It is our moral duty to provide decent care to asylum seekers

We report today on the poor healthcare given to asylum seekers housed in hotels and temporary accommodation while the backlog of cases mounts. As Dr Jan Wise, chair of the British Medical Association’s ethics committee, says, this neglect is “to pile trauma on trauma” for many people who have sought refuge in the UK from persecution or terror.

Unfortunately, it is to be suspected that the government thinks it can get away with such appalling treatment of vulnerable people, because it knows that public opinion is unsympathetic to new arrivals, especially those coming in small boats across the Channel. Ministers are unlikely ever to be explicit about this, but it may be at the back of their minds that unpleasant conditions in migrant accommodation may help to deter others from seeking asylum here. That is the sort of thinking that gave us the “hostile environment” policy, which resulted in so many cases of terrible injustice. It will not work as a deterrent, and it is inhumane and wrong in any case.

Suella Braverman, the home secretary, ought in her own interest to focus on making the asylum system work better rather than more punitively. People might be deterred from making unfounded asylum claims if claims were assessed quickly and those whose claims were rejected were promptly removed from the country. But that would require more public money to be spent on processing claims, which is something for which no short-termist politician seems prepared to argue.

Even Yvette Cooper, Ms Braverman’s shadow, was suggesting in recent days that asylum processing could be miraculously speeded up if applications from countries such as Albania were “fast-tracked” for rejection. This is not a workable policy, which is why Home Office sources denied a report a week ago that Ms Braverman was going to adopt it. The UK courts have rightly ruled that the last Labour government’s policy of blanket refusal of asylum applications from specified countries was unlawful, because each application must be considered on its own merits.

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Ms Cooper is trying to suggest that there is an easy way of speeding up the asylum process that does not require more resources. This is not the case. Trying to run the asylum system on the cheap is what has given us the poor conditions and inadequate healthcare that we see today. It is a false economy, because it simply puts more and more people in temporary accommodation, increasingly in expensive hotels, and leads to the periodic crises in places such as the Manston processing centre in Kent and the unsanitary accommodation there.

It does not need to be this way. It should be possible to combine compassionate treatment of all those claiming asylum with a firm policy of removing those whose claims are unfounded. But it would only be possible if, in the short term, more resources were devoted to assessing claims and, crucially, to removing people who are found not to be genuine refugees. If Ms Braverman could deliver that, she could save public money in the long run by deterring unfounded claims and she might even satisfy the punitive wing of her own party that she had the issue under control.

At the moment she risks the worst of all possible worlds, and her career going the same way as Priti Patel’s, by a policy that tries to save money but ends up being expensive, ineffective and inhumane.