Shocking asylum data reveals truth about two decades of failure | United Kingdom | News

Successive Conservative governments' strict asylum seeker policies have nevertheless resulted in more claimants being allowed to stay in Britain than ever before, analysis of long-term trends by the Express data team.

Exam Home office Figures since the introduction of the asylum system at the turn of the century show a striking reversal in decision outcomes over time. Under Tony Blair, initially eight out of ten applications were rejected, but when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister, only two out of ten applications were rejected.

Several experts contacted by the Express said it was a well-established, if less mentioned, fact that New Labour's high rate of rejection of asylum applications stood in stark contrast to that of later Conservative administrations.

Labor and Tony Blair were not exactly liberal on asylum, Professor Peter William Walsh, senior lecturer at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, told the Express.

They saw this as actually a major challenge to the immigration system in general, because people [were] applicant who did not meet the criteria for refugee protection and you can see it in the statistics [that] they were so low [a] subsidy rate.

Although the Coalition government adopted a range of hostile environment policies, under Conservative rule, initial decisions on asylum cases and final decisions began to increase, reaching record levels under the government by Boris Johnson.

Dr Walsh said there was no definitive explanation as to why strict policies led to a doubling of the number of initial approvals, from 40% to 80% during that period. However, he suggested that there was anecdotal evidence that the development of deterrent policies, such as the Rwandan project, could have been a diversion.

He explained: I don't have any special knowledge, but I have seen insider reports saying that everything is focused on small boats and that Rwanda is diverting attention from the ordinary day-to-day functioning of the asylum system, including processing of requests. .

We are not in a position to assess this, but it is not implausible that departmental priorities could have an effect. Like the [Express] The chart brilliantly shows that the acceptance rate has now fallen significantly in 2024 and there has been a ministerial directive that it was necessary to reduce the numbers.

Another anecdotal explanation for the Johnson government's rise has been offered by Angela Sharma, a barrister at Church Court Chambers and a specialist in immigration cases. She believes that a more permissive approach to the protections afforded under the Modern Slavery Act to victims of human trafficking during this period was compounded by significant delay.

Around 2020, this spike that we're seeing where they're granting protection may be due to a delay, she explained.

There was an influx of applications and, personally, I thought there were a lot.

At that time, people had protection through the modern slavery route. But now the criteria are quite strict and they look at thresholds.

Official Home Office graphics highlight the European migrant crisis of 2015, when around 1.3 million people, mainly from Syria, as well as countries including Afghanistan and Eritrea, came to the continent to seek asylum.

Dr Walsh said the arrival of these migrants in Britain was a plausible factor in the increase in success cases.

From 2018, we have more candidates from nationalities with high scholarship rates, he added. So we have the return of the Afghans after the fall of the Taliban [who] now have a subsidy rate of almost 95 percent and above.

We have Syrians [and] Eritrean [neither of whom] we had [back in the early 2000s].

Another possible reason is that the government has really started to do its homework and try to get better information about the countries of origin – actually knowing the details of what is happening in those countries, whether of political repression or civil war, in a way that it did not do before. .

Regardless of nationality, Dr Walsh explained, Britain is known to have a higher acceptance rate than other countries in Europe when it comes to asylum. After viewing the data, Dr Mike Jones, executive director of Migration Watch UK, also cited this fact.

“Let’s be clear,” he said. “The UK is now the European capital of illegal immigration. Successive governments have done nothing but twiddle their thumbs.

Rwanda's plan was a bold step forward, but without correcting human rights law, any effort to end this chaos is doomed to failure. »

Political parties engaged in a bitter dispute over who was responsible for the trends revealed by the Express analysis.

British Reform MP Rupert Lowe said it was a complete failure by the Conservatives and Labor and that the Reform Party was the only opposition party that would stand up and stop illegal immigration through a zero tolerance approach.

Labor, however, responded by saying the Tories had broken the asylum system and adding: Labor will clean up this mess and end the use of asylum hotels. We have already started deporting more people who have no right to be here, with a 20% increase in forced returns since the election.

A Conservative spokesperson denied the claim and said Labor had already reversed course and was granting amnesty to illegal migrants.

In response to unusually high global migration figures, we have introduced robust laws on illegal and legal migration, including the Illegal Migration Act, the Nationality and Borders Act and the Rwanda Act, to create a strong but fair asylum system where people who come to the UK illegally cannot claim asylum.

Our strong measures to combat illegal and legal migration will reduce their numbers by more than 300,000 this year alone, they added.

Unfortunately, this is a point on which Labor has backtracked, granting amnesty to illegal migrants. Keir Starmer has already overseen a 19 per cent increase in Channel crossings since July and is to reopen hotels, breaking another manifesto pledge.