Fury as bungling Home Office loses thousands of sensitive files including people’s passports and birth certificates
MPs blasted the 'shambles' which comes in the wake of the Windrush scandal
BUNGLING Home Office bureaucrats have lost the personal details of thousands of people, it was claimed today.
Furious MPs blasted the "shambles" created by officials in the wake of the Windrush scandal.
One former top mandarin that the department has routinely lost track of thousands of key documents at a time.
That includes passports, birth certificates and other forms of identification sent in by people fighting to stay in Britain.
Those affected have been left unable to prove their identity - and stuck in a legal limbo as they wait for their files to be found again.
Charity boss Satbir Singh described how his wife applied for a British visa - only for bureaucrats to lose her entire file.
He told the Guardian: "A lot of those were original documents, we had no idea how we were going to get replacements for them.
"Things like proof of our income, original payslips, original share certificates, original marriage certificate, birth certificates, university certificates, all of that stuff."
The Home Office only backtracked and passed the application after Mr Singh went public about his case.
After the repeated blunders came to light, campaigning MP David Lammy blasted: "FFS what an incompetent shambles."
Yvette Cooper, chair of the powerful home affairs select committee, said: "This is a question of basic competence. Too often we have heard about lost documents and simple errors by the Home Office that can have deeply damaging consequences for people’s lives."
A Home Office spokesman said: "The Home Office takes its data protection responsibilities extremely seriously and have robust safeguards in place to make sure we handle the millions of documents we receive in the appropriate way.
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“When documentation goes missing we make every effort to locate it. Each case should be reported to Home Office Security who will assess whether the Information Commissioner’s Office should be informed.”
The Home Office has been under fire since it emerged that hundreds of Caribbean-born Brits had wrongly been told they don't have the right to live in the UK.
Amber Rudd was forced to quit as Home Secretary after misleading Parliament over whether her officials had targets for the number of immigrants to be deported.
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