Capita Bungles Deportation of Irregular Migrants in UK
▻http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15819
“Message from the UKBA [UK Border Agency]. You are required to leave the UK as you no longer have the right to remain.” Thousands of people in the UK received this text message, sometimes several times a day, over the Christmas holiday from a company called the Capita Group.
Hundreds of people who were in the UK legally, including at least one citizen, as well as by people who had already left the UK, were alarmed when they received the messages. Many called their lawyers in “distress and confusion” according to the Immigration Law Practitioners Association (ILPA).
Migration activists initially assumed that the messages were a money making scam. But the lawyers quickly discovered that the text messages were part of a private scheme paid for by the government. The plan was designed by Capita, a UK outsourcing company with revenues of some £2.9 billion, which won a four year £30 million ($48 million) contract from the UKBA in October 2012 to track down 174,000 people in the “Migration Refusal Pool” – a government list of individuals whose UK visas have expired and were not renewed.
Capita is paid a fee for each person who leaves the UK, a practice which the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC) has dubbed “bounty hunting.”