So many asylum seekers have been allowed to remain in Britain by officials going through a backlog of cases that it amounted to an amnesty, MPs said yesterday.
The cross-party Home Affairs Select Committee said in a report that the Border Agency was on course to hit its target of dealing with a backlog of about 450,000 asylum cases by the summer but only by increasingly granting applicants permission to stay.
Of the 403,500 cases concluded so far, 40 per cent had been allowed to remain in Britain while so far only 38,000 applicants had had their claims rejected and had been removed from Britain.
In up to 74,500 cases the applicants could not be found, meaning it was unknown if they were still in the country, had left voluntarily or were dead, a figure the committee said was “indefensible”.
“We consider that in practice an amnesty has taken place, at considerable cost to the taxpayer,” the report said.
The committee concluded that a very large number of people remained in Britain who had no right to be there or who would have been removed if their cases had been dealt with more promptly.
“Though progress has been made it is clear that the UK Border Agency is not fit for purpose,” said Keith Vaz, the committee’s chairman.
“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.”
Immigration has long been a major issue for politicians and the public, with Prime Minister David Cameron saying in April uncontrolled migration had led to “discomfort and disjointedness” in some neighbourhoods.
He said between 1997 and 2009, 2.2 million more people came to live in Britain than left.
The coalition has promised to take action to deal with a problem it says it inherited from the previous Labour administration, such as by limiting the number of skilled immigrants from outside the European Union.
“We are already radically reforming the points-based system and other routes of entry that have been subject to widespread abuse and will re-introduce exit checks by 2015,” said Immigration Minister Damian Green.
“We are making greater use of intelligence to remove people with no right to be here and are concluding individual cases faster.”
