In Rishi Sunak’s speech on Channel crossings, he said that the government will begin to house refugees in empty holiday camps and student halls of residence, and ex-military bases will continue to be considered as a long-term solution. The Home Office hopes the plan will reduce the cost of hotel accommodation, currently running at £5.8mn a day, and that the location of holiday camps means there will be less opposition from Conservative MPs who have objected to hotels being used in their constituencies.
The use of holiday camps (or even military camps) could form part of the current solution to the long delays in asylum application processing and the use of hotels, but in the government’s hands such measures are likely to exacerbate the current problems and lead to more crises such as the outbreak of diphtheria at Manston.
System delays and problems
The high cost of housing asylum applicants is entirely due to the length of time they spend in Home Office accommodation while their claim is being processed. The number of asylum seekers in the system awaiting a decision has risen from about 66,000 in 2020 to about 170,000 today.
This rise of applicants awaiting a decision has almost nothing to do with the number of people crossing the Channel in small boats (the Channel has, mostly, replaced other forms of arrival rather than added to them). Although, overall, the numbers of new arrivals will be up this year on pre covid levels, there is not a major ‘surge’ as has been suggested by the government.
The main reasons for the delays in the system are the lack of sufficiently knowledgeable and experienced staff to undertake the work, and a slow cumbersome system with over 100 independent data bases to be worked through to complete a decision maker’s report. The Immigration Inspectorate also noted that Channel crossings are still being treated as an emergency by the Home Office rather than as a ‘steady state’ for which permanent and sustainable solutions need to be found.
For example, rather than ensure applicants can obtain good legal advice from the beginning, unhelpful barriers are built into the system: not telling people of the available advice and how to access it; only providing information in English; failing to explain how the system works and what sort of legal or other advice applicants need and when. This leads to more appeals against immigration decisions and late applications for appeals against removals, at enormous financial and reputational cost.
Lack of political commitment
While there are criticisms to be made of Home Office staff – they are, after all, responsible for the mechanics of the system – their ability to improve it has been constrained by a lack of political commitment to creating a humane and fair system and to providing the resources needed to achieve this.
As the home affairs committee noted in July, it is the Home Office that has broken the system. This was most evident recently when diphtheria spread through Manston detention centre and it emerged that asylum seekers had been kept there illegally, and in dire conditions, with the full knowledge of the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who had declined to act or fund solutions.
My outsider view of the system is that it is very disjointed; the separate system functions are treated independently and do not contribute to the overall aims of the process. Border Force is responsible for protecting national security. The initial holding centres are responsible for further checks and dispersal while decision makers carry out a thorough investigation of an asylum claim once an applicant has been accommodated.
The National Referral Mechanism assesses the likelihood of trafficking, usually of those people found in the UK rather than at the border. The various parts of the system have a helping function, to keep people safe and to provide refuge where appropriate but mostly, their role is one of screening, to keep potential refugees out.
There is a lot of overlap and duplication but also considerable gaps in the system and information gathering. People are passed between the various ‘tracks’ (threat to national security, asylum, trafficking with each element dealt with independently and in hierarchical order.
Even within the asylum track the person who does the initial interview does not do the substantive interview and the delays are such that the decision maker who chases queries or writes the report is likely to be different from the interviewer, simply because the delays add to fragmentation, and any disruption results in cases returning to the bottom of ‘the pile’. The current average rate for a decision maker is 1.7 cases per week.
Government response to delays
The Home Office has taken steps to address some of the problems identified and Sunak announced 500 more immigration staff for processing claims. One way to reduce pressures on the system would be to compress timescales, have more parallel decision making and introduce measures that would speed up decision making.
The government says it will ‘fast track’ Albanian asylum claims with a view to speedy deportation of the majority of those coming from Albania. Current proposals suggest it will say ‘no’ first to Albanians and rely on an appeal process (and where appeals are not allowed, it is likely there will be judicial reviews) to be instituted rather than take time to gather all the evidence that would support or deny an application.
While this may have an impact on quick returns, without necessarily increasing the risk of harm on arrival back in Albania, there is insufficient knowledge, currently, to indicate that it would and it may clog up the system further. Bad decisions are rarely time saving. So long as there is a strong market for exploited labour in the UK, it is likely crossings will continue with more imaginative or dangerous means of getting around any government constraints invented.
Meanwhile, those who the government considers are more likely to be ‘genuine’ refugees, in that they come from ‘war torn’ countries, will have to be ‘slow tracked’ to make way for assessing Albanian claims. The most vulnerable and in need of our support will be penalised further.
The need to compress the timescales between arrival and initial decision is significant. The problem is chronic and the rise is exponential. The Home Office previously gave assurances to the Home Affairs select committee that the back log would be cleared only to see it doubling, so Sunak’s promises this week are unlikely to be met.
Reception camps might be a solution
Practical and workable solutions need to be found and the use of holiday camps (or similar) might be a useful resource as an initial accommodation and assessment centre. Not, however, as currently envisaged by the Home Office, as long-term holding centres, but as a place in which proper assessments can be made and asylum seekers supported prior to moving to more permanent accommodation.
Criteria for success
In order to work well, the purpose of an initial stay at a camp would be to:
- Give confidence that the applicant is safe in the UK and will be given a fair and serious hearing.
- Ensure they are properly clothed and fed, and that their immediate health, mental as well as physical, needs are attended to.
- Provide good verbal and written information (in their own language) about the asylum process and what will happen in their case, with advice on hand during their stay.
- Ensure they have access to good legal advice throughout the process.
- Draw up an assessment of future needs and make preparatory links with their next accommodation provider and local services including health and education.
- Begin, and complete where possible, the process of assessing asylum claims.
Each process in the asylum system takes time (interviews, information collation, reference to country notes, guidance and legal judgements). In some cases, particularly when dealing with distressing material or if the chronology is confusing, there may need to be gaps between interviews and there may be periods of inactivity while awaiting documentary or other information.
In most cases, however, all the information that a decision maker needs will be gathered in the initial and substantive interview (and any subsequent clarification requests). If all of these activities were located on site, undertaken by experienced competent staff, and with applicant (and staff) access to sound legal and other advice, there is no reason why the asylum process could not take days or weeks, rather than months or years as is currently the case.
The system would need to be of high quality and would be costly to set up and run but if managed well with a focus on humanity and fairness, it could transform the timescales within which cases are being assessed. In turn this would reduce the need for hotels and enable those granted refugee status the chance to work at a much earlier point than at present.
Could it work?
While this could be a solution to the government’s problems, it is a solution predicated on humane and fair treatment. It will not work if the sole aim of any reception facility is to identify those to be sent to Rwanda, back to Albania or to be refused asylum, to do it as cheaply as possible, or to prevent ‘lefty-lawyers’ advising those seeking asylum.
Doing it badly would result in asylum seekers failing to cooperate, appeals being lodged, and the short timescales for decision-making being regarded as an indicator of injustice by the courts. A reception camp would quickly become an internment camp with its associated cruelties and crimes against humanity.
The Home Office record on setting up camps and managing those already established is nothing short of appalling – and illegal. There was nothing in Sunak’s speech that suggests the government has learned from this or is open to other options for solving the accommodation problem. While the government fails to commit to or resource fair and humane treatment, any proposals to use camps should be strongly resisted. The government needs first to show that it is intent on protecting those in need, rather than finding new ways to punish those who seek asylum in the UK.
