Topical:
The United Kingdom's Home Office has finally published a controversial report about immigration from the European Union. The Report, 'Review of the Balance of Competences between the United Kingdom and the European Union is said to have been suppressed for four months by senior members of the government.
The UK's National Audit Office (NAO) has issued a report into the workings of the UK's asylum and immigration system and has found that, eight years after a massive backlog of 450,000 'lost' cases was discovered, the Home Office still does not know the whereabouts of 175,000 people whose applications to remain in the UK have been refused.
The NAO report into the UK's immigration system stated that in March 2014, UK immigration had 301,000 open immigration and asylum cases. Of these, 85,000 were 'normal work in progress' and the rest, 216,000 cases, were 'backlogs...on hold or other types of outstanding work'.
On Friday 18th July, Isabella Acevado, a Colombian national, was arrested on the steps of Haringey Town Hall in north London moments before her daughter was due to be married.
According to an eye witness, fifteen immigration officers and several police burst into the room where the marriage was due to take place. Mrs Acevado and her brother were then arrested and removed from the building.
Mrs Acevado is not a household name in the UK but was in the news briefly in February this year when she played an involuntary role in the resignation of the UK's then immigration minister, Mark Harper.
The UK government has wasted £350m on a new IT system which was designed to manage immigration and asylum applications, according to a recently published report by the UK government's National Audit Office; which conducts value-for-money audits on public bodies.
The Immigration Case Work system (ICW) was commissioned in 2010. There were numerous problems with ICW. For example it did not interact with other government networks. It was abandoned last August. The government has since commissioned an alternative system which will cost a further £200m+ by 2017.
The UK's Home Office has announced a new visa for Chinese maths teachers. The government announced plans to bring around 60 maths teachers from Shanghai to work in the UK in March. The teachers will be expected to train British maths teachers in 'maths hubs'.
The government is concerned at the poor performance of UK students in maths and of the general level of innumeracy in the UK population. An educational lobby group, National Numeracy, warned earlier this year that poor numeracy among UK citizens is costing the country around £20bn per year.
Eurostat, the European Union statistics agency, reports that the population of the Union grew by 1.7m over the year to January 1st 2014. The population of the union rose to 507.4m, up from 505.7m a year earlier.
Eurostat reports that the population of the 28 countries that make up the current European Union has risen by 100m since 1960.
The population rose slightly because of a greater birth rate than death rate. Eurostat says that about 4,999,200 people died in the EU in 2013 while 5,075,700 were born. This caused the population to grow by a mere 76,500.