Continued from Part One, available here, Professor Robert Barrington and Dr Shahrzad Fouladvand of the Centre for the Study of Corruption (CSC) ask whether the UK needs to pay more attention to tackling corruption as an enabler of illegal immigration and human trafficking into the UK. A longer version of this blog will be available next week here as a CSC working paper.
In the last blog (Part One) we established that there are reasons to have serious concerns about corruption at the UK borders and the role they play in irregular migration. The known cases of immigration officers and other border officials who have been found to have demanded bribes and worked with organised crime groups should serve as a red flag to policy-makers that corruption may be playing a larger role than has been acknowledged in the UK’s border crisis.
How extensive is UK border-related corruption?
Corruption theory tells us that UK borders are likely to have a problem. Corruption amongst border control officials demonstrates a classic rational choice approach to corruption amongst public officials, as illustrated by the Klitgaard formula (corruption = monopoly + discretion - accountability), since officials have the opportunity for personal gain while exercising extensive personal discretion with little oversight (Klitgaard 1988).¹ To make matters worse, David Neal – the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration - reported in 2023 that 'the most recent Border Force People Survey signposts a dissatisfied workforce which is a breeding ground for insider risk to grow and become insider acts, enabled by privileged access.'
The UK’s border agencies have two in-house teams with a remit to look at corruption. Data collected by these teams offer us some surprising insights:
- On the Border and Immigration service's Anti-Corruption Criminal Investigation Unit (ACCIU): a recent Guardian investigation reported that ACCIU had '95 allegations investigated over the past three years.' This is an average of just over thirty cases being investigated per year.
- On the Joint Anti-Corruption Intelligence Team (JACIT): a report from September 2023 by David Neal, the UK’s independent inspector, revealed that in the calendar year 2022 JACIT 'received 127 referrals over the period.’ Of these, '49% of JACIT cases relate to local management issues such as poor training, attendance, and time management rather than corruption.' This would suggest around 65 corruption cases were referred to the unit over 12 months.
Are these numbers telling us there is a lot of corruption, or not very much? Compared to corruption in other high-risk areas where there is better data available, such as the Metropolitan Police, these low numbers are scarcely believable. Relying on such low numbers as being accurate might explain why the response to the threat of corruption has been so muted. The danger is that an analysis of the problem based on poor data might mean that a high-risk area is de-prioritised.
What could the new UK government do better?
The Sunak government failed both to fill the vacant post of Anti-Corruption Champion and to publish the replacement for the national Anti-Corruption Strategy which had sat for months on a ministerial desk awaiting sign-off after the previous one expired in 2022. Corruption was evidently not perceived as a big threat. Here we offer five suggestions of what could be done to address border-related corruption:
- Incentivise confidential reporting. If you are an illegal immigrant or asylum seeker who comes across corruption, why would you report it - and who to? Perhaps there could be an incentive to do so. Spare a thought for the individual who reported the official asking him for a £2,000 bribe. He could have secured his immigration status, but instead did the right thing. Why not reward him with those very same papers for which he refused to pay a bribe?
- Pay and morale. Reduce the incentives for border and immigration staff to earn some money on the side.
- Establish a typology of corruption for UK borders and immigration to help design targeted responses.
- Transparency. More transparency or access to data from the ACCIU and JACIT teams, as well as the National Crime Agency, would enable academics and think-tanks to assist in building a picture of the threat and help develop evidence-based policy solutions.
- Join things up. Why have separate but overlapping agencies dealing with the same problem? How do they coordinate with the apparatus designed to combat modern slavery? The UK needs to find a way to join up its anti-corruption governance across several key institutions.
Corruption is a high risk for the UK borders and illegal immigration, even if the data cannot yet demonstrate the scale or prevalence. Reducing the problem means first of all accepting that there is a problem, and then putting some shape to it. At present it is treated as a low – and perhaps negligible – priority. That is a high-risk approach to a high-risk threat.
About the authors
Robert Barrington is Professor of Anti-Corruption Practice at the Centre for the Study of Corruption in the University of Sussex. He was formerly the head of Transparency International (TI) in the UK, the world’s leading anti-corruption NGO, and Chair of TI's International Council. Robert's UK government advisory roles have included membership of the Ministry of Justice’s expert group drafting the official guidance on the Bribery Act, the BEIS Export Guarantees Advisory Committee and the Cabinet Office’s post-Brexit Procurement Transformation Advisory Panel. Publications include 'Dictionary of Corruption', 'Understanding Corruption', and ‘How to Bribe’. He holds a degree in Modern History from Oxford University and a PhD from the European University Institute.
Dr Shahrzad Fouladvand of the Centre for the Study of Corruption (CSC) is a Senior Lecturer in International Criminal Law at the University of Sussex. Dr Fouladvand’s main research interests are in the areas of Transnational Criminal Law (TCL) and international criminal justice systems, particularly, International Criminal Court (ICC) where she worked as a legal researcher at the ICC Office of the Prosecutor /Prosecution Division in The Hague. As a senior expert in international labour studies, Shahrzad worked with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) concerning the implementation of Fundamental Human Rights Conventions in relation to the ILO Conventions. Her research focuses on two forms of Transnational Crime: Human Trafficking and Corruption. Particularly, she is interested in the ways in which these two wrongdoings are interrelated.
Footnotes
¹ We acknowledge the limitations of the Klitgaard formula, while also noting that it can be particularly apt in cases where its key elements are so obviously present.
References
Jancsics, D. 2019. Border corruption. Public Integrity, 21(4): 406-419.
Jancsics, D. 2021. Law enforcement corruption along the US borders. Security Journal, 34: 26-46.
Klitgaard, R. 1988. Controlling corruption. University of California Press.
Sequeira, S and Djankov, S. 2014. Corruption and firm behavior: evidence from African ports. Journal of International Economics, 94 (2): 277-294.
