April 04, 2004
New migrant crisis hits Blunkett
David Leppard
DAVID BLUNKETT, the home secretary, already reeling from the resignation of Beverley Hughes, his immigration minister, was last night facing a fresh crisis over government attempts to manipulate figures for asylum seekers in Britain.
Home Office e-mails leaked to The Sunday Times reveal that Hughes’s office ordered staff to avoid arresting illegal immigrants. Some would have been suspected criminals.
It was feared that the immigrants would apply for asylum if detained and would therefore undermine the prime minister’s pledge to reduce the number of asylum seekers by half.
A number of new civil service whistleblowers have come forward to confirm that the government’s much-trumpeted asylum target was partly achieved by allowing illegal immigrants to stay at liberty.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, yesterday described the e-mails as “devastating” and called for a full independent public inquiry into the matter. “These e-mails show that ministers were operating a policy utterly corrupted by the prime minister’s promise to halve the asylum figures,” he said.
“This non-arrest policy is a public scandal because it’s the Home Office of all people who are talking about not enforcing the law. It simply beggars belief.
“It seems that illegal immigrants, including foreign criminals, were allowed to stay at liberty as a deliberate result of this secret policy.”
The e-mails were written by senior officials in the immigration enforcement directorate, which investigates and arrests illegal immigrants so they can be deported. They were leaked to The Sunday Times by a Home Office official who believes they illustrate how Blunkett’s immigration and asylum policies are a charade.
Dated August 29 last year, the e-mails inform Home Office investigators that a planned raid on a company thought to employ illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers has had to be aborted. This was despite three previous visits by the immigration investigators.
They wanted to raid the company and possibly prosecute it because it was employing “removable offenders”, many of whom were “working under assumed identities”.
However, one senior official told his staff that he feared losing his job unless he could be sure that those likely to be arrested were all failed asylum seekers (FAS).
Immigrants who have failed to obtain asylum rarely reapply and would therefore not increase the figures.
The senior official said: “I have already been speaking to Bev Hughes’s office on another operation and if I report anything other than FASs detected and removed next week, then I will be looking for another job.”
A second official said he feared the raid might result in illegal immigrants other than failed asylum seekers being arrested. These immigrants would be entitled to claim asylum.
One e-mail stated: “We will now cancel this job so as to ensure intake reduction” — a reference, Home Office insiders say, to cutting the asylum “intake”.
The official goes on to say that the raid would be postponed until after September 2003 — the deadline for Tony Blair’s promise to halve asylum applications. “I have reluctantly had to cancel this job. We will look at this post-September, perhaps with a view to doing both (factory) sites.”
The whistleblower who leaked the e-mails said last week that they demonstrated how staff had been told not to look for illegal immigrants during the period in which Blunkett and Hughes had been ordered by Blair to cut asylum figures. “These e-mails are the crown jewels,” he said.
The pressure on the two ministers to devise a system to deal with the asylum crisis began in February 2003 amid mounting public concern over the figures. The number of asylum applications for the previous year had hit a record 84,000.
In an interview on BBC’s Newsnight that month, Blair suddenly announced that the government would halve the number of asylum claims by September 2003.
Home Office officials, desperate to ensure that the promise could be met, backdated the period of Blair’s “year” to October 2002 — the month when figures were running at a record 9,000 applications a month.
They realised that by making October the “baseline” it would be easier for Blunkett to reach Blair’s promise to cut the asylum figures by 50% because the numbers were already starting to fall. However, they had only six months — not a year — to ensure the figures came down to 4,500 a month.
The leaked e-mails are reinforced by statements from four immigration service insiders who have contacted The Sunday Times urging the newspaper to expose the scandal.
They say officials were instructed to “soft pedal” arrests to keep asylum claims low. One, a civil servant in the immigration and nationality directorate’s headquarters in Croydon, south London, provided a written statement. The female official was furious.
“The irony is the trumpeting by the government of their achievement in reducing asylum claims by 50% following Mr Blair’s infamous commitment to do so on Newsnight,” she wrote.
“It is a fact that during the six-month period over which these figures were measured (March-September 2003), immigration enforcement staff were told not to conduct visits to arrest illegal immigrants unless they were absolutely certain they were failed asylum seekers, lest any hitherto undetected illegal immigrants encountered claimed asylum and thereby boosted the number of asylum claims.”
The Sunday Times first learnt of the potential scandal when another source, an assistant director in the immigration service’s enforcement directorate, approached the newspaper last summer — just days before the leaked e-mails were written. That official stated he and his colleagues had been “discouraged” from arresting illegal immigrants in order to deflate the asylum figures artificially.
“Arrests have been discouraged,” he said. “Managers have been told that we must be mindful not to increase the (asylum) intake figure. There are many in the country that are working illegally but we haven’t done anything with them.
“There are thousands and thousands and we are discouraged from going where we might get large numbers of them because that will increase the intake figure.”
The official claimed he had been criticised by his line manager for arresting several dozen illegal immigrants.
Two other enforcement officials now retired said enforcement budgets had been cut to prevent too many arrests of illegals. One said: “Enforcement officers have been sidetracked from pro-active investigation of suspected illegal entrants in order to reduce the flow of illegal entrants using the ‘asylum’ excuse for being in the UK.
“All that was required was to reduce the number of enforcement visits against illegal entrants by immigration staff, thus eliminating large numbers of illegal entrants from the ranks of potential asylum seekers.”
The Tories will this week step up their attack on Blunkett by focusing on the “chain of command” behind the order.
During the high point of Labour’s asylum crisis, Downing Street ordered the Home Office to report figures each week. The Conservatives want to know exactly what pressure ministers put on their staff to deliver this target.
Steve Moxon, the civil servant whistleblower whose original allegations about a secret policy to “rubber stamp” applications from east European economic migrants to enter or stay in Britain, sparked the crisis that led to Hughes’s resignation. He said there could be only one possible interpretation of the leaked e-mails.
“This amounts to an instruction from the minister of state’s private office to tell staff not to arrest illegal immigrants,” said Moxon, who is facing an internal disciplinary inquiry for speaking to The Sunday Times.
Blair gave Hughes no option but to resign last week once she had admitted that she had been warned a year ago of problems in Romania and Bulgaria.
The prime minister overruled Blunkett, who was fighting to save his minister. Blair was conscious from briefings by his pollsters that the immigration issue could greatly damage Labour at the next general election. He will seek to put the crisis behind him this week at an emergency immigration summit with cabinet ministers.
New disputes over immigration may be looming. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front in France, has been invited by the British National party to visit the West Midlands later this month.
A Downing Street spokesman said: “The prime minister does not accept immigration is in crisis. However, he does believe there has been a decline in public confidence in the integrity of some of the processes.”
The Home Office said: “The priority has certainly been to remove failed asylum seekers. But ministers have never asked the immigration service to hold back on other operations in order to prevent asylum claims. If they had we would not have removed 12,000 non-asylum illegals and overstayers last year, a record figure.
“Asylum claims have fallen because of the closure of Sangatte (the refugee camp near Calais), the moving of border controls to France and stopping people coming through the Channel tunnel.”
But Davis, Blunkett’s Tory shadow, said the statement did not address key allegations. “They are notably not denying the non-arrest policy,” he said.