Britain’s asylum system is like a leaky bucket, a Cabinet minister admitted on Tuesday as he defended the transfer of migrants to a barge off Dorset.
“The reality is, if you’ve got a hole in the bucket and if you keep filling it, you’re always going to have a problem,” Justice Secretary Alex Chalk said on Times Radio.
“The reality we have at the moment is there are still people coming over the Channel. The boats are still coming over,” he said.
“So what we’ve got to do, act one scene one, is to stop the boats, because once you stop the boats, there is no longer water flowing into that bucket. And that is why the Illegal Migration Bill is necessarily robust. It’s robust but it’s fair.”
The first 15 migrants, including asylum claimants, on Monday boarded the Bibby Stockholm barge moored in Portland, but the Care4Calais charity said up to 20 others were granted a last-minute reprieve after legal challenges.
The small number who boarded was “frustrating”, Mr Chalk said on BBC Breakfast.
“It requires a huge amount of time and effort and organisation to procure these alternatives. I think the British people would expect their Government to do that if it is our cheaper alternative… it doesn’t diminish our resolve to solve this.”
Mr Chalk also defended a new “professional enablers task force” announced by Home Secretary Suella Braverman to identify “crooked lawyers”, after reports that some solicitors were submitting false asylum claims in return for a fee.
Chalk, a barrister himself, said “the overwhelming majority” of lawyers do a good job. But a small minority were “actively corrupt”, he said after a Daily Mail exposé last month, accusing them of “lying, making up stories, abusing the legal system”.
Such lawyers should be “stripped out root and branch”, the minister said.
But the Law Society, which represents solicitors in England and Wales, said the necessary powers were already in place if the government wanted to clamp down.
“This task force which they tout with such aggressive language has been in existence for months now,” David McNeill of the Law Society told BBC Radio 4.
“So really from our perspective it just looks like a bit of lawyer-bashing as a distraction from really bad news for the Government on the number of asylum seekers now accommodated in hotels - 50,000,” he said.
“It’s not in our interest to have any solicitor acting improperly or crookedly, but this announcement today is something of a red herring.”
The Bibby Stockholm will take up to 500 male migrants when at full capacity, which Mr Chalk conceded was only a “small minority” of the 50,000 who were in hotels as of June - up by around 10,000 from December.
But the backlog of asylum cases has decreased by 17,000 over recent weeks, he told GB News.
