British prime minister Rishi Sunak conceded “not enough” asylum claims were being processed but defended his home secretary Suella Braverman over her handling of Britain’s migrant crisis.
Sunak’s government is struggling to cope with record numbers of migrants crossing the English Channel as a backlog in processing asylum applications and soaring emergency accommodation costs has put the hardline Tory party’s stance on illegal migration under scrutiny.
The crisis led to sharp exchanges in the House of Commons between Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer who accused the Tory government of having “lost control” of the asylum system.
Sunak described the channel migrant crisis as a “serious and escalating problem”.
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Almost 40,000 people have crossed the channel so far year, the highest number since records started to be collected four years ago. This compares with 28,526 in 2021 and 8,404 in 2020.
The focus of the worsening crisis has fallen on an asylum processing centre on a disused airfield in Kent where there has been severe overcrowding and outbreaks of disease among the 4,000 people staying at a Manston facility intended to hold just 1,600 people temporarily.
The UK government is spending almost £7 million (€8.1 million) a day housing asylum seekers in hotels as the asylum system slows the processing of applications to a trickle. Just 4 per cent of migrants who arrived in small boats in 2021 had received decisions on their asylum claims.
The controversial Conservative policy to send some asylum seekers landing to Rwanda, designed to deter others and costing £140 million so far, has been stalled by court challenges.
Starmer used Braverman’s eye-raising admission in parliament on Monday that illegal migration was “out of control” and that the system was “broken” to ask Sunak: “Who broke it?”
“If the asylum system is broken and his lot have been in power for 12 years, how can it be anybody’s fault but theirs?” asked the Labour leader during prime minister’s questions.
Sunak said his party’s record on migration was that it had “delivered Brexit” and ended the free movement of people but he admitted that “not enough” asylum claims were being processed and that the number of officials processing claims would be increased by 80 per cent.
Starmer accused Sunak of agreeing “a grubby deal” with Braverman to back him as prime minister and avoid a general election by reappointing her, exacerbating the migrant crisis.
“So why doesn’t he get a proper home secretary, scrap the Rwanda gimmick, crack down on smuggling gangs, end the small boat crossings, speed up asylum claims and agree an international deal on refugees. Start governing for once and get a grip,” said the Labour leader.
Most of the people landing on England’s southern coast are claiming asylum. Of those who arrived this year, 93 per cent of arrivals have applied for protection from the government.
UK government data shows that the UK received more than 60,000 asylum claims in the year to June 2022 with those arriving by small boat accounting for about half of these claims.
The bulk of migrants come from Albania, Afghanistan and Iran, Eritrea and Syria. Last year 75 per cent of people arriving in small boats were men aged between 18 and 39.
Immigration lawyers and charities blame a slowdown in the processing of asylum claims since 2018 for creating a backlog that has left refugees in limbo for years and sent costs soaring.
Colin Yeo, a barrister specialising in immigration law, said he has not yet seen a credible plan from the British home office to deal with the crisis. He said that “outlandish” and “really absurd” suggestions by the UK government such as putting wave machines or nets in the channel to prevent migrants crossing in small boats had distracted officials from “nuts and bolts management issues” that would tackle the problem.
“People have been warning about the backlog for a couple of years now and it has gone really bad. All the media attention has been focused on the conditions in a particular camp at Manston, but this isn’t a new problem. This has been coming for quite some time,” he said.
Yeo said that while Brexit was not a direct cause of “massive asylum backlog”, it had indirectly contributed by distracting British home office staff from managing the problem because redesigning the post-Brexit immigration system had “absorbed a lot of internal resources”.
Braverman’s rhetoric during the crisis, describing migrants arriving on the southern coast as an “invasion” earlier this week, has been criticised with Sunak’s own immigration minister Robert Jenrick saying that ministers had an obligation to “choose your terminology wisely”.
“It doesn’t seem a particularly accurate way to describe what’s going on,” said Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
“It is not an army. It won’t look like an invasion to most people.”
