Good afternoon. As protests over migrant
hotels grow, the home secretary has
promised a new fasttrack asylum appeals
process to be introduced. The overhaul
comes against a backdrop of frustration
and protests over where asylum seekers
are housed. It follows a decision by the
high court to grant Eping Forest
District Council a temporary injunction
to block asylum seekers from being
housed in the Bell Hotel in Essex. Well,
here's more from our political
correspondent, Amanda Aass.
>> Yes. So, the government is clearly under
real pressure over this issue because of
those scenes of protests we've seen up
and down the country because councils
are saying they want to follow the
example of Eping and appeal against the
use of hotels in their areas to house
asylum seekers. So they've made an
announcement today that they're going to
introduce a new system to fasttrack
appeals by asylum seekers who've had
their initial applications rejected. And
the idea is to reduce the amount of time
that they are spending living in tax
fair funded accommodation. Now currently
the system um is that the appeals are
heard by a judge sitting in a tribunal
but there are really long backlogs. So,
there are 51,000 people waiting um to
have their claims heard under the
current system with the average waiting
time more than a year. The government
say they want to cut that to 24 weeks.
They're going to set up a new service
which won't be staffed by judges, but by
professionally trained adjudicators, as
they're calling them, whose only job
will be to look at these asylum cases
and get through them as quickly as
possible. The idea being that then once
someone's claim is rejected, they can be
sent back or deported elsewhere.
although of course that relies on having
um a returns agreement with those other
countries. And really the backdrop to
all of this is that the number of asylum
claims currently being made is at record
levels. We've seen that surge in small
boats. The government say they have been
making progress in getting through them,
the initial claims more quickly, but
that the appeal system itself is broken.
Let me read you what I Cooper, the home
secretary, says about it. She says, "We
cannot carry on with these completely
unacceptable delays in appeals as a
result of the system we've inherited,
which means that failed asylum seekers
stay in the system for years on end at
huge cost to the taxpayer. Overhauling
the appeals system so that it is swift,
fair, and independent with high
standards in place is a central part of
our plan for change." Now, we've spoken
to some immigration lawyers who'd
welcome this. Say they say it's a start.
The government has to do something to
get a grip on this. It's very unclear
exactly how quickly they're going to be
able to bring it in. Um they're going to
have to have new legislation uh to get
this to work. Um clearly it's going to
be complicated and expensive to to train
all these uh new adjudicators and costly
as well. Of course, um the Tories and
reform, they effectively say the whole
system is in chaos. The Conservatives
say we should be leaving the European
Convention on Human Rights for these
kind of cases and deporting many more
people. we shouldn't have scrapped the
Rwanda scheme that they were trying to
set up um which would have worked better
they claim at deterring people from
coming across the channel in the first
place. Of course, Labour reject that.
They say it was a gimmick. They've got
their own measures in place to deal with
France additional measures to tackle the
gangs to try and reduce those numbers,
but currently they're at record levels
and the number of people being housed in
these hotels. Labour promised to stop
that um before the election, well,
they've actually gone up by 8%. They're
also under real pressure from reform
with Nigel Fraj saying yesterday
effectively get rid of the entire asylum
seeker, the entire asylum system, arrest
everyone who comes here illegally,
detain them, and then deport them back
home even if they're somewhere where
they might become a victim of torture
and persecution. So, a lot of questions
around this government under real
pressure to show that they're taking
action. It's unclear whether something a
little bit technocratic like this will
really um assuage those concerns.