UK

HubMP2012

Migrants are not the problem – this is just another distraction

AUGUST 29, 2025

The current situation is largely the creation of successive governments, argues Nadine Finch.

The growth of activity by and support for the far right is at a level that has not been witnessed in Britain since the 1970s and 1980s. Its primary targets are migrants and their communities. This time the fascist regalia and narrative are not so much in evidence, but the racist ideology is just as clear. The flying of flags from lampposts and the drawing of the St George’s flags on roads and pavements are also all too reminiscent of the no-go Loyalist areas in Northern Ireland. But both the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission have recognised the adverse effects of the use of flags and symbols to intimidate and denigrate communities seen to be different.

Here the Prime Minister rarely makes statements without being framed by Union Jacks and the Government’s social media repeatedly portrays asylum seekers as illegal entrants. It also does nothing to call out the hate directed at them. The added irony is that it is the Government itself that is continuing to place asylum seekers in hotels run by contractors who make millions by providing sub-standard accommodation.  

Over the summer, Farage ramped up anti-immigrant falsehoods. The Government has sought to appease him by implicitly accepting them and issuing a raft of responses that are not capable of solving the largely economic and social basis for the growing support for populist racist views. It agrees that asylum seekers should not be housed in hotels, but does not provide alternative accommodation, which would meet the needs of traumatised individuals and stop the profiteering by private accommodation providers. It also agrees that applications and appeals should be determined within a reasonable time, but does not provide funding for this to be achieved in a manner that will meet the requirements of international law.

In the context of the ‘asylum hotels’, prior to 1999 asylum seekers were provided with a percentage of income support and were dispersed to available public and private accommodation. But that Labour Government then created a separate asylum support scheme with its own costly bureaucracy and increasingly entered into expensive contracts with private accommodation providers, all too willing to be paid well for accommodation they had not been able to persuade others to rent at such a profit. This eventually led to three private contractors entering into even more profitable contracts with the Government to use hotels standing empty, as a result of Covid and the economic downturn.

Yes, there is an increase in the numbers of asylum seekers arriving here who require accommodation whilst their claims are determined. But they are not illegal entrants. That is just the terminology created by the previous Government and happily adopted by the current Government. Compliance with international law, in the form of the Refugee Convention, requires the UK to determine claims from individual refugees, who have arrived on its territory. In the past, they were granted temporary admission for this purpose. This was not leave to enter and remain but provided limited legal status during asylum proceedings.

And yes, 88% of asylum seekers do now arrive in small boats. They do so as the so-called safe routes are not open to the majority of those fleeing persecution and deprive individual asylum seekers of any agency to seek protection for themselves and their families. Covid, the closure of certain routes due to the war in Ukraine, increased penalties on those operating ferries and aircraft, hostility to migrants in large parts of Europe, existing family and community in Britain and, most importantly, the persecution they are fleeing have forced women, men and children into small boats to make the dangerous crossing from France and Belgium.  The majority are fleeing persecution in well-publicised war zones and/or repressive regimes in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Syria, Iran and Sudan.

The Government is obliged by the Refugee Convention to determine their applications. The ability to return adult asylum seekers to EU states they may have passed through, or have a connection with, ended when the UK left the EU. The bilateral agreements the Government is now boasting about are extremely limited and still to be proved effective.

The last Government virtually brought decision-making in asylum cases to a halt in order to emphasise its one solution: giving asylum seekers a one-way ticket to Rwanda for their applications to be resolved there.  Since taking office, the Government has done little to address a major obstacle to swift decision making; that of the Immigration Service within the Home Office. It is said to have a reputation within the Civil Service itself for seeing its major task as being to reduce the number of asylum seekers and migrants being permitted to remain here and having failed to build an internal culture of excellence and expertise based on compliance with international law.

Concern about this is also widespread amongst the legal profession and UNHCR has tried to raise standards within the Service for decades. Many working in the sector have experienced ‘the culture of disbelief’ that persists and are aware that the Home Office management has consistently adopted a fire-fighting approach, moving asylum case workers to ad hoc teams; working at one time on settlement for EU citizens and more recently on processing deportations. This de-skills case workers and destroys morale.

Targets for deportation, anti-migrant rhetoric by the Government and instructions to speed up processing applications for asylum seekers may then blend together into a form of negative case-hardening against all applicants. Lack of expertise and increased targets for decisions can also lead to mistakes. In the year from June 2024 to June 2025, the number of asylum applications allowed by the Home Office decreased from 58% to 48%. The conditions in the countries from which asylum seekers were fleeing did not decrease at a similar rate. For example, discrimination and repression by the Taliban in Afghanistan against women and political opponents appears to be increasing. Yet the numbers of applications allowed from Afghan asylum seekers, decreased from 96% to 40% in that year.

It is not possible to quantify the effect of all of the factors referred to above, as no data on the quality of decisions has been released by the Home Office for 2024/5. But statistics do show that in 2023/4 only 52% of decisions passed Home Office internal quality checks.

In terms of asylum appeals, the Rwanda effect and the efforts of the current Government to ramp up the number of decisions has led to the number of appeals to the First Tier Immigration and Asylum Chamber rocketing from 7,173 at the start of 2023 to 34,814 at the end of 2024.

In November 2024, Lady Chief Justice Carr, told the House of Commons Justice Select Committee that the key issues facing the judiciary and the courts were increasing backlogs, chronic underfunding, staffing shortages and a lack of capacity affecting both courts and tribunals. She also noted that there had been an increase in 82% in cases being appealed to the First Tier Tribunal of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber.

She went on to explain that some 150 new fee-paid First Tier Tribunal Judges were being recruited and should be in post by the autumn of 2025.They will join existing salaried and fee-paid judges. Fee paid judges sit for a certain number of days per year, but usually also remain in practice as barristers and solicitors. This gives the Tribunal the flexibility to respond to the ebb and flow of arrivals of asylum seekers in response to invasions, civil unrest and persecution and their consequent appeals.

The ceiling of sitting days can be increased very quickly but this, of course, is dependent on the Treasury releasing its steel grip on the supply of financial resources to the Ministry of Justice. It also depends on the Government refraining from populist faux-solutions and assessing with competence the money and staff needed to respond to the current flood of appeals.

But in another example of soundbite government, it announced over the Bank Holiday weekend that there would be a new system of independent adjudicators. There was no explanation about why they would be replacing the salaried and fee-paid judges that had already been recruited. There was no confirmation that they would be sufficiently trained and experienced to reach decisions on complicated cases in accordance with international law.  There has been no consultation with the Tribunal judiciary or any indication about how legislation would be amended to make the soundbite a reality.

It is also unclear how the creation of independent adjudicators outside the existing Tribunal system will affect the role of the Upper Tribunal of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber, which operates at a High Court level. It has a number of very important roles in addition to the core one of hearing appeals from the First Tier. One of these is the issuing of country guidance decisions.

One of the most challenging of tasks for both Home Office case workers and immigration judges is assessing the subjective fear of an individual asylum seeker in the context of the current conditions in their country of origin. The Immigration Service does have its own guidance on countries from which asylum seekers arrive. But this is over-reliant on desk research of other sources, which also rely on desk research, and largely ignores the opinions of academic and legal experts, who are often deemed to be ‘hired guns’ favouring applicants. This leads to many appeals against Home Office decisions.

To combat this trend and assist immigration judges, the Upper Tribunal created a system in which experienced Upper Tribunal Judges selected test cases where they reviewed a wide range of documentary and expert evidence in order to issue Country Guidance Decisions for other immigration judges.

By this and other means, the judiciary has worked hard to combat the high level of errors made by the Immigration Service, which is apparent from the fact that since 2019/2020, just under 50% of appeals have been allowed. At the same time, many judges have to ensure that appellants, who can longer access a legal representative due to a shortage of legal aid provision, have a fair chance of understanding the proceedings and presenting their case.  

Choices made to restrict funding to legal aid and the Tribunal system and the failure to address the endemic inadequacies within the Immigration Service have real-world consequences. These affect not only asylum seekers and their communities but the cohesion of the society around them by feeding the lies and prejudices of those seeking to exploit racism and economic and social deprivation.

Nadine Finch is a former Upper Tribunal Immigration Judge.

Image: c/o Labour Hub