How journalists can end up dictating Home Office policy

When you write the stories of people wronged by governmental mistakes, you end up setting off a sometimes unexpected chain of events

Covering social affairs means reporting on all manner of injustice and human suffering – that much is obvious. But while a journalist’s job is usually limited to informing the public and raising awareness, my work increasingly appears to be dictating government decisions that can transform people’s lives.

Just last week, I wrote a story about a mother who was blocked from coming to the UK to see her seriously ill daughter because the Home Office was “not satisfied” her intentions were genuine. Within 12 hours of publication, the department reversed the decision and granted her a visa.

Days before this, our team reported how a student from Amsterdam University had been blocked from entering the UK for an academic conference because immigration officials were “not satisfied” she would leave at the end of her stay. Again, within hours of the story going live, the Home Office performed a U-turn and granted her entry.

These are just two of around a dozen similar cases I’ve reported on in the past year. It has got to the point where immigration solicitors approach me asking me to cover their clients’ stories because – and they openly admit it – media intervention is often the only solution to resolving Home Office mistakes.

As gratifying as it can be to effectively save innocent people from being wrongly split from their families or unlawfully flown back into war zones or personally dangerous situations, there is something deeply unsettling about the whole idea. What about all of those people who weren’t able to contact a journalist? It raises serious concerns about the accuracy of decision-making at the highest levels.

Amid mounting concern about the hostile environment and with Brexit on the horizon, I will continue to cover these stories and expose how Home Office failings can devastate people’s lives. But I hope that the government begins to respond on a wider scale to these systemic failings, rather than acting as though individual cases are isolated (I see from the statistics behind my individual reports that they hardly ever are) and responding in a way reminiscent of a PR branding exercise. Now is a delicate political time for immigrants and refugees, and I’ll continue to put pressure on the powers-that-be to exercise compassion and common sense until that larger-scale action is taken.

Yours,

May Bulman

Social affairs correspondent