Ministers have been accused of “lawyer-bashing” and seeking to distract from their own failures to clear the backlog of asylum claims by pushing a crackdown on lawyers who act improperly.
The justice secretary has said he would be comfortable with severe punishment for immigration lawyers who engage in malpractice after the government said they could face life in jail under the terms of the Illegal Migration Act.
But a senior official from the Law Society, the body that represents solicitors in England and Wales, pointed out that a government taskforce being trumpeted by ministers on Tuesday in response to allegations of wrongdoing by some solicitors in dealing with asylum applications had already been working for months before the scandal.
“The solicitors’ profession wants to see all of this eradicated. It’s not in our interest to have any solicitor acting improperly or crookedly, but this announcement today is something of a red herring, said David McNeill, the Law Society’s director of public affairs.
McNeill spoke on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme after three legal firms were shut down over allegations false asylum claims were being submitted for a fee.
He accepted such practice could go on in the industry but said: “This taskforce which they tout with such aggressive language has been in existence for months now so really from our perspective it just looks like a bit of lawyer-bashing as a distraction from really bad news for the government on the number of asylum seekers now accommodated in hotels – 50,000.”
The government’s approach to dealing with asylum claims has included requiring people to submit a claim while physically in the UK, while also shutting off all safe and legal routes to get there to the vast majority of people. Campaigners have argued this has pushed people to try to enter by irregular means, such as by crossing the Channel in small boats.
On Tuesday, the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, told GB News: “There’s been life imprisonment for those who aid and abet illegal migration for many, many years and, yes, I’m absolutely comfortable that those who breach their professional duties and act illegally should be convicted, punished and disgraced. I’m entirely comfortable with that.”
Chalk added: “Most lawyers do a fantastic job, but those that don’t, those that abuse their position and act illegally, it’s very important that the system comes down on that like a ton of bricks.”
He also defended his party’s deputy chairman Lee Anderson, who has said people seeking asylum in the UK who complained about conditions on the Bibby Stockholm barge should “f*** off back to France”. Tory government ministers have previously said they hope placing people in deliberately sparse conditions on the barge will deter others from trying to claim asylum in the UK.
Chalk told LBC: “Lee Anderson expresses the righteous indignation of the British people. Yes, he does it in salty terms, that’s his style, but his indignation is well placed.”
The justice secretary also said the backlog of cases had decreased by 17,000 over recent weeks, after Home Office figures revealed more than 50,000 people were staying in hotels in June.
On Sunday, the Independent reported that thousands of cases had simply been marked as cleared without the claimant having been assessed. The news site reported that Home Office guidance allowed officials to unilaterally close cases, even where they had not been able to contact the claimant, with a letter to them simply being filed away.
It said many were closed because people did not attend interviews, quoting a Home Office official as saying: “This is done to basically bring the backlog down. A lot of interviews were booked to withdraw as many claims as possible [if people didn’t turn up].”
