Asylum seeker ‘amnesty’ condemned

So many asylum seekers have been given leave to remain in the UK that it “amounts to an amnesty”, MPs have said.

Out of 403,500 cases dealt with by the UK Border Agency (UKBA), just 9% resulted in removal while 40% – 161,000 – of applicants were allowed to stay.

The Home Affairs Committee also said it was “indefensible” that in one in six cases, the UKBA simply had “no idea” what had happened to the applicant.

Immigration Minister Damian Green said there was “absolutely no amnesty”.

He said the government had “eliminated” a backlog of 450,000 asylum cases – the scale of which first emerged in 2006.

At the time, the then home secretary John – now Lord – Reid promised to clear it, and the UKBA’s deadline for the completion of that task was this summer.

But in a critical report, the cross-party Home Affairs Committee said that target “seems to have been achieved largely through increasing resort to grants of permission to stay”.

Guidance was revised to allow officials to consider granting leave to applicants who had been in the UK for between six and eight years – a reduction on the 10 to 12 years that applied at the start of the process, the MPs said.

Giving 161,000 people leave to remain was “such a large proportion that it amounts in effect to an amnesty”, they added.

The report said another 74,500 asylum seekers have had their cases concluded simply because “the applicants cannot be found and it is unknown whether they are in the UK, have left the country or are dead”.

“We consider this indefensible,” the MPs said. “Moreover, public confidence in immigration controls is severely undermined by such situations.

“A robust immigration system requires those administering it to have an appropriate system in place that will mean applicants are not lost or untraceable.”

The coalition government has continued the last Labour government’s ban on low-skilled workers from outside Europe, but has also introduced a cap on non-EU skilled workers as part of a pledge to bring net migration down to “tens of thousands” by the end of the Parliament.

However, the committee report stated that the UKBA had “not carried out checks on all those employers registered as sponsors of skilled migrants” and there were “grave doubts” about whether it even had the capacity to do so.

The agency also “does not systematically follow up intelligence of possible illegal migrants” and does not take tough enough action against migrant workers whose visas have expired.

The report concluded: “The net result is that a very large number of people remain in the UK who either have no right to be here, or who would have been removed had their cases been dealt with in a timely manner.”

Ministers have insisted the UKBA is improving, but Keith Vaz, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, said it was “still not fit for purpose” – echoing the phrase used by Lord Reid when he took over responsibility for immigration in 2006.

“While there is no doubt that individual caseworkers are dedicated and hard-working, there are serious concerns over the agency’s ability to deal with cases and respond to intelligence swiftly and thoroughly,” he added.

Mr Green denied there was any amnesty for asylum seekers, saying: “What we’ve done is get through to the bottom of that huge problem we inherited.

“The main thing is we’ve now eliminated this backlog from the system so we can now get on with the everyday job that the previous government couldn’t because they had that backlog.”

The Home Office later clarified that although all 450,000 cases from the backlog had been looked at, only 403,500 had actually been settled and there was no fixed deadline for dealing with the remaining 46,500.

It said 126,000 cases had been concluded under the coalition government.

For Labour, shadow Home Office minister Gerry Sutcliffe said: “Following the government’s decision to cut over 5,000 staff from the UKBA, we have repeatedly warned the Home Office that enforcement will suffer as a result.

“This report shows that managers and staff at UKBA consistently say there are not sufficient resources to track and return illegal immigrants.

“In addition, the report states that legacy asylum applications are increasingly being given permission to stay rather than the government seeking their removal. In the last few months there has been a significant decrease in the percentage of applicants and dependents sent home.”

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