Liberal Democrats Choose Candidate for Daventry Constituency
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by jonathanharris on 11 January, 2023
There is still a great deal of public anger, understandably, but unfortunately often misdirected with the council team and the police getting the brunt of it. The Home Office have abjectly failed to communicate with the council on this matter. Even now, they are not attending meetings with officers. It is really important that people understand that this is a government decision – it’s their imposition.
The West Northants Council officers, and local councillors, re-emphasised our opposition to the plan to house people at Highgate. The village is entirely inappropriate. However, I urge people, as I did at last night’s public meeting, not to conflate the issue of this location choice and the asylum challenge in its wider picture and look at the facts.
The term ‘illegal immigrant’ is trotted out inappropriately, frequently. The council’s own website states:
There is no such thing as an ‘illegal’ or ‘bogus’ asylum seeker.
Under international law, anyone has the right to apply for asylum in any country, that has signed the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and to remain there until the authorities have assessed their claim. It is a legal process.
Being frank, it’s not helpful that our MP, Chris Heaton-Harris has chosen to use this term in his last-minute consultation. His communication also seeks to justify the government’s Rwanda policy. That’ll be the one where £140 million has already been spent and not a single person removed or an airline that is prepared to take the contract. It is absolutely the right thing to do to seek the views of residents. It is not appropriate to use this as a platform to politicise this local issue, in my opinion.
The UN estimated figure for 2020 was that there were around 281 million international migrants around the world. This equates to 3.6% of the global population. Migration is a global challenge.
The asylum backlog has increased substantially in recent years, due to an increase in applications, and applications taking longer to process. On 31 December 2021, there were around 101,000 people awaiting an initial decision on their asylum claim. This is a more than ten-fold increase on the number awaiting an initial decision on 30 June 2010 (source The Migration Observatory – University of Oxford).
I believe this number is nearer 122,000 now. The share of asylum applications that received an initial decision within six months fell from 87% in Q2 2014 to 6% in Q2 2021.
The backlog of asylum seekers waiting more than six months for a decision to be made on their case has trebled from the time that Priti Patel took over as Home Secretary in 2019. The pandemic may have made the challenge more difficult however, data suggests that the trend began long before.
The reason for the growing delays appears to be straightforward: fewer decisions are being made and the number of asylum claims has increased.
The percentage of cases on which a decision is being made within 6 months has declined drastically since 2014. This is apparently despite an increase in staffing levels.
Brexit and the lapsing of the Dublin III Regulation has also potentially been a contributory factor. Furthermore, a report published in July 2021 by the Refugee Council highlighted that the average wait time for processing is likely to be between one and three years. The report stated that Home Office delays in providing initial decisions on asylum claims were caused mainly by a failure by the Home Office to keep up with the number of decisions that needed to be made.
David Neale, Chief Inspector for Borders and Immigration, highlighted this failure by the Home Office in a report which was published in May 2022. So, inefficient decision-making and ‘internal failings’ of the Home Office have led to this crisis, under the Conservative Government’s leadership.
The link below may be useful for the full detail on the Chief Inspector’s Report:
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