Memo to the press on Med crisis: UK rejected 72 per cent of asylum claims this year

Is Britain too generous as the Daily Mail implies? Not according to the data

 

Today’s Daily Mail is aghast to hear a United Nations official suggest that Britain should ‘take in more Med migrants’.

Peter Sutherland, UN special representative for migration, saying Germany and Sweden have granted more asylum claims during the recent crisis in the Mediterranean than has the UK, nearly earned him an editorial column in the Mail. (This appears to have been bumped for other columns).

The implication of that underlined ‘more’ is that we are already too generous, thanks very much.

But official figures from the Home Office show that nearly three quarters (72 per cent) of asylum claims this year were refused by the UK.

In the first quarter of 2015, the UK received a total of 5,955 asylum applications. In the same period, the UK made 8,976 initial decisions on these and earlier applications.

Of these 5,744 were refused, while 3,232 were granted, including 2,784 on the grounds of asylum.

When you subtract 1,011 cases withdrawn by applicants, the number refused by the UK amounts to 72 per cent of decisions so far this year.

So Britain is refusing asylum to nearly three quarters of applicants.

Is this because we have more claims than other countries? No. 

According to the European Commission, the UK wasn’t even in the top five destinations for asylum seekers in 2014, coming in sixth below Germany, Sweden, Italy, France and Hungary respectively.

If you rank countries’ asylum claims by population, the UK came 19th after such economic powerhouses as Bulgaria.

And yet the UK refused to grant asylum in two thirds (67 per cent) of all application decisions in 2014.

Meanwhile, the UK has only accepted 143 out of a possible 4 million displaced Syrians as of March this year.

While overall migration numbers are certainly growing, it is wildly misleading to suggest the UK has been over-generous about granting asylum – whether during the ongoing crisis in the Med or generally over the last year.

Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter

Read more: 

Daily Mail says boats of migrants should be stopped ‘by any means necessary’

Daily Mail says Syrian refugees turn Greek holiday town into ‘disgusting hellhole’

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15 Responses to “Memo to the press on Med crisis: UK rejected 72 per cent of asylum claims this year”

  1. Cole

    All the recent research suggests there are about the same number of EU migrants living in the UK as UK migrants living in the rest of the EU. Of course you won’t hear about this in the Tory press.

  2. Dave Stewart

    could you provide a link to this? I’d be very interested to read it. Thanks

  3. Dave Stewart

    No it is not obvious. Those figures do not provide any information regarding the veracity of the asylum claims. The only thing you can infer from this data is that the UK rejects nearly 3/4s of claims. That could be because they are bogus or it could be clerical error or it could be the UK is systemically refusing as many claims as possible, or it could be the rules are set up so most people fail and so on and so on. The reason behind these numbers could be more or less anything and you nor I nor anybody else armed with only this data can make any fact based assertion regarding the veracity of asylum claims.

  4. Cole

    https://eu observer.com/social/123066 and others. Basically came out of a parliamentary question last year.

  5. damon

    The asylum system broke because so many people were claiming it who weren’t entitled.
    Tens of thousands clogged the thing up and dragged claims out through the courts.
    It became another way to force your way into a first world country.
    Perhaps we should have liberalised the immigration system as some people have suggested.
    https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2015/05/14/the-price-of-fortress-europe/

    But lets not pretend that all or even most people who claim asylum are legit. Or even that we are meant to take every person from countries where their is strife or they face possible persecution – now even being gay is seen as ground for asylum. It’s about numbers for me.
    I heard on the BBC radio 4 news at 1pm today a young lad from Senegal saying how he was tortured by smugglers/kidnappers in Libya ….. and he briefly mentioned that he’d left Senegal to escape some fighting or civil strife. Poppycock.
    If there is trouble in some part of a generally stable country, the first thing to do is move to another part of that country. The capital for instance.

    Like millions of Kurds have done in Turkey. They didn’t all need to go to Germany and Europe. It’s a bit daft that we still have loads of Turkish Kurds living in England when Turkey is now safe for them to go back to.
    The same with Tamils from Sri Lanka. I just spent the winter there and the country seemed totally safe. Even Jaffna and the north.
    I had expected the Tamil areas to be heavily militarised – but they weren’t.
    Even the northern town of Kilinochchi which was heavily damaged in the war, was peaceable and busy with people coming and going without much hassle from the army.
    When we took in thousands of Tamils, what we really did was take in thousands of Tamil Tiger supporters who helped wage the war over there from over here.

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