50,000 lost asylum seekers puts pressure on Home Secretary

A failure in a number of IT projects means the Home Office has no way of knowing which rejected applicants have actually left the UK, according to the influential Public Accounts Committee.

A long standing backlog of complaints means there are still 11,000 asylum-seekers in the UK who have been waiting for at least seven years to be told if they can stay in the country.

Chair of the committee Margaret Hodge today called on the Government to improve the way it records asylum seekers entering and leaving the country, and to track down the missing applicants.

She said: “It is particularly disturbing to find that, when the Department asked Capita to check over 250,000 case records in 2012 and 2013, Capita had been unable to contact over 50,000 people listed. The Department admitted that they did not know where these 50,000 people were.

“The Department should, as a matter of urgency, take more steps to identify people that remain in the UK illegally and speed up their removal.

The report was last night seized on by the Labour party as evidence that since Homes Secretary Theresa May took over control of the Border Agency the situation has got worse.

Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper MP said: “This report lays bare how Theresa May and David Cameron are presiding over one failure after another in our immigration system.

“Theresa May was very quick to blame the UKBA, but since she took direct control of the border force and immigration system, we have seen backlogs increase sharply and the admission that the Home Office have no idea how many of the 175,000 failed asylum seekers are still here or where 50,000 failed asylum seekers even are.”

The pressure on the UK immigration system was highlighted yesterday when it was claimed that there are around 2,500 migrants in Calais and many are “prepared to die to come to England”, according to the town’s mayor.

Natacha Bouchart told the Home Affairs Select Committee that the border should be returned from Calais to Dover as her town struggles to cope with an increasingly violent population of migrants.

And Ms Bouchart repeated her assertion that Britain’s “much more favourable” benefit system was one of the main reasons migrants are flocking to the French port town.

It comes as former Home Secretary David Blunkett defends controversial immigration remarks by the Defence Secretary.

Michael Fallon was right to speak out about immigration, despite the outcry over his use of the term “swamped”, the Sheffield MP said.

Mr Blunkett said: “Just because immigration is deeply controversial, that cannot mean that we should avoid talking about it.”

Immigration minister James Brokenshire said: “The immigration system we inherited was totally dysfunctional with systematic abuse of family, work and student visas and an agency overseeing it all that was completely incapable of the task.

“UKBA was a failing organisation that could not deliver an efficient immigration system for Britain. This is why we split it up into three separate divisions to improve focus on their specific roles.”