Suella Braverman’s small boats policy is ‘harmful, impractical and costly’

The Commons select committee on women and equalities is just the latest body to issue an excoriating denunciation of the government’s policies and in particular, the immoral mess that is its approach to asylum. It compounds a judgement that has been handed down time and again: last year the home affairs committee criticised the then home secretary, Priti Patel, and her “asylum backlog that causes misery for every person waiting months, years even, for news of their fate, unable to work or move on with their lives”.

This government has a history of ignoring parliamentary censure, but when ministers come to respond to the equalities committee report, we would urge them not to try to mark their own homework. That homework has already been graded, including by members from their own party, and it has censured their approach in the harshest language. The purpose of a select committee is to guide and correct and, in this case, to issue the sternest of warnings. No amount of pushback will do. This is not the opinion of one teacher; it is the entire staff room.

Now comes the wqualities committee, telling us that the present home secretary, Suella Braverman, is threatening the safety of refugee children in the care of the British state, as well as other especially vulnerable cases. We as a nation have sunk to the position where MPs on a cross-party committee with a majority of Conservative members and a Conservative chair, Caroline Nokes, feel compelled to tell their own ministers to exempt children from the Rwanda deportation scheme.

As the committee states, the present system is “harmful, impractical and costly”, and will deteriorate further as Ms Braverman’s latest policies become law. The UN Refugee Agency has said the Illegal Migration Bill amounts to “an asylum ban – extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the United Kingdom for those who arrive irregularly”, while parliament’s joint committee on human rights has also declared it unlawful. The Home Office’s own economic impact assessment says it will cost £169,000 to deport each asylum seeker. Enshrining in law a legal duty for the home secretary to forcibly detain all refugees indefinitely, regardless of the merits of their claims, pending deportation for virtually all of them is an act of desperation as well as a shame. Yet this is what will happen if her latest bill remains unchanged and becomes an act of parliament. It doesn’t deserve to work, it will not work and it should not stand.

Ms Braverman’s problem is that, aside from one scheme agreed with the Albanian government, there are no operational returns agreements in place and up and running with any other government. The much-vaunted Rwanda plan is suspended during its judicial review, but even if Ms Braverman’s bizarre dream of seeing genuine refugees taking off for Kigali comes to fruition, the numbers who will be forcibly sent to central Africa are tiny in relation to the numbers arriving and the backlog in the system.

Running out of hotel space, Ms Braverman is currently spending even more money on chartering as many barges as she can and commandeering disused military bases to keep asylum seekers detained in near-prison conditions. Except, of course, as human rights groups and the parliamentary committee point out, refugees have committed no crime and should not be held without trial in “prolonged detention with no certainty of release for asylum-seeking people who pose no threat to the public and for whom there is little prospect of removal from the UK”. The government, according to this cross-party group, is “turning back the clock” on years of policies aiming to use detention as a last resort and ensure the safety of vulnerable asylum seekers.

Plainly, such detention, often in crowded and squalid conditions, is inhumane. Plainly, it creates conditions in which abuses can take place because there is literally no escape. Victims of human trafficking, torture survivors, women and children in particular, shouldn’t be exposed to such unforgivable treatment. Even if some have a bogus claim – and the great majority have asylum granted – there is no excuse for a civilised country to debase itself in this way. A nation and its leaders should be judged on the way they treat their refugees, and on that basis, the UK is even now not living up to its moral international legal obligations.

There is also little prospect that Ms Braverman’s approach will succeed in its stated aim – to act as a deterrent. For people who’ve escaped civil wars, crossed continents and risked their lives crossing the English Channel, it is safe to say that nothing will put them off.

Only 12 days ago, at least 81 people died and hundreds more are still missing when an overcrowded fishing boat sank off the coast of Greece. All that will happen under a compulsory detention regime is that the genuine refugees who currently give themselves up to Border Force will instead try to land surreptitiously and melt away into the shadowlands of the informal economy and illegality.

Ms Braverman seems to believe that the more cruelty she builds into the system the more she pleases the hard right and the greater the chances of her succeeding Rishi Sunak as party leader when the moment arrives. She may be right about that, but her policies aren’t working and the government’s pledge to “stop the boats” is doing no such thing.

For reasons that remain mysterious, Ms Braverman seems unable to work out that the best way to deal with refugees is to process them as rapidly as possible while respecting their right to a fair hearing and legal advice. That is where the resources need to go, rather than detention camps that will never be able to catch up with the demand for such accommodation, unsuitable as it is.

As things stand, the UK is set to effectively abolish the right to claim asylum in the UK. That is wrong in principle, unlawful and unworkable in practice.