It is hard not to conclude that this is a situation of the government’s own making. Robert Jenrick, the new immigration minister, insisted there was no way the government could have predicted the scale of the recent surge in attempts to cross the Channel. But towards the end of last year, officials told ministers to expect up to 60,000 arrivals in 2022. The message was clear. Contingency plans had to be made to ensure that resources, capacity and facilities were in place to respond. Following an inspection of reception arrangements in Dover late last year, Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, said “contingency planning should ensure there is an effective response to fluctuating numbers and rapid mobilization 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 increasing year on year since 2010 to more than 100,000 – a consequence of long-term under-resources, insufficient work and inadequate systems and processes. A year ago, concerted action was taken to hire more employees. But it takes at least a year from hiring to training for an employee to be able to do their job well. A plan should have been put in place long before the Covid pandemic when delays were already piling up. And it gets worse. Incredibly, there hasn’t been a functional IT case management system. Decision makers use spreadsheets. In a report published in November last year, Border and Immigration Chief Inspector David Neill found that “inefficient” and “inefficient” workflow processes and an over-reliance on cumbersome Excel files contributed to the failure to follow through on the decision. construction. Only this year has a decent IT system been developed and put into place. The picture that emerges is of a government enterprise that has been systematically neglected and under-resourced for many years, with any attempt to improve it made only when it was already deep in crisis. A year ago, children who arrived here alone had to sleep on mats on the floor of a derelict building in Kent because there were insufficient mechanisms to transport them quickly to the local authority. We have warned, and ministers have been told, that it will happen again unless there is rapid reform. The situation with the 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 that people were not being placed in more suitable accommodation. The committee said the Home Office “should, within three months, draw up a clear plan on how to quickly and safely reduce the use of hotels”. The ministers failed to understand the problem. And they failed to engage adequately with key stakeholders, including councils and health services and other agencies. Fast forward to now and Braverman has been accused of deciding not to book enough hotel accommodation to ensure men, women and children didn’t sleep on makeshift mats for days at Manston (she denies blocking bookings). What drove these failures? I would argue that the political driver has been the belief, held by the Conservative government, that those seeking asylum in this country are not only undeserving, but breaking the law – even though there is nothing illegal about seeking asylum in any country, and Three quarters of asylum seekers in the UK receive refugee protection. The view is that they should be treated with hostility and then deported to Rwanda. As such, the asylum system is being deliberately neglected and made worse in the hope that it will act as a deterrent. But there is no deterrent 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 built around these values would treat people with dignity and decency and not store them in “deplorable” conditions. It will also respect the UN refugee convention and ensure that everyone gets a fair hearing on UK soil instead of being sent to Rwanda. The new prime minister and the new immigration minister have a simple choice. To quickly change direction and demonstrate a much more compassionate approach or perpetuate the ongoing systemic failure and heartless response that the government itself has chosen. The Refugee Council is ready, with the Together with Refugees coalition, to share our ideas on how we can work together to build a humane asylum system to address the growing global challenges of people being forced to flee their homes them for safety.
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