Dominic Raab has opened the door to a more humane asylum policy – but Labour should have got there first

How unusual: a Conservative minister talking about things beyond their brief. And talking sense. Whatever next? Dominic Raab has licence to roam on policy, of course, as deputy prime minister. That is one of the reasons his appointment was significant, even though some were dismissive at the time of the reshuffle, saying that it would make no practical difference because he was already Boris Johnson’s deputy as first secretary of state. But deputy prime minister is a better understood title, giving him explicit authority across the whole of government.

He has used it today in an interview with The Spectator, in which he says “I would be open-minded” about allowing asylum seekers to work while their claims are being processed. This is one of the long-standing ways in which the Conservatives have allowed themselves to be accused of being heartless. Asylum seekers are not allowed to work unless the home office has taken more than 12 months to decide their claim, so they have to subsist on a cash allowance of £39.63 a week.

The argument against allowing asylum seekers to work is that it would increase the incentive for people to make unfounded claims, knowing that they would be able to earn money as if they were legal immigrants. But how much of an additional incentive would this be in practice, given how attractive the UK is anyway?

Of course, the best solution is to have an asylum system that assesses and decides claims so quickly that the problem doesn’t arise. That was, more or less, what the Labour government managed to do, after a long struggle. By 2010, there were only 3,600 people waiting for more than a year for an initial decision; a decade later, in 2020, this had increased ninefold to 33,000.

But in the meantime, it seems only fair that, if the government is so inefficient as to keep people who must be presumed to fear persecution waiting for so long, it should allow them to work.

Interestingly, Raab’s open-mindedness on this question is part of his wider point about labour shortages in Britain. While he resists the idea that the government should issue 100,000 temporary visas for EU workers, he suggests instead that asylum seekers and prisoners should be allowed to take paid jobs.

This is a triple missed opportunity for Keir Starmer. The Labour leader could have struck a strong Lexiteer (left-wing Brexiteer) note by saying that the end of free movement was a chance to bid up the wages of British workers. Instead, he wobbled on visas, first appearing to agree that the UK should issue 100,000 of them, before retreating to saying that the 10,000 that are being issued (half for lorry drivers and half for poultry workers) should be for six months rather than three.

Then it could have been the Labour Party rather than the deputy prime minister that proposed allowing asylum seekers and prisoners to make a contribution by earning, at a time when a lack of workers is holding the economy back.

How much difference any of these policies would make at the level of the whole economy is debatable. But it would have allowed Starmer to claim some Brexit middle ground – and to propose humane ideas that ought to be Labour’s natural territory.

As it is, that ground is conceded to Conservatives, with Raab suggesting that if prisoners were allowed to work it would “give them something to lose”, and that, “if you give them some hope, they’re much less likely to reoffend”. That is the kind of thing that Labour ought to be saying, and it is revealing that in all five days of the party’s conference in Brighton, it failed to come up with these kinds of creative, compassionate and centrist solutions to the labour shortage that underlies so many of the country’s economic problems this winter.

Starmer was so frightened of his Remainer shadow that he shied away from suggesting the import of cheap EU labour was the answer to the problem. But equally, he didn’t want to claim that Brexit might actually have some benefits, while he also failed to think about other ways of tackling the labour shortage that might allow a more enlightened approach to the asylum and penal systems.

While shadow deputy prime minister Angela Rayner was calling the Tories “scum”, the actual deputy prime minister was busy stealing Labour’s clothes. Labour might regret that.