The UK immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, said he would “choose his words very carefully” when asked if he would defend Suella Braverman calling migrant boats “an invasion”, but refused to criticise the home secretary.
Jenrick also said the government was not the root cause of deteriorating conditions at a controversy-hit centre for asylum seekers.
Manston, in Dover, is at the centre of an overcrowding scandal after Braverman was reported to have ignored legal advice that the government was detaining asylum seekers at the site for unlawfully long periods by refusing to book hotels.
Jenrick, a close ally of the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, said he would “never demonise people coming to this country in pursuit of a better life. I understand and appreciate our obligation to refugees.”
But he said the phrase “invasion” – for which Braverman has been criticised – was “a way of describing the sheer scale of the challenge”.
He told Sky News: “She was also speaking, I think, and this is an important point, for those people who live on the south coast who day in, day out are seeing migrant boats landing on their beaches.”
Jenrick told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It is not a phrase that I have used, but I do understand the need to be straightforward with the general public about the challenge that we as ministers face.”
He said the number of arrivals was a “major challenge for the country” and that infrastructure was being “overwhelmed”. He said the government could not have foreseen the number of people travelling across the Channel, which was twice the number of last year.
“This has also been a year, remember, where quite rightly we’ve done a number of other things like Homes for Ukraine, like our Afghan resettlement scheme, like Hong Kong families coming over, and so the confluence of these factors has put immense pressure on our system,” he said.
Jenrick said conditions at Manston were improving and that the government was moving people out to hotels where it could.
“It is not designed to be somewhere where people stay for a prolonged period of time,” he said of the centre, admitting that people had been sleeping on mats on the floor. “It is, by necessity, relatively austere. The task now is to ensure it gets back to its normal working pattern.
“I would just say that the root cause of what we’re seeing at Manston is not the government. It’s certainly not the brilliant Border Force staff who are managing the site, the contractors, the catering staff. The problem is that thousands of people are crossing the Channel illegally every day.”
Lucy Moreton, a spokesperson for the Union for Borders, Immigration and Customs, said staff were deeply concerned about conditions in the centre and the potential for further attacks on the site.
“There’s been a lot of drones flying over the site in the last 24 hours. There’s a lot of tensions on the site. The migrants are very keen to be moving, to be moved on, to get their freedom back,” she told the Today programme.
“Staff face, on a daily basis, sitdown protests, being chanted at, being shouted out. Constant searches going on, improvised weapons are always being found. It’s a really frightening time for the staff and no prison in the UK has over 4,000 people uncontained face to face with those who are responsible for controlling them. That’s an utterly unsustainable position.”
