Politicians of all colours talk about the United Kingdom having a proud history of offering sanctuary to those in need and welcoming immigrants. Priti Patel said it on a number of occasions when she was home secretary, and so did Rishi Sunak when campaigning to become prime minister. So how can it be that people who fled persecution in Iran and Afghanistan or bloodshed in Syria are being detained for over a week, sleeping on floors and catching diseases such as scabies and diphtheria? And how can it be that the home secretary, Suella Braverman, has used such inflammatory language, accusing them of “invading” the UK?
It’s difficult not to conclude that this is a situation of the government’s own making. Robert Jenrick, the new immigration minister, has insisted that there was no way the government could have predicted the extent of the recent rise in attempts to cross the Channel. Yet towards the end of last year officials told ministers to expect as many as 60,000 arrivals in 2022. The message was clear. Contingency plans needed to be made to ensure that resources, capacity and facilities were in place to respond. After inspecting reception arrangements in Dover late last year, Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, stated that “contingency planning should ensure there is an effective response to fluctuating numbers and rapid mobilisation of resources whenever necessary”.
Looking back now, the government can’t say it wasn’t warned. But the lack of ministerial desire to engage with what they were being told goes deeper than that. The number of people waiting for an initial decision on their asylum claim has been rising year on year since 2010 to more than 100,000 – a consequence of long-term under-resourcing, insufficient caseworkers in place and poor systems and processes.
A year ago, concerted action was taken to recruit more caseworkers. But it takes at least a year from recruitment to training for a caseworker to be up to speed to do the job well. A plan should have been put in place well before the Covid pandemic when the backlog was already quickly growing.
And it gets worse. Unbelievably, there hasn’t been a functional IT casework system. Decision-makers have been using spreadsheets. In a report published in November last year the chief inspector of borders and immigration, David Neal, found “inefficient” and “ineffective” workflow processes and an over-reliance on cumbersome Excel files were contributing to a failure to keep on top of decision-making. It is only this year that a decent IT system has been developed and is now being put in place.
The picture that emerges is of a government operation that has been systematically neglected and under-resourced for many years, with any attempt to improve it only happening once it was already deep in crisis.
A year ago, children who arrived here alone were having to sleep on mats on the floor of a dilapidated building in Kent because there were inadequate mechanisms in place to transfer them quickly into local authority care. We warned, and ministers were told, that it would happen again unless there was a rapid overhaul.
The situation with hotels is also a consequence of long-term neglect. Two years ago, the House of Commons public accounts committee investigated the use of hotel accommodation and said it was very concerned people were not being placed in more appropriate housing. The committee said the Home Office “should, within three months, set out a clear plan for how it will quickly and safely reduce the use of hotels”. Ministers failed to get a grip of the problem. And they failed to adequately engage with key stakeholders including councils and health and other agencies.
Fast forward to the present and Braverman has been accused of deciding not to book sufficient hotel accommodation to ensure men, women and children were not sleeping on makeshift mats for days on end in Manston (she denies blocking the bookings).
What has been driving these failures? I would argue that the political driver has been the belief, held by the Conservative government, that those seeking sanctuary in this country are not only undeserving but are breaking the law – even though there is nothing illegal about applying for asylum in any country, and three-quarters of those who seek asylum in the UK are granted refugee protection. The view is they should be treated with hostility, then expelled to Rwanda. The asylum system therefore is deliberately neglected and made worse in the hope that it will act as a deterrent. But there isn’t a deterrent effect and instead, regardless of the best efforts of hard-working government officials, we are left with a dysfunctional system that is far from fit for purpose.
When Sunak addressed the nation outside Downing Street last week he spoke of the importance of showing compassion and fairness. An asylum system that is built around those values would treat people with dignity and decency and not warehouse them in “wretched” conditions. It would also respect the UN convention on refugees and ensure that everyone is given a fair hearing on UK soil rather than being shipped to Rwanda.
The new prime minister and immigration minister have a simple choice. To quickly change direction and demonstrate a far more compassionate approach, or to perpetuate the ongoing systemic failure and heartless response that has been of the government’s own choosing.
The Refugee Council stands ready, with the Together with Refugees coalition, to share our ideas of how we can work together to build a humane asylum system to meet the growing global challenges of people forced to flee their homes for safety.
Enver Solomon is chief executive of the Refugee Council
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
