Braverman comes out swinging on asylum record

Britain’s beleaguered Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, denied ignoring legal advice on housing asylum seekers as she addressed the Commons this afternoon, but reinstated her commitment to “stopping the invasion on our southern coast.”

Braverman was seeking to defend her involvement in the turmoil at the Manston asylum processing centre in Kent. She denied accusations that she had breached her legal duties by ignoring official advice to sign off on urgent measures to move asylum seekers into hotels to reduce unsafe levels of overcrowding at the centre. On no occasion did she block hotels or “veto advice to procure extra and emergency accommodation,” Braverman insisted, adding that 30 new hotels had been agreed under watch. 

The Home Office has come under scrutiny after it was revealed that 4,000 migrants were being housed in Manston, some of whom have been held there for a month. Manston is designed to accommodate a maximum of 1,600 migrants, who are meant to be processed and moved out within 24 hours. What’s more, the dire conditions inside have led to outbreaks of nasty diseases, including diphtheria. 

Hundreds more migrants were transferred to Manston yesterday after a man launched a petrol bomb attack on a migrant processing centre in Dover. This afternoon, Braverman confirmed that the Dover centre is now “fully operational again.” 

The Home Secretary is facing something of a twin scandal. The initial scandal, which earned her the nickname “leaky Sue” and saw her resign under Liz Truss, has intensified today in light of fresh revelations that Braverman’s use of her personal account to share confidential government documents was far from an isolated incident. In a letter this morning to the home affairs select committee chair, Dame Diana Johnson, Braverman admitted that she had used her personal account for official work not once but six times during her brief stint as Home Secretary under Truss. 

While the leaky Sue scandal has undermined her authority, it may blow over if Sunak continues to stand firmly by her. Yet Channel crossings is likely to be defining issue of Braverman’s time as Home Secretary. 

A record 40,000 people have arrived in the UK in small boats so far this year, compared to just over 28,500 for the whole of 2021. And the backlog in asylum claims has soared, with the Home Office managing to process just 4 per cent of claims from Channel migrants last year.

The Home Secretary insisted today that the government is putting more resources and technology into speeding up the process, adding that a pilot in Leeds of the new “asylum transformation programme” has seen interview times reduced by over a third. 

As for the surge in the number of those crossing from Albania, she said the Home Office was “working to ensure Albanian cases are processed” and those who are “abusing modern slavery laws” are removed, “sometimes within days.”

Interestingly, while migration is one of the most politically divisive issues, the importance of speeding up the asylum claims process is an area in which those across the political spectrum generally align – one which even saw Braverman and Diane Abbott find common ground this afternoon. 

“It’s not often I say this, but I actually agree with her,” remarked Braverman in the Commons, when Abbott pointed out that tackling this backlog is in the interest of all parties. 

The longer asylum seekers wait for their claims to be processed, the longer they are left in a dire state of limbo and banned from working, and the longer too that they are being accommodated at public expense.

As for Braverman herself, she may have kept the hounds at bay for now by playing things with a straight bat in the Commons, but the potent mix of twin scandals is acting as a drag on Rishi Sunak’s new government. Her days might well be numbered.

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