Tony Smith says French checks cut asylum intake

Transcript

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

1. 6:49

   where we started to see a lot of asylum applications coming in. People were arriving mainly on the ferries across from Dover. and claiming asylum. And my immediate response would send them back to France, right? I mean, I don't care about them. No, no. But then the lawyers came in, you know, the legal advice came in, the policy makers came in and said, no, no, Tony, you can't do that. Because if they're claiming persecution, they've got a legitimate claim for protection and you have to at least consider the claim.

2. 7:20

   So I said, well, all right, we'll do that then at Dover. You know, we'll put a team down there and we'll process them. And then we'll send them. But no, no, you can't do that either. has to be referred away from the border into the home office this led to a huge backlog of asylum cases where people were turning up at the border without any documents on the fairies and and then claiming asylum and we could send it back and so i took on something called the asylum liaison unit they created a whole new department in the home office called the asylum director who weren't immigration officers but were charged with the duty of considering all these asylum applications So I did that for a while. I did a lot of stuff on asylum in the late 90s.

3. 7:59

   And then I got selected to go to Canada on an exchange programme with the Canadian immigration. And the idea really was that I was going to learn a little bit more about how they deal with refugees, how they deal with, you know, they are a country of immigration. Their top priority is to take people into Canada. It's a big country and they want people in the provinces. So I wanted to learn that. But no sooner had I got there. And then 9-11 happened. And that's another story. But I mean, it's a long story. But I was director of ports of entry in Canada, which put me right on the front foot of border security in Canada and therefore North America.

4. 8:36

   Spent a lot of time over after 9-11 talking to the Americans about how we're going to improve targeting, checking people, coming into the country, making sure that they were not coming for, you know, nefarious reasons, terrorism, crime, whatever. Built a lot of targeting units there. And then I came back, my three years were up, came back to the UK and they promoted me again to become Director of Ports of Entry in the Immigration Service, which was managing all of the border controls at all of the ports of entry.

5. 9:01

   Now, you know, I came back, we still had, in fact, while I'd been away, we'd had a massive increase in asylum while I was in Canada. It went up from about 25,000, 30,000 to over 100,000 applications in about 2002, 2003. And there was a lot of work going on by the government of the day to try and get asylum intake down. I walked back into that. The main tactic the government then used was to put the border abroad.

6. 9:27

   So we did agree with the French that we would have what we called the juxtaposed controls. We would put our own officers in Calais and Dunkirk to check passports before people could get on the ferry, in the same way as we do with planning. And that kind of worked because then they started trying to get in the back of lorries, and we agreed with the French. We put dog teams out there and surveillance teams and equipment to search the lorries.

7. 9:48

   So we managed to get asylum intake right down from about 100,000 to about 25,000 over two years, which was pretty good. That was a main target. That was a target to reduce asylum intake. And then the UK Border Agency was formed.