medConfidential spots tiny yet staggering online blunder
Gareth Corfield Mon 1 Feb 2021 // 09:30 UTC Share
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Exclusive A single missing web link on GOV.UK has cost the taxpayer £51m over the past five years because civil servants are being forced to handle paper forms posted to the Home Office.
Research by privacy campaign group medConfidential reckons the government has wasted about £10m per year since late 2015 thanks to the omission of a crucial web link from a GOV.UK page about Biometric Residence Permits (BRPs).
Phil Booth of medConfidential told
The Register: While the Home Office generates a profit from fees for migrants, it is required to provide some services for free – such as making a change of registered home address when someone moves house.
I pity the fool who deleted more than 400,000 fingerprint, DNA, arrest and offence records from the Police National Computer, I really do. While the Home Office continues to take a hammering for it
Almost a year into the Covid crisis, low-income NHS workers are still being forced to pay extortionate visa fees, racking up thousands of pounds of debt.
Edgy future for EU citizens despite trade deal
06 Jan 2021
Andrea Carlo,
The Independent
Following months of gruelling negotiations with the EU, the UK has finally managed to leave the transition period with a trade deal. The set of emotions this has evoked throughout the country has been as wide as the chasm opened by the referendum four years ago – from elation and relief, to acute distress. If there’s one thing that the vast majority of people in Britain have gained, however, it’s a sense of clarity, as they entered this new year knowing the terms and conditions of post-Brexit life.
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Ever since British and European negotiators resumed talks to negotiate the UK’s imminent transition out of the EU, everything from Belgian fishing trawlers to heated disagreements over tariffs have threatened to derail them.
But it is not only fishing rights and trade deals that hang in the balance. It is also the fate of Britain’s recently arrived asylum-seekers, who are being deported in record numbers ahead of the looming Brexit deadline.
Over the past year, more than 8,000 people took to the choppy waters of the English Channel in rubber dinghies. It is more than three times the number of people who undertook a similar journey last year, and 40 times the number of those who did it the year before that. It is, in part, a sign that many are becoming increasingly fed up with conditions in Europe, where it is getting harder for refugees to be granted asylum or reunite with family members.