An inspection of overstayers (March – October 2025)

Appoint a Senior Civil Servant (SCS) as the Migration and Borders (M&B) System lead for overstayers, tasked with overseeing the creation of a strategy for preventing overstaying, and identifying and removing overstayers (or regularising their immigration status). As a first step, the SCS lead should catalogue the strands of current and planned activity that contribute directly or indirectly to the Home Office’s understanding of and response to overstaying and overstayers, using this to produce a gap analysis and action plan, and to ensure that the risks surrounding overstaying and overstayers are properly reflected in risk registers at all levels across the M&B System.

Home Office accepted: A new Director-General chaired governance group to focus on controlling threats and vulnerabilities in regular migration routes was established in March 2026. This board will draw the system together, ensuring clear focus and prioritisation of effort for all such threats, including overstaying a visa. As part of this recommendation, the Home Office will: Exploratory tasking was commissioned at the board meeting held on 14 May and Home Office will take forward activity across our systems throughout the course of 2026.

Implementation: December 2026

Audit the IT systems used to record and manage overstaying and overstayers with the aim of reducing the number of systems in use, fixing ‘bugs’ and issues that impact efficiency and effectiveness, and standardising and assuring record keeping, ensuring that current and historic information and data about overstaying and overstayers (caveated as appropriate) can be accessed by whoever has an approved business need. This should include:

Partially accepted: The Home Office acknowledges the five elements of this recommendation. Many of the suggested actions and improvements are already underway or embedded in current processes. Further enhancements may be added to the roadmap following impacts assessments and prioritisation decisions.

Implementation: December 2026

Develop internal and external communication plans covering overstaying and overstayers, identifying (and updating as appropriate) key messages, target audiences, delivery methods, and metrics for measuring effectiveness. This should include: - creating (or re-focusing) boards and fora to share knowledge and experience of overstayers and overstaying between M&B directorates and business areas, and between the Home Office and stakeholders - reviewing Home Office engagement with visa sponsors, creating the means for sponsors for each of the different routes to share their knowledge and experience of overstaying and overstayers with each other - (with input from stakeholders) reviewing guidance and messaging where these bear on overstaying and overstayers and ensuring that they are clear and unambiguous (taking account of the fact that visa applicants may have limited English) - (in order to develop a better understanding of the factors that lead to overstaying) ensuring that the Home Office’s information and intelligence requirements in relation to overstaying are clearly defined and are understood by teams within the Home Office who encounter overstayers, and by others, such as the police - examining ‘Right to Work’ or ‘Right to Rent’ referrals to establish whether the system is working and why, in particular, employer referral numbers are so low - producing a response to questions about the size and nature of the overstaying population that does not fall back on exit check data published in 2020

Partially accepted: The Home Office recognises the importance of clear and effective communication with both internal and external stakeholders regarding overstaying and will as part of a wider review of its strategic oversight of the management of overstayers (recommendation 1) review its communications strategy and where enhancements may reasonably be made.

Implementation: December 2026

Review quality management in relation to visa decision making, ensuring that quality is not being compromised by the daily benchmarks set for decision makers. This should include:

Home Office accepted: The Home Office is committed to maintaining high standards in visa decision-making and regularly reviews demand forecasts, productivity expectations and resource allocations to ensure that Service Lines are equipped to deliver quality outputs in line with service level agreements. Training is routinely refreshed, and robust quality assurance processes are already in place across visit, study, and work service lines, ensuring decision makers receive feedback on overturned decisions and the quality of refusal notices. VSI’s Cross-Cutting Service Operations will explore opportunities to bring greater co-ordination across Service Lines to drive further improvements and consistency, including discussion at relevant operational boards to monitor performance and delivery. Information about overstayers identified by Immigration Enforcement is routinely shared with the teams responsible for visa decision-making. When someone is found to have overstayed, this is recorded in our systems so that relevant teams can access the information and take appropriate action. The Home Office is committed to making these processes as efficient and joined up as possible, and we continue to review how information is shared to ensure it supports learning and improvements in future decisions. Work to strengthen how information about overstayers is captured, shared and used in visa decision‑making will be reviewed as part of the strategic oversight work under Recommendation 1, to ensure that cross‑system dependencies are properly understood and governed.

Implementation: December 2026

In order to reinforce the importance of visa holder compliance, as a matter of urgency, review the backlogs of visa cancellation cases and identify how these can be reduced to manageable levels and how cancellation processing times can be cut to a maximum of two months, if necessary, surging staff resources to bring the backlogs and timescales down initially

Home Office accepted: With the exception of those cases which remain on hold, pending redeployment back into the sector, who have worked as Carers or Senior Carers and their Sponsor’s licence has been revoked, we are currently cancelling individual’s leave within 1-2 weeks of them entering the work queue if the cancellation is not linked to a Sponsor Revocation. If the case is linked to a Sponsor revocation, we are holding these for 4 weeks and cancelling at that stage to ensure that any possible litigation challenge is not submitted. This has been achieved through the deployment of additional staff to the cancellations team and also by utilising data and technology to routinely ‘cleanse’ the queue for cases that do not require pursuing. On average, we are concluding c5000 cases per week. The Home Office will ensure that insights from the cancellations caseload feed into the wider system‑level oversight work being taken forward under Recommendation 1. This will help maintain a consistent strategic approach to tackling overstaying across the Migration and Borders System.

Implementation: Implemented