Home Secretary told to go after Pakistan and India to increase returns of failed asylum seekers

A former Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration has said the UK needs to go after the “big fish” like Pakistan and India if it wants to increase returns of failed asylum seekers.

Speaking on GB News, John Vine said: “[Low numbers of returns] are happening because these countries are failing to accept their citizens back. So although there’s been an agreement with the UK, with these countries, they’re not honouring that agreement.

“What the Home Secretary announced last November was that she would get tough with countries that weren’t doing that. So for Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa, she restricted the opportunity for them to apply for visas to come to the UK to try and force the countries to actually accept back their citizens who had failed asylum claims in the UK.

“The only problem is that those countries are only a small percentage of the problem. So the really big offenders are Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

“There’s obviously a lot of politics in this, but this is what needs to happen in order to get these countries to accept their own people back from the UK.

“We should be going for the big fish, but obviously there’s a big Pakistani community in the UK, so there’s lots of politics, I think, at play here with any government in the UK.

“These countries are safe countries in terms of not being at war. It’s very difficult for people to come to the UK and claim asylum from countries like India and Pakistan. I mean, they’re democracies.

“What needs to happen is that we need to get tough. This has not been the case for many years. We’re not just talking about this government, we’re talking about the previous government as well, where basically, people have been able to game the system and lodge individual claims.

“And very often the governments of those countries have denied that these people, who are clearly their citizens, in fact are their citizens.

“When you look at the number of returns last year, it amounted to about 40,000 people. Now, we used to return that many every year, really, before the pandemic. It fell to an all-time low during the years of the pandemic, 2,000 or 3,000 have returned in those years.

“She is increasing the number of returns. But if you look at the figures of the 40,000, only 10,000 are enforced returns and the rest are voluntary returns.

“She is looking at Denmark as a model, another model in Europe, and they spend a lot of taxpayers’ money on incentivising people to go back to their country of origin and I think that’s what this government is doing here.

“She’s just announced a pilot scheme whereby people are being paid up to £10,000 per person to volunteer to go home.”