Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, has stated that the UK’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 avoided answering 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 praised 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…
2023-06-04 05:43:20
Link from www.theguardian.com
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