The Minister for Immigration (Robert Jenrick)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns) for securing the debate and for speaking so powerfully on behalf of his constituents. First and foremost, I want to pay tribute to Thomas Roberts, a young man with a bright future ahead of him whose life was cut short, and to extend my sympathies and those of the Government to his family and friends for their profound loss. This was an horrific crime which has robbed a young man of his future and caused intolerable suffering to his loved ones.
In any such case, justice must be delivered and the perpetrator punished. I welcome the life sentence that has been handed down by the Crown court, and I can assure my right hon. Friend that Mr Abdulrahimzai will be considered for deportation so that removal coincides with the end of his custodial sentence. As my right hon. Friend said, that individual abused the generosity of our country, and exploited our asylum and immigration system with terrible consequences. However, when a crime as abhorrent as this occurs, we must also confront the difficult questions posed by the case and ensure that our systems and processes are as effective and robust as they can be. That is what my right hon. Friend and his constituents would expect and what the broader British public would expect, and I can also assure my right hon. Friend, and indeed all Members, that the Government recognise the need for this case to be comprehensively examined. I have already asked the Home Office to conduct an investigation of the circumstances surrounding it.
While I completely understand the desire for immediate answers, I hope that my right hon. Friend will understand if I refrain from going too far into the detail while that investigation is ongoing, but I can provide some immediate reflections on the circumstances surrounding the case. All asylum claimants should be subject to robust mandatory security checks against their claimed identity, including criminality checks on UK databases. This happens when we intercept individuals such as those who arrive on small boats at Western Jet Foil in Kent and are subject to checks at the Manston centre. However, we need to strengthen ties with international partners to make vital intelligence- sharing more seamless, for instance through the sharing of criminal conviction data. Individuals attempting to cheat our immigration system using multiple names—or aliases—and ages must face decisive action. It is unacceptable that we place foster carers, schools and others who support individuals in intolerable and dangerous positions because we do not have access to sufficient data.
Another issue on which we should reflect, which my right hon. Friend rightly raised, is the need for robust age assessment measures. The age of a person arriving in the UK is normally established from the documents with which they have travelled, but that has proved challenging because so many arrivals who claim to be children do not have any definitive documentary evidence to support their age claims. Under the current process, when an individual claims to be a child without documentary evidence, and when there is reason to doubt their claimed age, immigration officers are required to make an initial age assessment to determine whether the individual should be treated as a child or an adult. If doubt remains about whether the claimant is an adult or a child, they are referred to a local authority, such as that of my right hon. Friend, for further consideration of their age and treated as a child for immigration purposes until that further assessment has been completed. Clearly this case illustrates why we need a more consistent and robust approach.
Given the difficult task of accurately assessing someone’s age and the serious risks when we fail to do so, the Home Secretary and I are considering introducing scientific age assessment methods at the earliest opportunity. This is being done in fellow western democracies such as Norway, Denmark and Sweden. It is essential to widen the evidence available to decision makers and improve the accuracy of their decisions. It will also act as a deterrent to those who flagrantly abuse the system and put others at risk by posing as children. The report from the Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee was published by the Home Office on 10 January, and we will now consider the recommendations. We will bring forward proposals at the earliest opportunity.
Turning to the wider issue of hotel accommodation in my right hon. Friend’s constituency, we currently accommodate around 650 supported asylum seekers in Bournemouth, mostly in temporary hotel accommodation. There are 10 supported asylum seekers in longer-term dispersal accommodation, and there are no bridging hotels currently housing unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Let me perfectly clear that I share my right hon. Friend’s deep frustration, and I acknowledge the impact that this is having on his local community and on the business community in his constituency. It is a vibrant and beautiful tourist destination that wants to make use of its hotels for better purposes.
By national standards, those numbers are low. There are more than 150 local authorities that support larger populations of dispersed asylum seekers and 50 local authorities with larger overall total supported asylum seekers. Taking account of the overall population in Bournemouth, supported asylum seekers account for 0.16% of the local population. There are more than 110 local authorities that have a higher concentration of supported asylum seekers. This is not to diminish the burdens; it is merely to contextualise them and to show the scale of the challenge that now confronts us, to which we as a Government must find answers.
We need to ensure that there is proper engagement with the local community when we stand up this new accommodation, and I have made that point on numerous occasions. We must ensure that the Home Office now implements better procedures to let local authorities, and indeed Members of Parliament, know in good time that we intend to take up this form of accommodation. My officials are now running regular engagement sessions with local authorities to try to improve this process. We take steps to try to minimise the impact of any hotels on the local community. Our service providers have a model to ensure that many on-site facilities and amenities, such as recreation, food and laundry, are provided and that specialist support and security guards are provided 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
None the less, it is absolutely right that my right hon. Friend has raised this on behalf of his constituents. I hope he has seen, in the statement that the Prime Minister set out in December and in subsequent ones that the Home Secretary and I have made, that we are absolutely clear that the mission of this Government in this respect is to end the use of these hotels and to return them to local communities and businesses for their rightful purpose. They are not right for local communities. They are expensive and a waste of money for the taxpayer.
We have committed to clear the backlog of legacy outstanding initial decisions in the asylum system by the end of 2023. To this end, we are doubling the number of asylum caseworkers this year and streamlining and modernising the end-to-end decision-making process. This should ensure that claims can be dealt with quickly, whether because the individual has a high chance of being granted asylum or because they have a very low chance of it, including those from safe countries such as Albania who can be removed forthwith. We will reduce the number of asylum seekers in contingency accommodation as a result. I am pleased to say that that work is not only under way but is already bearing fruit. The legacy backlog is falling as a result of the work now undertaken.
We are also trying to increase the supply of dispersal accommodation, which is a cheaper, less visible and more appropriate way to house these individuals, by working with local authorities across the country to ensure a fair and equitable spread. We are also looking at a small number of larger accommodation sites, the purpose of which will be to ensure that there is decent, but never luxurious, and good value-for-money accommodation, of the kind the public would expect. I hope we will be able to set out more on that in due course.
In the long term, as my right hon. Friend rightly said, the enduring solution to this problem is not procuring more hotels or more sites such as dispersal accommodation but stopping the illegal small boat crossings. It is for that reason that the Prime Minister has made this one of the five priorities by which he wishes this Government to be judged, and it is why the Home Secretary and I are firmly focused on implementing the reforms needed to grip this problem once and for all.
In the coming weeks, we will bring forward new legislation to restore deterrence and to stop the small boats crossing the channel, which I know will have the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West. It will be based on the simple principle that people who come here illegally should have no right to remain here, and that we will fulfil our historic duty as a country to support those genuinely fleeing persecution and human rights abuses around the world, not by enabling people to abuse our system and jump the queue but by working with those in greatest need to pursue targeted resettlement schemes of the kind we have recently done so well as a country with respect to Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria and Hong Kong.
We have presented a comprehensive plan for tackling illegal migration and stopping the boats, with deterrence suffused throughout our approach. A critical element of that is the Rwanda plan, which my right hon. Friend has always supported and which we hope to implement at the earliest opportunity. Putting that plan into action is a first-order priority for this Government.
I finish by repeating my thanks to my right hon. Friend for securing this debate. He is right to raise these issues, and I hope I have given some reassurance about how seriously the Government take them. On the case he highlighted, of a life tragically cut short, my thoughts are with the victim’s loved ones. Protecting the public is the Home Office’s No. 1 priority, and this Government will do all we can to deliver it.
We are, as my right hon. Friend said, a big-hearted country that seeks to protect genuine asylum seekers and offer them a new life in this country, but we will clamp down with the full force of the law on those who choose to abuse our generosity. We will build a new asylum and immigration system that secures our borders and delivers our obligations in a way that the British public would expect.
Question put and agreed to.