It’s clearly asylum week at the Home Office. On Sunday they announced destructive new ‘safe and legal’ routes for asylum seekers which will create a Burnhamwave. Monday brought a commitment to replace employment tribunal judges with specially recruited members of the public, followed by a new plan which, according to the department’s press release, means ‘asylum seekers to pay’ towards the cost of their accommodation and support.
We know from Home Office research published last year that those granted asylum have very low levels of employment (less than 50 per cent), even years after that grant
The media management model is familiar to those of us who’ve followed Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s team since they were at the Ministry of Justice. Each day in the lead-up to the publication of a major piece of legislation they trail an individual policy or two. Some are calibrated to appeal to the left, some to the right. They push messages about fairness, balance, and both the fiscal and moral necessity of reform.
Sometimes it works. Broadly, Mahmood’s sentencing reforms were necessary and well-intended. The migration reforms announced last year were even better – an end to the permanence of asylum grants, recognition that the Boriswave was a disaster, and a serious effort to reverse much of its harm, with planned reforms which would have prevented the large care worker cohort from ever settling.
