Government has “total lack of grip” on asylum system, Yvette Cooper says

Yvette Cooper has accused ministers of having a “total lack of grip” on the asylum system and has said Labour would take a “common-sense approach” that would see the government “fast track asylum cases from countries that are designated as safe”.

In a Times Radio interview this morning, the Shadow Home Secretary discussed Labour’s plan to fast track asylum applications for people from “safe” countries.

“It means that if you’ve got cases and where you’ve got cases that are clearly unfounded, they can be swiftly decided and returned, where, for example, people are not fleeing persecution and conflict,” she said.

“It’s an approach that the UN Refugee Agency has recommended a kind of fast tracking approach to different kinds of cases.”

Cooper told listeners that the Home Office is “not doing the proper fast tracking” and has “added to the bureaucracy in the system with their additional legislation”. “They’ve added additional six-month delays on 18,000 cases,” she said.

“They’re not dealing with the long standing cases, they should be targeting some of those as well. And decisions have just collapsed. So caseworkers are making what a quarter of the number of decisions a week that they used to be making even five or six years ago. It just feels like you’ve got this total chaos in the Home Office.”

Border guards manning airport passport control announced on Wednesday a new eight-day strike from December 23rd to New Year’s Eve affecting Heathrow, which has been planning for its busiest Christmas since 2019. Gatwick and Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff airports, will also be affected.

The walkout comes as the country expects planned strikes by nurses, railway staff, Royal Mail workers, airport baggage handlers and civil servants in the coming weeks in protest at real-terms wage cuts while inflation runs at 11%.

Cooper also accused Suella Braverman of not trying to resolve disputes with Border Force trade unions this morning, and argued that “ministers seem to be actually trying to escalate the crisis, escalate the conflict”.

“It really feels at the moment like you’ve got government ministers who are just addicted to chaos and who are making things worse for people right across the country, rather than working together rather than getting around the table and sorting things out,” the Shadow Home Secretary added.

Cooper also said Rishi Sunak had “sidelined” the Home Secretary, since his controversial decision to reappoint her days after being sacked, and said the Prime Minister is “obviously excluding her from the decisions”.

“That in itself is chaotic. If you’ve got Suella Braverman saying one thing, you’ve got Robert Jenrick saying another, you’ve got Rishi Sunak saying something else entirely,” Braverman said.

“We’ve had eight immigration ministers and six home secretaries in the last seven years alone. That’s what the Conservatives have done in the way that they have been treating this. We just get rhetoric from them. We don’t get practical plans.”