In the past year the government has announced several much-criticised plans to crack down on ‘illegal immigration’. The main focus is on small boats crossing the Channel but huge issues arise from the cost and unpopular decisions over where to house ever-growing numbers of asylum seekers whose applications sit in a log-jammed Home Office.
In 2014, the backlog of asylum seekers awaiting decisions numbered just 20,000 – by 2017 this had risen to 29,000 and today it is over 160,000. The cost of providing accommodation for those in the system is now £5.6mn per day. On occasions the quality of that accommodation has been lamentable – witness the disgrace and eventual closure of the overcrowded Manston migrant camp, in Kent, where cases of scabies and diphtheria were reported. This has all made for extremely uncomfortable media coverage for the government.
Someone with experience in these matters is David Normington, who was permanent secretary at the Home Office during the Tony Blair years and helped put in place the solution to an asylum backlog that arose 20 years ago. Normington says the government’s panic is partly because dinghy arrivals show them up as incompetent, unable to control the UK’s borders. In a long and thoughtful piece in the April issue of Prospect magazine he judges government performance as “generally calamitous”. Its response to the crisis is “headline-grabbing announcements” rather than the required quiet diplomacy.
Slower Home Office decision-making
While part of the problem has been the increase in the numbers of people seeking asylum, a major contributor is the extraordinarily slow speed of Home Office civil servants in processing decisions. According to analysis by the Oxford Migration Observatory, an average staff member made just two decisions per month in the year ended March 2022, compared with eight per month in the year ending in March 2016. That represents a 75% fall in productivity. How can this be?
Several factors have been suggested to explain this ultra-poor performance. They include inadequate staff training, low morale and high staff turnover due to lack of career progression and pressure to meet targets.
Writing in The Guardian in November 2022, Enver Solomon, CEO of the Refugee Council, states: “A year ago, concerted action was taken to recruit more caseworkers. But it takes at least a year from recruitment to training for a caseworker to be up to speed to do the job well. A plan should have been put in place well before the Covid pandemic when the backlog was already quickly growing. And it gets worse. Unbelievably, there hasn’t been a functional IT casework system. Decision-makers have been using spreadsheets.”
‘Inefficient and ineffective’
He quotes a report published in November 2021, in which the chief inspector of borders and immigration, David Neal, cited ‘inefficient’ and ‘ineffective’ workflow processes and an over-reliance on cumbersome Excel files. He adds it took a year for a decent IT system to be developed that is only now being put in place.
Solomon sums up: “The picture that emerges is of a government operation that has been systematically neglected and under-resourced for many years, with any attempt to improve it only happening once it was already deep in crisis.”
A further factor has been the tendency for politically driven home secretaries (think Priti Patel and Suella Braverman) to go off on policy frolics such as ‘a giant wave machine’ (to deter boats) or the planned Rwanda deportations, reallocating staff who would normally be working on asylum decisions to assist with these initiatives, which frequently come to nothing.
Hostile environment
If you have a sense of decency and a liberal conscience you might easily imagine that in the last 15 years the Home Office has not been a very congenial place to pursue a civil service career. Theresa May was two years into her job as home secretary when she made her strategy explicit, telling the Telegraph in May 2012 that her aim “was to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration”.
Sarah Teather, sometime Liberal Democrat MP and minister for children is quoted in The Guardian (April 2018) as saying:
“The Home Office has a culture of enforcement and disbelief which runs deep into the walls, but it is politically led. It’s a culture from the top, and it has been a bit rich for the (then) home secretary, Amber Rudd, to blame civil servants. When you’ve had a Conservative home secretary that long, you cannot moan when civil servants deliver those policies.”
Frustrated civil servants
Senior Home Office civil servants speak of their frustration at not being listened to by politicians who are obsessed with their personal projects, criticism of which (possibly in terms of unwise resource allocation) are simply batted away.
One example is Sir Philip Rutnam, who resigned as permanent secretary following a series of run-ins with Patel. In March 2021, Rutnam received a £340,000 settlement in his case for unfair dismissal. Rutnam claimed he was the victim of a “vicious and orchestrated” briefing campaign after trying to get Patel to change her behaviour.
Given these conditions, the abysmal productivity of asylum decision-makers becomes readily understandable. Is it possible to do better?
More staff and a positive approach
Germany offers an example of how the problem can be tackled. Every year they receive far more asylum applications than the UK. For example, in 2015 Germany had a huge influx of mainly Syrian refugees. Over a million people lodged applications in 2015–16 and, as in the UK, swathes of people waited in limbo.
The German government’s positive approach was a huge staff recruitment campaign resulting in an almost fivefold increase to just under 10,000 (the UK employs 1,200). Germany created the largest asylum processing system in the world, and added improvements in procedures and quality control. In 2023 migrant numbers are rising fast and Germany too is having difficulties, but the official mindset is still nowhere near as negative as that which pervades our own Home Office.
