Tony Smith says asylum delays led to temporary admission

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 17:24

   Yeah, so the Immigration Act 1971 is still in force, believe it or not. That was the one that came in 1173, and that's still the main legislation. But what's happened is it's been chopped and changed and chopped and changed over generations. Now, yeah, generations, I suppose. If you go to the 80s and 90s, the asylum problem was the first thing that I thought I went to... I'm not saying my boss, I don't think we cracked this one, because we had cracked a lot of stuff.

2. 17:49

   We were cracking bogus marriages, we were cracking bogus colleges with the police, we were doing a lot on immigration crime. But when people started claiming asylum, this whole new army of people came along and appeared on the scene, you know, from the judiciary and from, you know, pressure groups and refugee organisations who challenged the whole process that I described to you, that I used to operate, said, well, we can't have immigration officers doing this anymore.

3. 18:12

   It's not OK, because they're not qualified to judge whether or not someone's in fear of persecution. And it's in direct conflict with the Refugee Convention. And so that's when the asylum thing took, that's what the main watershed was. It was in the late 80s, 90s, we started to get more and more people turning up at the border. And the fact of asylum trumps border control. Asylum is the magic word.

4. 18:38

   I don't know if I'm giving away too many secrets here, but I think it's common knowledge now out there pretty well. Look, if you turn up at the border and you get stopped, claim asylum. Why wasn't that happening before? No one worked out that this was the case? No, no one had worked it out. and no one even thought that it was relevant because why would it be relevant? I mean, you know, the powers in Schedule 2 were conferred.

5. 18:57

   No one. question the fact that, well, someone, I mean, we did, that's not to say we didn't have refugees that were brought over here. We've always had refugees that were brought over here, you know, going back to Idi Amin and, you know, so there would be a programme where you could say, well, there is a cohort of people in that country that we want to legally bring in as refugees, but nobody turned up at the border and just said, oh, I want asylum. This kind of just caught in and took off to a point where people started to realise, well, actually, that's all you've got to do. If you can get here and claim asylum that at least stops them from removing you instantly which is what i used to do then there's an old judgment called the hardy al-sing judgment which goes back to the 80s which said that yes this we we will let the immigration officers detain people for more than

6. 19:43

   a set 24 48 hours but you have to demonstrate you've got a realistic chance of removing this person within a reasonable amount of time basically that's what the courts decided because we couldn't do that anymore because the asylum application would come in and then you get By the time you got around the interview, there'd be some other evidence that was in, and then they'd claim something else. And so the process, we got elongated to the point that we couldn't demonstrate to a court that we could remove this person quickly, so you're suddenly now under pressure to grant them temporary admission into the country.

7. 20:12

   And so that's where it began to go wrong, is that we were starting to get more and more people turning up, claiming asylum at the border, and getting into a system that kind of grew exponentially with the casework, to the point where it became almost unmanageable in the early noughties. And that's why I say the tactics of the government at a day, and I'm going back to early 2003, 2004, was to say this is really important.

8. 20:39

   What we need to do is reduce asylum intake. That's the movement of the border into France and checking people before they can get on a plane to come here, finding an airline if they brought someone without a passport, you know, to make sure the checks are pushed out, if you like, or push the border out. And for those that are here, start doing things like detain fast track third country unit to get people removed.

9. 20:59

   And the idea was that ultimately we would be able to turn the tide on this and actually get more people going back than the people that were coming in.