BACK in November 2024, I explained in this publication that ‘five consecutive Conservative Home Secretaries cut the number of staff assessing asylum claims and today tax-payers pay millions to house these people until their claims are assessed.’

The asylum system we inherited from the Conservatives was a complete disaster. The entire Conservative plan was based on the so-called ‘Rwanda deterrent’ – hundreds of millions of pounds spent on deporting just a handful of people. Looking back 2 years on, if the ‘Rwanda Plan’ wasn’t such a serious waste of public money, it would be laughable. So where are we today?

Here are the facts that you’ll struggle to find in virtually any media: in the first four months of this year, small boat crossings which bring to our shores the vast majority of our asylum claimants, have fallen by a staggering 42 per cent year-on-year. (It’s important to ignore the month-on-month figures that you’ll see in some media, as these are entirely dependent on the weather in the Channel during one particular month. Year-on-year figures are a much more accurate comparison.)

The use of asylum hotels has fallen from 400, under the Conservatives, to just 185 today. The number of people housed in those asylum hotels has fallen from over 56,000 before Labour came into power, to less than 30,000 today. And it should not be forgotten that the contracts for these hotels, agreed by the Conservatives, were at eye-watering expense to tax-payers.

This government has committed to closing all asylum hotels by the end of this Parliament, saving over £2-billion. And we’re well on track to achieving that. In terms of Cornwall, how many asylum seeker beds do you think we have across the entire Duchy? 300? 3,000? Nope – across the whole of Cornwall, with a population of about 600,000, we have just 28 asylum seeker beds. Yet based on what I hear on some doorsteps, you’d would think that there’s an asylum seeker hotel or guesthouse on every street corner! And there’s more.

In the 18 months since Labour came to power, there have been almost 60,000 removals – a 31 per cent increase on the same period prior to the election. The backlog in the processing of asylum seekers has more than halved, after this Labour government replaced the staff who process claims that had been cut by those five Conservative Home Secretaries.

But to truly deal with the illegal people-trafficking of vulnerable souls across the Channel – that is what they truly are – we have been engaging far more effectively with French authorities. And it’s working. Since Labour came to power, working with our allies across Europe, 105 separate major people-smuggling gangs have been disrupted and the French authorities have prevented over 42,000 asylum seekers from crossing the Channel.

But perhaps the most important statistic of all: since Brexit when the UK became a ‘third country’, small boat crossings and asylum applications had risen by an incredible 150 per cent. For those that wanted to reduce the number of asylum seekers to the UK, Brexit has quite simply been a disaster.