‘Just a gimmick’: Suella Braverman criticised over plans to tag migrants

Suella Braverman has been criticised over plans to fit migrants with ankle tags, with Labour branding the idea “just another gimmick”.

Home Office officials are reportedly considering it as a way to prevent migrants who cannot be housed in limited detention sites from absconding.

The Illegal Migration Act places a duty on the government to detain and remove those arriving in the UK illegally, either to Rwanda or another “safe” third country.

However, as spaces in Home Office accommodation are in short supply, officials have been tasked with a “deep dive” into alternatives, according to The Times.

While the preferred solution is to increase the number of detention places, electronic tagging has been mooted, as has cutting off financial allowances to someone who fails to report regularly to the Home Office.

UK charity Refugee Council criticised the idea, claiming it would see vulnerable people “treated as mere objects”.

Chief executive Enver Solomon said: “It’s treating people as mere objects rather than vulnerable men, women and children in search of safety who should always be treated with compassion and humanity, in the same way we welcomed Ukrainian refugees.

“This is not who we are as a country nor the Britain we aspire to be.”

And a refugee who fled Afghanistan said electronically tagging asylum seekers was “completely wrong and unacceptable”.

Gulwali Passarlay told The Independent the only point of the plans was to “make the public think we are doing something”, and accused ministers of being “cruel”.

His friend has been forced by the Home Office to wear an ankle tag since arriving in the UK as a refugee, which Mr Passarlay says has taken a significant toll on his mental health.

“How would normal people feel if they were electronically tagged just for being who they are?” he said. “We're surveilling the most vulnerable people in our society,” he added.

The government’s plans emerged days after Home Office figures showed the backlog of asylum cases in the UK has hit a new record high, in a blow to Rishi Sunak’s pledge to “stop the boats” and cut processing times.

A total of 175,457 people were waiting for an initial decision on an asylum application in the UK at the end of June, up 44 per cent from 122,213 a year earlier and the highest figure since records began in 2010.

The number of people waiting more than six months for an initial decision stood at 139,961 at the end of June, up 57 per cent year-on-year and another record high.

In a bid to bring down the £6m a day cost of housing asylum seekers in hotels, ministers are trying to move migrants onto the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset.

But these efforts faced a fresh setback on Sunday as The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) sent a legal threat to the Home Office accusing ministers of “callous disregard” for the safety of those on board.

Asked about electronic tags for migrants on Monday morning, home secretary Suella Braverman said ministers are considering “a range of options”.

“We have a couple of thousand detention places in our existing removal capacity,” she told Sky News.

“We will be working intensively to increase that but it’s clear we’re exploring a range of options, all options, to ensure that we have that level of control over people so that they can flow through our systems swiftly to enable us to thereafter remove them from the United Kingdom.”

But Labour’s shadow employment minister Justin Madders described the plans as “just another gimmick”.

Speaking to Sky News, Mr Madders said: “The only people you tag are criminals. And my understanding is that people who are coming to this country seeking asylum are not criminals.

“They are usually people fleeing persecution. And if there’s a problem with people absconding, this is the first I’ve heard about it.

“Clearly the solution to that is actually to get on and process the asylum applications a lot quicker than is happening.

“I think this is just another gimmick that is not dealing with the root of the problem at all.”

Mr Madders also said it is “pathetic” for the government to blame “lefty lawyers” and Labour for failings in its asylum policy.

“They ought to own this problem,” he said.

Shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said it is “the latest in a long line of gimmicks” thought up by the home secretary.

“It’s time they put in the hard work to clear their record asylum backlog so we can get people out of expensive hotels,” he said.

In June last year, the Home Office launched a 12-month pilot scheme to fit migrants with tags.

The tagging pilot allowed the electronic monitoring of asylum seekers who are declared inadmissible after travelling through safe countries and includes those selected for transfer to Rwanda.

The Independent revealed an asylum seeker electronically tagged by the government after being selected for removal to Rwanda was launching a legal challenge against the move.

The man said that after being tortured and trafficked in Sudan and Libya he has been treated “like an animal” in the UK.

A psychiatric report found that being forced to wear a tag had worsened his mental health, including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, and increased the risk of self-harm and suicide.

The Home Office said it is “committed to the removal of foreign criminals and those with no right to be in the UK”.

A spokesman said: “That is why we have introduced measures under the Illegal Migration Act which will ensure those arriving in the UK illegally may be detained and swiftly removed to their country of origin or a safe third country.

“We are now considering a range of options to reduce the rate of absconding.”