To Britain’s shame, our asylum system is both cruel and ineffective

Symbolism is all. Britain has become a makeshift country, relying on tents and barges to provide temporary accommodation for tens of thousands of asylum seekers. The Independent sees the marquees ordered by Suella Braverman, the home secretary, as a symbol of national shame.

She, on the other hand, sees them as a symbol of intent: a visual reminder broadcast around the world that “Britain is not a soft touch”. What this comes close to saying is that Britain is not a compassionate country and that the British government does not care how well founded someone’s fear of persecution might be, it would rather refugees went somewhere else.

Privately, Home Office officials say that they do not want to be caught out as they were last year, when they failed to predict an entirely predictable increase in small-boat Channel crossings and were left booking whatever hotel rooms were available at short notice – including many with luxury star ratings.

They are quite right: that maladministration should be avoided. But the alternatives are not tents and floating bunkhouses: there are plenty of other basic accommodation options that could be readied in advance of this year’s expected arrivals. Yet Ms Braverman wants to make a symbolic point, in order, she says, to “deter” attempted crossings.

This is despite the absence of any evidence of a deterrent effect. People are not risking their lives in the Channel because they hope to be put up in a four-star hotel; therefore they are unlikely to be put off taking that risk if they think they will be herded into primitive lodgings. No matter how dreadful the reports were last year of conditions in the tents on Manston airfield, tens of thousands of people still sought refuge in the UK. This week’s reports of outbreaks of scabies, tuberculosis and a case of scurvy in temporary asylum-seeker accommodation at the former RAF site at Wethersfield in Braintree, Essex, will not deter the boat people.

Deterrence is deeply ingrained in Home Office thinking. Hence the “hostile environment”, which was originally intended to make life difficult for people who had no right to be in the country, but which ended in the deep injustices suffered by Windrush immigrants who came legally. All deterrence does is erode the compassion that ought to be this country’s watchword.

The one measure that might actually have a deterrent effect only makes matters worse. The policy of removing asylum seekers to Rwanda, if found lawful by the Supreme Court later this year, might indeed cause some migrants to decide against attempting the Channel crossing.

But only “some”. Very few people arriving by small boat are likely ever to be flown to Rwanda. Ms Braverman’s bulk order of marquees is almost a tacit admission that she expects the Rwanda policy either to be struck down by the Supreme Court or that it will not have anything like the deterrent effect that she used to dream of.

So the government’s management of the asylum system is doomed to remain mired in misery and inefficiency. The very slowness with which asylum applications are processed, and the backlog of tens of thousands of cases that result, are deliberate parts of this deterrence theory – as Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, unwisely admitted two months ago. He told the Commons: “The faster the process, the more pull factor there is to the United Kingdom. That is not a reason to maintain an inefficient process, but we need a process where deterrence is suffused through every element.”

There spoke a minister who had lost touch with the essential humanity needed to approach what is undoubtedly a difficult problem. A minister who ordered the painting over of a cartoon mural in a child asylum seekers’ reception centre.

All in the name of a “deterrence” that is worse than mere cruelty, because it is ineffective.