UK asylum system ‘riddled with abuse’, says immigration minister

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The immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, has said Britain’s asylum system is “riddled with abuse” and that targets to reduce net immigration are not “particularly helpful”, despite previous pledges in successive Conservative election manifestos.

Jenrick also deflected questions on Sunday about how many people had been removed from the UK under a “gold standard” UK-Albanian deal, which targets people arriving illegally from Albania mainly by crossing the Channel.

He said hundreds of people had been removed but that others were still being housed in hotels or had absconded. Jenrick told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge On Sunday show it was still “early days” under the deal and that “spurious last minute claims” had held up deportations.

The deal with the Albanian authorities had been lauded by Rishi Sunak as the prime minister came under pressure from the right of the Tory party after figures showed more than a third of people who arrived on small boats in the UK via the Channel in the first nine months of 2022 were from Albania.

While Jenrick initially said thousands had been removed to Albania, he went on to qualify this by saying: “There are hundreds of Albanians who’ve arrived on small boats who have been placed on those flights as a result of the processes we put in place and the agreements that we’ve reached with Albania.”

The government is under renewed pressure from its own backbenches after figures published last month showed net immigration to the UK had increased from 488,000 in 2021 to 606,000 in 2022. The figure for last year is nearly double the number in 2018.

Jenrick told the BBC that net immigration was “far too high today”. But when asked about a pledge under David Cameron to limit immigration to “tens of thousands” of people a year, Jenrick said: “I don’t think that targets like that are particularly helpful because migration is an extremely challenging space where behaviours are constantly changing.”

He said a lot of progress had been made on illegal immigration in a short period of time, with “really unique landmark deals” with France resulting in a “big increase” in the number of interceptions on the beaches.

But Jenrick said the asylum system, which, according to him had a backlog of more than 150,000 cases, must be changed “fundamentally”.

He said the illegal migration bill would alleviate the pressure. The government’s asylum bill – which is supposed to change the law so that those who arrive in the UK by irregular means can be removed to a third country such as Rwanda – goes before the House of Lords this week. It is expected to face significant opposition from peers and could be amended or delayed until later in the year.

Defending the government’s record during a round of broadcast interviews on Sunday, Jenrick said a lot of progress had been made on illegal immigration in a short period of time.

But he told the BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “The asylum system is riddled with abuse, we have to be honest with ourselves.”

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Jenrick also addressed reports from last week that a large group of asylum seekers were left on the street in central London for two nights in a row. Westminster city council’s leader wrote to the home secretary, Suella Braverman, to express “deep concern” that about 40 refugees had been placed in the borough on Wednesday night “without appropriate accommodation or support available … and no prior communication with the local authority”.

Jenrick said: “As I understand what happened here was that these migrants, who had themselves said that they were destitute, they had nowhere to stay, we had offered them a safe bed with board and lodgings in a good-quality hotel in central London.

“Yes, some of them had to share with other people. These are single adult males: I don’t think that’s unreasonable,” he said, adding that the government wanted to reduce the cost to the taxpayer.

Jenrick denied it was government policy to tell asylum seekers they had to share four to a room in hotels, but said it was “completely fair and reasonable” to ask single adult males to share a room.