Last week the Home Affairs Committee questioned Mark Sedwill over an internal memo, leaked in March, in which he promised Border Agency staff that after the changes “most of us will be doing the same job, in the same place with the same colleagues and the same boss.”
Committee chair Keith Vaz asked for assurances the changes to the service will go further than the appointment of Sarah Rapson as director-general of the retitled UK Visas and Immigration unit.
Sedwill said management is “already refreshing” the service and personnel changes should be expected in the next few months. But he reminded MPs that the Border Agency’s weaknesses were structural, not with staff. “The key issue here was the structural issue; it wasn’t about the leadership of the people,” he argued. “The fundamental underlying problems here were structural: it was the systems, the IT, the support and so on, and not the personnel. It would be wrong to dwell upon the personality.”