As far as the mainstream media and politicians are concerned, the issue seems to have moved away from what corrective action was taken by the SIA and the Home Office to why it has taken until November for the problem to be made public.
In a statement to Parliament today, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith launched a defence of the Security Industry Authority, saying it did not fail in its duty.
Instead, she said, the legal responsibility of ensuring that employees have the legal right to work in this country lies with employers.
“I must make it clear from the outset that it is the legal duty of all employers to ensure that those they employ are entitled to work in the United Kingdom. The SIA has not failed to do anything that it was obliged to do in law,” the Home Secretary said.
An article in Tuesday’s Daily Mail, based on leaked e-mails, claims that the Home Secretary was alerted to the problem by the SIA in July, but followed officials’ advice to implement a news black-out on the topic.
Since July, the SIA has been checking the right-to-work credentials of non-EU nationals applying for licences. On Monday, the SIA stressed that checking an employee’s immigration status was the responsibility of the employer, but since it had been made aware of a problem it has started doing extra checks.
Fresh checks have been ordered by the Home Office on 40,000 licence holders.
Conservative leader David Cameron claims that the leaked documents show that the Home Office put spin ahead of considerations of public safety.
The Daily Mail quotes from an e-mail from Mark Williams, Home Office Secretary Jacqui Smith’s private secretary, in which he says that the Home Secretary: “agrees with you that this is not ready for public announcement yet. She did not think the lines to take that we currently have are good enough for Press Office or Minister to use to explain the situation.”
Speaking on the Today programme on Tuesday morning, Mr Cameron said: “It looks very much like they put the convenience of when they wanted to announce things to the press, and government spin, they put that ahead of considerations of public safety and telling the public what was happening.”
The Home Office has so far stressed that the it was never initially within the SIA’s remit to carry out immigration checks when granting licences and argued that it would have been irresponsible to make a statement on the matter until it had established the nature and scale of the issue.
The BBC journalist Danny Shaw has said he was told at the weekend that the Home Office felt that to make an announcement about illegal immigrants working in the security industry would have hampered attempts to round-up illegal workers.
Speaking to MPs in the Commons, Smith defended her decision not to release the information, saying she was interested in what she could do, not what she could say about the situation.
“Ministers and officials are taking robust action to satisfy ourselves of the scale of the problem and to ensure the SIA (Security Industry Authority) and BIA (Border and Immigration Agency) work together to address it,” she said.
