Home Office admits that the New Plan for Immigration might not work

Home Office admits that their immigration plan might not work

The Home Office has admitted that there is “limited evidence” to suggest that its new plans for the immigration system will reduce the number of migrant Channel crossings.

The Home Secretary has made promises to reduce the number of immigrants crossing the English Channel as part of the New Plan for Immigration which she hopes to introduce under the Nationality and Borders Bill, which is currently under review in parliament.

But in an impact equality assessment recently released by the Home Office stated that the reforms to the immigration and asylum system carry “significant scope for indirect discrimination” and “potential for direct discrimination on the basis of race”.

What is the New Plan for Immigration?

The government’s New Plan for immigration would see an overhaul of the asylum system. The Nationality and Borders Bill would make arriving in the UK without permission a criminal offence. The new plan would seek to “rapidly remove” asylum seekers who enter the UK via unauthorised routes and would grant them only temporary protection in the UK with limited rights for those who cannot be removed quickly.

As part of the New Plan Home Secretary, Priti Patel, recently ordered officials to rewrite the UK’s interpretation of maritime laws to allow Border Force to turn small boats in the English Channel around. As a result of this France warned the Home Secretary that the Channel could become a “theatre of human tragedies”

The New Plan has also come under intense scrutiny by human rights organisations who claim that the limited number of official resettlement routes means that thousands of vulnerable asylum seekers could be left unprotected.

Home Office’s justification

As part of the impact assessment the Home Office responded to the concerns of human rights organisations and admitted that there “may be circumstances where someone faces immediate danger in their country of origin but is not eligible for our refugee resettlement programmes”.

In these circumstances the department said that the Home Secretary “may consider such cases, by virtue of their challenging circumstances, to merit the use of discretion to allow individuals to come to the UK”, however it did not make it clear how this would be done.

The department has said that the impact equality assessment will “ensure that equalities are considered at an early stage to inform decision making in relation to policies and operations” but they also acknowledged that increased security and deterrence could encourage these vulnerable asylum seekers to “attempt riskier means of entering the UK”.

Despite the many concerns raised in the equality assessment, the Home Office said that any discrimination that comes as a result of the New Plan for Immigration would be “objectively justified” as a “proportionate means” of achieving the objective of the plan to “deter illegal entry into the UK”.