Giving evidence to the home affairs select committee last November, John Vine made it clear that he was facing a mammoth task. As the first ever chief inspector of the UK Border Agency, Vine was five months into the job of establishing a new inspectorate to oversee the vast government agency – a recently-assembled organisation with 25,000 staff and an annual budget of £2bn.

“I literally inherited an office and two people at the beginning of that five-month period,” he told the committee. “We are still at the set-up stage. My first task was to establish the inspectorate from nothing, rather than launch into inspections.” Revealing that he was working with a provisional budget, with the agency’s future finances “the subject of discussion”, Vine noted diplomatically that “I would like [the budget] to be finalised as soon as possible.”

Another few months on, Vine has made good progress: he has, at least, a confirmed budget for 2009-10, a team of about 20, a couple of pilot inspection schemes under way, and a plan setting out his ambitions for the next couple of years. But he still, I suggest, faces a huge task.

“Challenge, I think, rather than task!” he smiles. “The remit is huge; the border agency is huge, and it’s grown exponentially over recent years.”

The challenge facing Vine is not only huge, but also rare. “It’s very unusual to be setting up an inspectorate from scratch,” he comments. “Most of the existing inspectorates have been around for decades – the police inspectorate for 152 years! So the challenge is unique.”

A new frontier

It is also, perhaps, overdue. For decades, the functions that came together a year ago to form the UK Border Agency (UKBA) have largely escaped independent inspection, overseen only by the National Audit Office (NAO) and a ragbag collection of monitors established to examine the operation of various immigration acts. Yet the UKBA combines a set of political hot potatoes notorious for sparking media controversies: the Foreign Office’s visa operations, HM Revenue and Customs’ border customs work, and the Home Office’s Border and Immigration Agency.

The latter in particular has proved a political graveyard, with mismanagement scandals claiming the ministerial careers of Beverley Hughes in 2004 and Charles Clarke in 2006. So the new inspector’s role, says Vine, is “very important in increasing public confidence; that’s really the rationale behind the creation of an inspectorate.”

His new website notes that, when home secretary John Reid reviewed his department’s immigration work in 2006, he found “many different inspection and advisory bodies, but no assessment of overall effectiveness, no assessment of enforcement, no assessment of overall decision-making, no assessment of access to information and limited assessment of treatment.” As Vine comments: “There’s something similar in almost every other area of public policy, and I think it’s time for comprehensive scrutiny of UKBA.”

So the task is dramatic in both scale and novelty – but Vine is confident that he has at least the remit to do the job. Reporting to Parliament through the home secretary, he has the right to conduct inspections of the former Home Office and Foreign Office functions. The immigration bill currently going through Parliament will give him the powers to inspect border customs work, and – while the home secretary can ask him to examine particular areas – Vine says he’s defining his own agenda. He clearly sees his role as a broad one: “Part of inspection is about looking to see whether the UKBA is achieving its objectives – but inspection is also about asking whether its objectives are the right ones,” he says.

A steep learning curve

In defining his approach, Vine’s background as a career policeman will clearly be significant; it was certainly a factor in his winning the job. “The inspector could have come from many different backgrounds,” he comments. “I think perhaps the fact that immigration matters are rather mixed up with broader security issues did give me an advantage. The area where I’m on a steep learning curve is asylum and refugees, and in that area I’ve been at great pains to speak to the refugee bodies and try to learn from them.”

Vine is also at pains to dampen expectations of quick results from his new inspectorate. “People must understand that I’ve been in post for about nine months; I started with no staff and very little resource, and we’re still not anywhere near a full complement,” he says. “I have to try and inspect against the resources that I have available. So we’re starting now, and over the next three or four years we’ll be able to take on more responsibilities.”

The lack of any established set of performance data, he adds, means that he can’t take a risk-based approach to inspection; he first needs to identify where the risks lie.

“I haven’t inherited any database of information that tells me that the border agency has performed well here and badly here,” he says. Asked whether the UKBA has provided him with any data, he says that it has – but later sounds sceptical about some of these numbers. The figures on the backlog of immigration cases, in particular, proved a sticky topic in Vine’s select committee hearing, and he clearly wants to produce his own data. “I’m led to believe that the borders agency has reduced backlogs to about 350,000, but the NAO report on asylum has questioned some of the figures, and I want to look at them again,” he says.

Vine’s approach, then, involves picking a set of fields – some of them thematic, some geographical (see box, right) – and “drilling down quite deeply to find the evidence as to whether services are being delivered well or not”. His inspectorate’s work, he adds, will also be “very customer-focused; I want to look at what it’s like for people who are subject to the system”.

In researching his approach to inspections, Vine says, “I’ve looked at the methodology of 17 other ombudsmen and inspectors, and what I discovered is that there isn’t a best way of doing it; they tailor their approaches to the needs of that organisation and to the basis on which they’ve been set up.”

Examining the UKBA, he adds, is made more complex, “because it’s so wide-ranging in its responsibilities. The terms of reference of any scrutiny of asylum must be very differently defined from those on enforcement or intelligence or customer complaints.” So while his inspection plan does set out in broad terms the capabilities he’ll be examining, there will be no published metrics and the inspection framework is painted in only the broadest of brush strokes. While Vine hopes to examine “the difficult issues across all the major areas” of the UKBA’s work over the next three to four years, his approach in each case will be tailored to the specific topic.

He does, however, intend to begin by tackling some of the areas of greatest public worry: “I want to make a start with those areas that, politically and to the public, are of real concern,” he says. These include asylum and customer service, the latter including an examination of complaints handling; early in 2010 he hopes to begin an inspection of the UKBA’s enforcement operations. Meanwhile, he’ll be examining the Wales and South-West region, and following up with a look at the North-West and the UKBA’s overseas operations.

It’s an ambitious programme of work – particularly given the inspectorate’s budget, the uncertain status of which raised eyebrows at the select committee. The agency’s income has now been fixed for this financial year at £3m; a puny sum compared to the UKBA’s £2bn spending. But Vine argues that the money is “sufficient for us to make a good start”. He acknowledges that “it is going to be a challenge; you could double the budget and there would be people who argue that it isn’t enough”, but adds that “it hasn’t been calculated on a whim: we looked very carefully at the budgets of similar inspectorates, and tried to calculate how many days of inspection they required to produce a relatively comprehensive programme”.

Time will tell

Indeed, Vine’s budget is comparable to the funding given to HM Inspectorate of Prisons, which spent £3.4m in 2007-8 inspecting an organisation with 47,000 staff and a budget of about £3bn. Nonetheless, he’s leaving his options open. “We don’t know what resources we’ll need until we get on the ground and find whether our estimates are accurate,” he says. “I think it’s a reasonable sum; time will tell whether it’s sufficient.”

Another of the select committee’s concerns concerned Vine’s job title: its January report recommended that the name of his office be “amended explicitly to include the word ‘independent’, in order to clarify that the post is independent from the UK Border Agency.” Indeed, Vine acknowledges that “it has been a little frustrating at times explaining that I am independent”; the select committee’s proposal is, he says, “a good suggestion.” However, he appears to view changing his title as a distraction from the task at hand: the title is “not an insurmountable problem”, he believes: “What’s important is that I produce reports that address the issues where there’s a cause for concern or a need for public reassurance. Hopefully, I’ll be judged by the quality of what I produce.”

So John Vine’s new agency is slowly coming together: he has the remit, and is assembling the team and beginning pilot inspections. Asked whether he will need any further powers, he does have one suggestion. “I want to do some unannounced inspections of certain areas of border agency business, and to do that effectively I need to – for example – get airside quickly at airports,” he says. “But there’s no power in the existing legislation for me to issue myself with a warrant or pass that enables me to do that as of right; I still have to rely on cooperation with other agencies. I’ve no reason to think that cooperation won’t be there, but it may be an area that we have to revisit; we’ll have to see what our experience is.”

During an hour spent with the new chief inspector of the UKBA, this ‘wait and see’ approach becomes something of a theme; as Vine readily accepts, his inspectorate is only now beginning to look outwards at its vast, multi-limbed charge, and “it’s still a matter of judgment or guesswork as to what we’ll find.” But he says he is determined to forge his own path; to begin by opening the cans from which, in the past, some rather fierce worms have emerged; and to respond to the changing environment.

“I’ve created a programme based on my judgment and a lot of stakeholder work,” he says. “And if I feel that the programme needs to be changed or altered, then I’ll do that. We’ll be evaluating the programme throughout the year, and I can focus unannounced inspections where I think there’s either an organisational or a public scrutiny need.”

“I’m sure that as we go through our inspection work we’ll find that things will emerge,” he concludes. “Some of my findings will include suggestions for future scrutiny. So issues will emerge to finesse the plan for following years; more, perhaps, than people anticipate.”


John Vine: career highlights

1981     Joins West Yorkshire Police fast-track programme
1992     Promoted to become commander of Halifax Division
1996     Appointed assistant chief constable of Lancashire Constabulary
2000     Moves to Tayside Police as chief constable
2003     Made president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Scotland
2005     Leads the police operation at the G8 Gleneagles summit
2007     Awarded a CBE
2008     Selected as chief inspector of the UKBA


An inspector calls: the inspection framework

The chief inspector’s role replaces several existing statutory jobs, including the certification monitor; the race monitor; the Advisory Panel on Country Information; the Complaints Audit Committee; and the independent monitor for entry clearance refusals without the right of appeal.

The inspectorate will examine routine work using a core programme, which will run alongside a thematic programme. The core programme will examine geographical regions of operation, corporate centre functions, and operations such as casework, intelligence and enforcement. The thematic programme will inspect broader, cross-cutting topics such as complaints and information handling.

The inspectorate is currently carrying out pilot inspections of non-suspensive appeals, juxtaposed controls, and the port of Harwich. These pilots will be followed by formal inspections of asylum (starting now); customer service and complaint handling (beginning June); the Wales and South-West region (September); enforcement (February 2010); the points-based system (April 2010); overseas operations (May 2010); the North-West (mid-2010); intelligence (October 2010); and customs issues (January 2011).