Recommendation 9

The NAO reported that Immigration Enforcement uses management information to assess the performance of individual teams rather than the system’s overall health, and the Department accepted this finding.16 We asked whether the Department could deliver an effective immigration enforcement service without basic management information. The Department rejected the suggestion that it had no management information, and stated it had “too much [management information], but not of the right sort”. It recognised the need to improve its management information and its ability to measure the overall outcomes of its activities rather than inputs and outputs.17 For example, the NAO reported that the Department and its partners identified 11,300 clandestine attempts to enter the country at UK ports and 35,600 attempts from overseas in the twelve months to the end of October