Home secretary Suella Braverman has said that the Home Office must improve its efficiency having failed to control the UK’s borders properly in the face of mass illegal migration.
Braverman told the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee that people smugglers exploiting vulnerable individuals were squarely to blame but the Home Office needed to take responsibility for failing to properly tackle them.
“We have failed to control our borders, yes, and that's why the prime minister and myself are absolutely determined to fix this problem,” she said.
"I am very clear who's at fault. It's the people coming here illegally, people smugglers, people who are choosing to take an illegal and dangerous journey to come here for economic reasons."
The home secretary also admitted that she’d been made aware as early as September that there were overcrowding issues at the Manston processing centre in Kent and had been warned on four occasions that keeping migrants there in such numbers could constitute a breach of law.
Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, Dame Diana Johnson, revealed that the home secretary was told on September 15 and 22, and on October 1 and 4, that the Home Office could not detain migrants waiting for alternative accommodation.
Manston hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons recently, after the site which was built to house 1,600 migrants on a temporary basis was found to have as many as 4,000 people staying there, with some having been there for more than a month in substandard conditions.
The Home Office reported on Tuesday that the Manston site had finally been cleared, with those staying there placed in temporary alternative accommodation.
36 of those who had been at Manston have since been returned to Albania. Around 12,000 migrants of Albanian origin have arrived in the UK this year by crossing the Channel, the BBC reports.
Conservative MP Lee Anderson told the home secretary that the Home Office was “not fit for purpose at the moment” and that having to house migrants in hotels on a temporary basis was a result of its failure to properly implement border control.
Braverman told the committee that she is looking to quadruple the rate at which asylum cases are processed to deal with the influx of migrants quicker, with authorities only ruling on one asylum case per week on average at the moment.
She said: “We want to deliver sustainable changes to reach a minimum of three decisions, per decision maker, per week by May.”
To adequately resource the staff workforce to follow through on Braverman’s ambitions, the Home Office has doubled the number of asylum staff to more than 1,000 and plans to bring in 500 more judges by March 2023.
Braverman also informed the committee that she still believed in the Rwanda policy that was first outlined when Priti Patel was home secretary and was confident that the courts would rule in favour of its legality.
The UK government has paid Rwanda £140 million as part of the plan, which will see some asylum seekers be sent to the East African country to be processed and claim asylum there instead if they enter the UK via illegal routes.
The move comes in a bid to deter migrants from crossing the Channel, but it has not yet been fully implemented after being held up by legal challenges.
