have been caught up in the crackdown.

The revelation puts more pressure on the home secretary to get to grips with the crisis in her department after the Guardian first revealed a catalogue of failures that affected the Windrush generation of migrants.

The shadow cabinet minister Keir Starmer added his voice to those calling for the home secretary to address parliament to set out the full position on targets. “Otherwise there can’t be real accountability,” he said.

On Wednesday the Commons home affairs select committee asked the home secretary whether her department had regional targets, after an immigration union official claimed they existed.

Rudd confirmed she had asked for more removals more generally, adding that there was “nothing wrong” with trying to deport illegal immigrants, but said she was not familiar with the suggestion that regional targets were in place.

“We don’t have targets for removals … If you are asking me if there are numbers of people we expect to be removed, that’s not how we operate,” she said. The Home Office immigration chief, Glyn Williams, also told MPs that targets did not exist.

Yvette Cooper, the chair of the committee, said the contradictory evidence suggested the Home Office might “lack a grip” on the system. She said the response was a “complete fudge” and she would be writing to Rudd to get a “proper answer”.

The inspection report, by the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, published in December 2015, showed that targets were set for voluntary departures, which took place when an individual or family notified authorities of their intention to leave the UK.

The targets, which Lucy Moreton, general secretary of the Immigration Service Union, said were advertised in posters across the Home Office estate, were then split between 19 immigration compliance and enforcement teams across the UK.

Moreton told the MPs the government’s net immigration target, which Theresa May has stuck to rigidly, had been “translated down” to frontline staff who were under “increasing pressure” to deport a certain number of people each month.

Voluntary departures included people who had approached the Home Office for financial assistance with their travel arrangements.

This was available to anyone over 18 who was in the UK illegally, had been refused leave to remain in the UK or had applied for an extension of leave but wanted to withdraw the application and depart.

The Labour MP Sarah Jones, who sits on the committee, said there was “absolute clarity” that the targets existed in the evidence presented to them. “We need some clarity about what drivers were pushing the workforce to make the decisions that they made,” she said on Thursday.

The Home Office said it had never been policy to take decisions arbitrarily to meet a target, but did not deny that targets were in place.

The culture secretary, Matt Hancock, denied that targets had led to people being arbitrarily removed. “As far as I understand it, it has never been Home Office policy to take decisions arbitrarily to meet the target,” he said. “There are rules around immigration. Immigration needs to be controlled but the rules also need to be fair.”