In a landmark speech on immigration last December, Rishi Sunak made a series of bold and apparently undeliverable commitments. He promised to stop the flow of small boats to the UK, increase the amount of non-hotel accommodation for asylum seekers and abolish the backlog of unprocessed asylum cases by the end of 2023.
The government’s spiralling difficulties in addressing the first and second pledges have been evident throughout the summer, with footage of new boat arrivals broadcast nightly, and complications with the opening of the Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge mounting up. The failure to address the asylum backlog was starkly exposed in Thursday’s release of the quarterly immigration statistics.
