Nearly two-thirds of asylum seekers turned out to be bogus - but Britain ended up with £10 billion bill anyway, says report 24 August, 2011 The UK’s asylum system has been costing taxpayers on average more than £2 million a day since 1999 and, once anyone has set foot on British soil, they have a 77% chance of staying – whatever the merits of their case That is the conclusion of a study by think-tank Migration Watch UK of the outcome of the asylum system over the period 1997 - 2010 published today in advance of the latest statistics due on 25 August. The study found that only a quarter of those who sought asylum in the UK between 1997 and 2010 were granted asylum, including those granted on appeal. A further one in seven were granted other forms of protection so 60% were eventually refused altogether. Of those refused only just over one third were removed with the result that anyone claiming asylum in Britain had a 77% chance of staying here - more often than not illegally. The study also found that, in recent years, the majority of applications (59%) were lodged only after the applicant had been detected. The cost to the tax payer, including the cost of legal aid and the cost of the immigration courts was close to £10 billion or nearly £2.3 million a day over the period. The proportion of asylum seekers granted protection in France was found to be significantly lower than in the UK. Said Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migration Watch UK: ‘The asylum system has proved to be a £10 billion shambles. Those who, like ourselves, are serious about protecting genuine refugees should be no less serious about removing bogus claimants and, better still, deterring them in the first place. The system needs to be much faster. Delays in the system leave the door open for appeals based on the right to family life without any consideration for the rights of society in general’ ‘It also needed to be much tougher on the bogus. It is absurd, for example, that we should allow people who have been in Britain illegally for years to claim asylum so as to delay or prevent their removal; this now applies to almost 60% of claimants. ‘It is a pity that the lawyers have been so remarkably silent all these years. The failure of the UK Border Agency to implement the decisions of the immigration appeal courts reduces their activities to a charade and brings the rule of law into disrepute,’ he said. Social Housing and Migration in England 24 August, 2011 The social housing requirements of new immigrants will cost the tax payer £1 billion a year for the next twenty five years. That is the conclusion of a study published by Migrationwatch today. The study found that 45 additional social homes would have to be built everyday, or nearly 1400 a month, over that period to meet the extra demand. The failure to build local authority housing to compensate for council houses that have been sold off led to a fall of about half a million in the number of social homes available between 1997 and 2007. This, combined with high levels of immigration, has led to an increase of nearly 60% in the waiting lists for social housing England over the last eight years. The regions most severely affected were London where the proportion of households on the waiting list in 2010 was 12% and Yorkshire and Humberside where it was 11%. Both are regions of high immigration. The study also found that non EU migrants were more likely to live in social housing that the UK born. For some nationalities the difference was striking:- Nigeria (29%), Iran (33%), Jamaica (35%), Ghana (39%), Portugal (40%), Bangladesh (41%), Turkey (49%), Somalia (80%) compared to UK born for whom the proportion was 17%. Commenting, Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said: "The impact of immigration on the availability of social housing for British people has been airbrushed out for too long. Either the government must cut immigration very substantially as they have promised or they must invest very large sums in the construction of extra social housing". Social Housing: Rebuttal 22 August, 2011 http://fullfact.org/ have not published Migrationwatch’s rebuttal on the £1bn cost of social housing as promised so we are publishing it on our own web site. Full Fact have challenged the Migrationwatch calculation that tax payers face a £1 billion annual bill for the next 25 years to provide enough council houses for future immigrants. They base their argument on the numbers of foreign nationals currently occupying social housing. However, they seem to have misunderstood the basis of the Migrationwatch calculation which is not a question of existing percentages but of future projections of migrant households. This calculation is set out in paragraphs 15 -18 of Briefing Paper No 7.12. In brief, the additional housing required by immigrants will be 83,000 homes per year or just over 2 million over the period. (This is the difference between the principal projection and the zero net migration projection). According to the Migration Advisory Committee, which based its findings on the Government’s Labour Force Survey, 22% of non-EEA born migrants who have been in the UK for at least 5 years are in social housing. (See footnote 2 in the paper). Although born outside the UK, some of these will no longer be ‘foreign nationals’ because they will have acquired British citizenship. We took 20% which comes to about 415,000 over the period or 45 a day. As regards costs, current government spending averages £60,000 on each social housing unit. This gives £25 billion over 25 years or “£1 billion a year” on average. The proportion of houses currently occupied by foreign nationals is a different matter for which there is a range of numbers. The continuous recording of lettings (CORE) in Table 754 of the Local Authority Housing Statistics gives 6.1% for 2009/10, as Full Fact say. However, the English Housing Survey which takes a 2 year average of 2008/9 and 2009/10 gives 9.5% non-British social renters. The figure of 8.3% in paragraph 3 of the paper referred to the previous year's figures as this part of the paper was completed before the latest English housing Survey was published. 
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Wednesday, 24 August 2011
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