Alf Dubs, member of the House of Lords, writes: Where to start with Patel’s ‘overhaul’ of the rules regarding asylum, announced today?
The Home Office claims it is ‘collapsing’ under the number of asylum claims. The Home Secretary herself described the asylum process as ‘broken’. But this government has been in charge for a decade, during which time the application process has got 8 times longer.
In 2019 there were approx 5 asylum applications for every 10,000 residents in the UK. Compare that to the EU average of 14 asylum applications per 10,000 of the population, placing us 17th in the EU in terms of asylum applications per head of population. The HO has closed the only two legal routes for refugee children stranded in Europe, including lone children and those with family here, to seek asylum in the UK. This is not “fair but firm’ – it keeps families apart and lacks compassion.
Removing legal routes to safety doesn’t prevent criminality – it fuels it. The day the legal routes for refugee children seeking asylum here was closed was a field day for people traffickers and smugglers who exploit despair.
And just to add one final piece of data, because facts matter. There were 29,456 asylum applications in the UK in 2020 – a drop of 18% on 2019. Germany took 7 times that number (121,955), France & Spain took 3 times that number (93,470 and 88, 530) and Greece with a population of 10.7m, took 40,560.
STANCE NEWS 