OPINION: 'The volume of illegal small boat arrivals has overwhelmed our asylum system'

The Government seeks to take concerted action to stop the illegal small boats into Britain with the passage of the Illegal Migration Bill. It could not come soon enough. The volume of illegal small boat arrivals has overwhelmed our asylum system.

The asylum system currently costs us an eye-watering £3 billion a year and - since 2018 - some 85,000 people have illegally entered the UK by small boat.

Up to £7 million a day is being spent on housing over 40,000 people in hotels. It is unsustainable.

This is why stopping the boats was one of the five promises the Prime Minister made to the public in January. In many ways it is the most difficult of the five and certainly the public will not accept MPs passing laws as evidence of success – there must be delivery.

Ahead of this Bill being passed, the Government announced a new agreement with Albania so the vast majority of Albanian claimants can be removed, with weekly flights until all Albanians in the backlog are sent home. This had a huge impact on Albanian crossings. Before, 43% of all those seeking asylum from the boats were Albanian (and mainly young men).

This has plummeted to less than 2%. Albanian is a safe country which has applied to become a member of the EU. Claims for asylum from Albania are in the main bogus and those who object clearly just want a fully open border into the UK.

The Illegal Migration Bill is a critical step in combatting people traffickers who are ruthless organised criminals who trade in human misery and desperation. To tackle this, people who enter Britain via this illegal route (from the safe country of France, remember) will be removed, blocked from returning to the UK and prevented from seeking British citizenship in future.

They will not get bail or be able to seek judicial review for the first 28 days of their detention, and we will control our borders by putting on a new cap on the number of refugees the country will settle through safe and legal routes, which will be set annually by Parliament.

There will also be a new legal duty on the Home Secretary to detain and remove those who arrive illegally (to Rwanda or another safe third country). It is a duty which will take precedence over someone’s right to UK asylum. All of this should make a significant and positive impact upon this problem.

The number of displaced peoples around the globe is staggering. 89.3 million people at the end of 2021 were forcibly displaced. Global refugee figures are at an all-time high as are general migration trends.

Britain is the second biggest granter of Asylum claims in Europe bar Sweden. Since 2015, we have offered a safe and legal route to the UK to almost half a million men, women and children seeking safety, as well as family members of refugees.This is one of the reasons why Britain is so popular. According to Migration Watch, in 2021 the UK’s asylum grant rate at the initial decision stage was almost three times that of France. The UK accepted 72 per cent compared with France’s 25 per cent.

This is why we have to have a tougher approach and why this Bill is central to bringing round a measure of stability and control in order to concentrate on those who come through safe and legal routes like our UK Resettlement Scheme, including Community Sponsorship and the Mandate Resettlement schemes which allow us to support the most vulnerable refugees direct from regions of conflict and instability, rather than the cohort of single young men currently coming over on illegal and dangerous small boats.

We should not grant asylum to people who are already in safe countries like France, except in the most compelling of cases. It a basic issue of fairness and the right thing to do.