The UN has backed a Home Office-funded pilot that would dramatically reduce the spiralling costs of the crisis-hit asylum system – yet Suella Braverman is refusing to endorse the scheme, despite it being described as “more humane”.
This week, the UNHCR (the refugee agency that helps the UK government improve its asylum system) will praise a Home Office-funded scheme in Bedfordshire, which it found cut the cost of accommodating refugees and migrants by more than half when compared with placing them in detention. The savings came through housing people and giving legal and welfare support.
The home secretary, however, is intent on overseeing a huge increase in the Home Office’s detention estate, which experts estimate will take billions to fund. Braverman told parliament that she intends to pursue “a programme of increasing immigration-detention capacity”, which reportedly includes disused RAF bases and barges. The only barge used so far is the Bibby Stockholm, which was to hold 500 asylum seekers but is now empty after legionella bacteria was discovered on board.
The Home Office is also paying more than £5m a day to house asylum seekers in hotels.
Meanwhile, the illegal migration act will, says the Refugee Council, lead to “tens of thousands”’ of refugees being detained, with internal government projections indicating costs could top £3bn over the next two years. A report this week by IPPR thinktank is expected to warn that the law will only worsen the chaos.
The UNHCR’s evaluation of the Home Office-funded pilot is expected to praise the Bedfordshire scheme because it was “more humane” and treated refugees and migrants with civility. Critics say it is this aspect that has seen the scheme effectively abandoned by the Home Office, whose bill gives the home secretary a legal duty to detain and remove anyone deemed to be entering the UK illegally.
Sources with knowledge of the scheme said: “The findings fly in the face of the illegal migration act. They certainly contradict the Home Office narrative and rhetoric of ‘invasion’ and ‘scary migrants.’” Shortly after she was reappointed as home secretary by Rishi Sunak, Braverman told the Commons last October that refugees and migrants crossing the Channel in small boats were “the invasion on our southern coast”.
The King’s Arm Project, based in Bedford, has since August 2020 supported 75 vulnerable migrants of 23 nationalities, offering them legal advice, clothing, mental health support, English language learning and GP registration while in the community.
The pilot was more cost-effective than detention and led to better outcomes, such as settled status. Fewer than half of those held in immigration detention centres are deported.
One participant in the scheme said that the help was “methodical, very orderly and effective. It came at a time when I was in the depths of hopelessness and in despair, I did not know who to turn to for help.”
The Home Office has given no explanation as to why the scheme was not introduced on a wider scale after the pilot last summer.
It is not the first “alternative to detention” scheme to be abandoned by the Home Office. In 2021, an initiative in Newcastle to ensure that vulnerable women could live in the community instead of being detained was wound down by the Home Office.
In 2019, the former immigration minister Caroline Nokes wanted to reform the system to help “support vulnerable women outside detention” but the Home Office’s attitude to asylum seekers has hardened in the subsequent years.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Our current asylum system is under extreme pressure and the costs are unacceptable. The best way to relieve pressures on the asylum system is to stop the boats in the first place.
“We continue to explore other ways to bring the cost of detention down, but there is currently no evidence of providing better value for money than the current system.
“The government has introduced the illegal migration bill, which will ensure that those people arriving in the UK illegally are detained and promptly removed to their country of origin or a safe third country.”
