- BY Colin Yeo
New Home Office definition of ‘exceptional’ circumstances
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A Home Office spokesman said:
“Staff who make exceptional contributions to the work of the Home Office are eligible for special one-off payments”
Apparently a total of 11,672 bonuses were paid in 2012/13 to around 40% of staff, equating to a mean bonus of £559.
Who knew that 40% of staff at the Home Office had made an ‘exceptional’ contribution to its work? Impressive. And something to bear in mind next time one of those Home Office staff suggest in a reasons for refusal letter or court submissions that a person’s case is not ‘exceptional’ as required by the Immigration Rules at paragraphs 390A, 391, 397, 398, S-EC.1.4, E-ECP.4.2 and, no doubt, elsewhere.
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8 responses
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that large numbers of Home Office staff are “exceptional”. Of course, by that I don’t mean “exceptionally good”…
Omg! Are we still flogging this same deceased horse? 40% of HO staff are not given bonuses, cite your source, do your maths or both.
Er, the source is cited. There’s a ‘hyperlink’ that opens a new ‘webpage’ that is the source.
Just noticed that your cut and paste ‘evidence’ is from the Grauniad, facts as reliable as it’s spellling.
Sigh. See para 26 of the Home Affairs Select Committee report. I guess you didn’t get one, then.
Colin, I work for the HO, in my own experience, operational staff (ie those at the coal face, not those high up the food chain), do NOT see, 40 %of staff get a bonus, under our performance measures (feel free to FOI if you have not already), the max is 20% in any given cohort.
Internal administrative practices of the Home Office – ‘believe nothing, refuse everything and give no ressons’ is the blunt instrument that perhaps digs up higher percentage of staff bonuses than hitherto identified.
The maths isn’t difficult. Find out how many staff were paid bonuses. Find out how many staff work for the Home Office. Divide the former by the latter and multiple by 100 to get the % of bonuses paid.
Now, it could well be true that the higher-ranked you are the more likely you are to get a bonus. It works that way in the private sector. So, just because 20% of staff at ‘the coalface’ get a bonus doesn’t mean that less than 40% of staff overall get a bonus. Suppose there are 70% of staff at the ‘coal face’. Only 20% of staff at the coal face could get a bonus (i.e, 14% of total staff), and it would still be possible to give 40% of staff overall a bonus.