Karl Williams is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies.
Unless the Government takes decisive action, the crisis in the English Channel is only going to deepen. That is why, in a new report published by the Centre for Policy Studies, Nick Timothy and I are calling for a radical overhaul of Britain’s failing immigration and asylum system.
In exclusive polling commissioned for the report, we found that fully 74 per cent of voters think the Government is handling the situation in the Channel badly. And no wonder. After all the hard-line rhetoric, the deployment of the Royal Navy and a series of costly deals with France, still the migrants come.
It is hard to understate the scale of the problem. Over 44,000 migrants have crossed the English Channel in small boats so far this year, including one to two per cent of the adult male population of Albania. This brings the total number of illegal maritime entrants since 2018 up to 83,000. That’s more migrants landing on our shores than there are regular soldiers in the British army. If they were all gathered in one place, they could populate a large town like Redditch or Hastings.
Yet this could be just the beginning. The number of illegal maritime arrivals increased sixfold in 2019, then quadrupled in 2020 before tripling to 28,526 in 2021. This year we are on track for 47,000 and a figure of over 60,000 in 2023 looks entirely plausible on the current trajectory. Cumulatively we’re looking at a medium-sized city within a few years.
Even if the crossings were to stabilise at current annual levels, the existing system simply cannot cope. The asylum case backlog has risen to over 160,000 and the share of new cases processed within six months has fallen to just 10%. Removals of people without a right to be here, included convicted criminals, have plummeted. The annual asylum bill has more than tripled to £2.1bn – enough to cover the wages of 62,000 nurses.
Many pro-immigration activists argue that the solution to the Channel crisis is “safe and legal routes” for asylum seekers to reach the UK. But this is absurd: the illegal crossings would stop only if such routes were unrestricted and unlimited in scope. And if numbers were unlimited, our borders nullified, it is hard to see how the immigration and asylum system – or indeed public services and our social fabric – could cope. We would be effectively abolishing ourselves as a nation state.
It is partly to refute such arguments that we made the first chapter of our report effectively a standalone essay on ‘The Case for Control’. This case is built on five pillars: social, cultural, economic, practical and democratic. There is not the space to rehearse all the arguments here. But it is worth dwelling on the democratic case for a moment, for of course, the Channel crossings are just one part of the broader immigration picture.
The fieldwork for our polling was carried out before it emerged that net migration had smashed all previous records, coming in at 504,000. Yet even so, for 27 per cent of voters, immigration was a crucial issue. Even when immigration was not a foremost concern, many were discontented. A solid majority, 59 per cent, thought immigration too high over the last ten years; just nine per cent thought it too low.
This should not be surprising. The population of England and Wales increased by 3.5 million between 2011 and 2021, with net migration accounting for 57.5 per cent of the increase. This is despite the fact that in every general election since 2010, and the Brexit referendum, the winning side promised to reduce overall immigration. The crisis in the Channel is just the most visible testament to a decade of broken immigration promises.
Fixing Britain’s immigration and asylum system and stopping the crossings is therefore rightly a top priority for the Government. But in order to do so, ministers need first to identify exactly what has gone wrong. That is the focus of the second chapter of our report.
Partly this is a tale of under-resourcing and bureaucratic dysfunction. From 2013, the UK Border Agency was split into the three directorates, but since then, the enforcement budget has fallen from £440 million to £420 million – a real terms decrease of 16 per cent. Meanwhile, productivity in the wider system, hit first by the Windrush scandal and then by Covid, has yet to recover.
Administrative malaise has been deepened by the legal morass which officials have to navigate while being harassed by (often taxpayer-funded) activist groups engaged in guerrilla lawfare. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 is now regularly abused to prevent deportation. When this fails, the fall-back position is the ECHR and the UK case law which has grown up around it.
So overall the UK is seen as a soft touch. Since 2004, the number of enforced returns from the UK has declined by almost 90 per cent. Irregular migrants know that if they can make it to Britain and claim asylum, they are unlikely ever to be removed. This understanding underpins the business model of the people smugglers and is the root cause of the Channel crisis.
Stopping the crossings therefore requires solving a complicated and interlocking set of problems. In our report, described by the Home Secretary in her forward as ‘a vital and necessary contribution to the policy debate’, we ultimately make 41 recommendations clustered around three policy pillars: offshoring of asylum seekers, better immigration enforcement and dedicated resettlement schemes.
First, on offshoring, we need to ensure that it is impossible in law to claim asylum in the UK after travelling from a safe country. No migrant who arrives illegally should ever be allowed to settle here. So the Rwanda scheme must be implemented at scale. We should be prepared, if necessary, to relocate tens of thousands of illegal maritime entrants. In the end, this will probably entail repealing the Human Rights Act and leaving the ECHR.
Some critics argue that offshoring would be absurdly costly on a per capita basis. But this overlooks the crucial deterrent effect – the money saved on every migrant who decides not to make the journey and claim asylum in the UK. Our modelling, drawing on the hugely successful Australian example of ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, shows that this approach could feasibly yield savings of c.£8 billion over five years.
The second policy pillar is designed to support the first. For without tougher and more intelligent immigration enforcement, many migrants might still be tempted to make the journey here, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to disappear into the underground economy with ease.
We therefore propose a raft of new measures designed to tighten up the leaky system. For example, cuts to the budget of Immigration Enforcement need to be reversed, and its powers enhanced. In particular, Parliament should change the law to permit the open-ended detention of illegal entrants, while barracks-style accommodation should be expanded. This would end exorbitant hotel bills.
Finally, all future grants of asylum should be handled exclusively through dedicated schemes – as in the Syrian crisis – so we can choose who comes here and how, with annual numbers capped by statute at a maximum of 20,000. That way we can properly target scarce resources at the most vulnerable. But to enable this, we first need to secure our borders through offshoring and improved enforcement.
If we reconstruct our immigration and asylum system atop these three pillars, we will have a system comprehensively based on control and deterrence that would allow us to put a stop to the Channel crossings. And we would therefore be doing what a large majority of voters, especially Conservative and ex-Conservative voters, want.
Karl Williams is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies.
Unless the Government takes decisive action, the crisis in the English Channel is only going to deepen. That is why, in a new report published by the Centre for Policy Studies, Nick Timothy and I are calling for a radical overhaul of Britain’s failing immigration and asylum system.
In exclusive polling commissioned for the report, we found that fully 74 per cent of voters think the Government is handling the situation in the Channel badly. And no wonder. After all the hard-line rhetoric, the deployment of the Royal Navy and a series of costly deals with France, still the migrants come.
It is hard to understate the scale of the problem. Over 44,000 migrants have crossed the English Channel in small boats so far this year, including one to two per cent of the adult male population of Albania. This brings the total number of illegal maritime entrants since 2018 up to 83,000. That’s more migrants landing on our shores than there are regular soldiers in the British army. If they were all gathered in one place, they could populate a large town like Redditch or Hastings.
Yet this could be just the beginning. The number of illegal maritime arrivals increased sixfold in 2019, then quadrupled in 2020 before tripling to 28,526 in 2021. This year we are on track for 47,000 and a figure of over 60,000 in 2023 looks entirely plausible on the current trajectory. Cumulatively we’re looking at a medium-sized city within a few years.
Even if the crossings were to stabilise at current annual levels, the existing system simply cannot cope. The asylum case backlog has risen to over 160,000 and the share of new cases processed within six months has fallen to just 10%. Removals of people without a right to be here, included convicted criminals, have plummeted. The annual asylum bill has more than tripled to £2.1bn – enough to cover the wages of 62,000 nurses.
Many pro-immigration activists argue that the solution to the Channel crisis is “safe and legal routes” for asylum seekers to reach the UK. But this is absurd: the illegal crossings would stop only if such routes were unrestricted and unlimited in scope. And if numbers were unlimited, our borders nullified, it is hard to see how the immigration and asylum system – or indeed public services and our social fabric – could cope. We would be effectively abolishing ourselves as a nation state.
It is partly to refute such arguments that we made the first chapter of our report effectively a standalone essay on ‘The Case for Control’. This case is built on five pillars: social, cultural, economic, practical and democratic. There is not the space to rehearse all the arguments here. But it is worth dwelling on the democratic case for a moment, for of course, the Channel crossings are just one part of the broader immigration picture.
The fieldwork for our polling was carried out before it emerged that net migration had smashed all previous records, coming in at 504,000. Yet even so, for 27 per cent of voters, immigration was a crucial issue. Even when immigration was not a foremost concern, many were discontented. A solid majority, 59 per cent, thought immigration too high over the last ten years; just nine per cent thought it too low.
This should not be surprising. The population of England and Wales increased by 3.5 million between 2011 and 2021, with net migration accounting for 57.5 per cent of the increase. This is despite the fact that in every general election since 2010, and the Brexit referendum, the winning side promised to reduce overall immigration. The crisis in the Channel is just the most visible testament to a decade of broken immigration promises.
Fixing Britain’s immigration and asylum system and stopping the crossings is therefore rightly a top priority for the Government. But in order to do so, ministers need first to identify exactly what has gone wrong. That is the focus of the second chapter of our report.
Partly this is a tale of under-resourcing and bureaucratic dysfunction. From 2013, the UK Border Agency was split into the three directorates, but since then, the enforcement budget has fallen from £440 million to £420 million – a real terms decrease of 16 per cent. Meanwhile, productivity in the wider system, hit first by the Windrush scandal and then by Covid, has yet to recover.
Administrative malaise has been deepened by the legal morass which officials have to navigate while being harassed by (often taxpayer-funded) activist groups engaged in guerrilla lawfare. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 is now regularly abused to prevent deportation. When this fails, the fall-back position is the ECHR and the UK case law which has grown up around it.
So overall the UK is seen as a soft touch. Since 2004, the number of enforced returns from the UK has declined by almost 90 per cent. Irregular migrants know that if they can make it to Britain and claim asylum, they are unlikely ever to be removed. This understanding underpins the business model of the people smugglers and is the root cause of the Channel crisis.
Stopping the crossings therefore requires solving a complicated and interlocking set of problems. In our report, described by the Home Secretary in her forward as ‘a vital and necessary contribution to the policy debate’, we ultimately make 41 recommendations clustered around three policy pillars: offshoring of asylum seekers, better immigration enforcement and dedicated resettlement schemes.
First, on offshoring, we need to ensure that it is impossible in law to claim asylum in the UK after travelling from a safe country. No migrant who arrives illegally should ever be allowed to settle here. So the Rwanda scheme must be implemented at scale. We should be prepared, if necessary, to relocate tens of thousands of illegal maritime entrants. In the end, this will probably entail repealing the Human Rights Act and leaving the ECHR.
Some critics argue that offshoring would be absurdly costly on a per capita basis. But this overlooks the crucial deterrent effect – the money saved on every migrant who decides not to make the journey and claim asylum in the UK. Our modelling, drawing on the hugely successful Australian example of ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, shows that this approach could feasibly yield savings of c.£8 billion over five years.
The second policy pillar is designed to support the first. For without tougher and more intelligent immigration enforcement, many migrants might still be tempted to make the journey here, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to disappear into the underground economy with ease.
We therefore propose a raft of new measures designed to tighten up the leaky system. For example, cuts to the budget of Immigration Enforcement need to be reversed, and its powers enhanced. In particular, Parliament should change the law to permit the open-ended detention of illegal entrants, while barracks-style accommodation should be expanded. This would end exorbitant hotel bills.
Finally, all future grants of asylum should be handled exclusively through dedicated schemes – as in the Syrian crisis – so we can choose who comes here and how, with annual numbers capped by statute at a maximum of 20,000. That way we can properly target scarce resources at the most vulnerable. But to enable this, we first need to secure our borders through offshoring and improved enforcement.
If we reconstruct our immigration and asylum system atop these three pillars, we will have a system comprehensively based on control and deterrence that would allow us to put a stop to the Channel crossings. And we would therefore be doing what a large majority of voters, especially Conservative and ex-Conservative voters, want.