Home secretary Shabana Mahmood has told MPs she is confident that her department can handle the delivery of migration reforms billed by the government as the “biggest overhaul of the system in 50 years”.
Mahmood’s comments came as she was being grilled by members of parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee over the proposals, which include doubling the permanent-settlement qualifying period for migrants to 10 years – and in some cases longer.
The plans offer distinct benefits for different categories of migrant, however. Some high-earning migrants would be entitled to settlement in three years but recognised refugees who come to the UK legally would have to wait 20 years.
The Restoring Order and Control policy paper also proposes making refugee status temporary, which would allow the UK to return people granted asylum when their home country is determined to be safe for them again.
At a session last week, Home Affairs Committee member Joani Reid said the Home Office was infamous “for being sclerotic” and asked Mahmood if she is confident the department will be able to implement and administer the reforms.
The home secretary said it is the job of officials to implement and administer the new migration system.
“Obviously I’ve got to make sure that the Home Office is capable of delivering it,” she said. “But it’s not unusual for us to have rule changes – at least twice a year they happen anyway.
“They are often technical, they sometimes require a slight redesign of our systems. They require further training to make sure people know exactly what they’re doing as they’re assessing applications, so I don’t think it’s such a new thing for the Home Office that they won’t be able to do it.”
Mahmood said the Home Office has already seen a significant amount of digital transformation, and acknowledged “all of the attendant traumas and difficulties” usually involved.
“I don’t envisage that these changes are going to break the system,” she said. “And it will be my job to make sure that’s not what’s happening.”
Mahmood said that some of the proposed migration changes may come sooner than others because decisions had already been taken and were not subject to further consultation. She said the “basic idea” of extending the qualifying period for settlement from five years to 10 was not being consulted on.
“Once we have finalised the policy, we will be able to do both the full impact assessments, and on equalities specifically, and we will have to design the system to ensure that it can cope with those changes,” she said. “But I’m confident that can be done.”
Select committee member Chris Murray asked whether having more Home Office staff investigating whether local changes in foreign nations made those countries safe to return people granted asylum to represented a good use of their time.
Mahmood replied: “I think that it is right that we move to a system where refugee status is temporary. At the moment, once you are deemed to be a refugee and you succeed in your claim, at that point you have full status here.”
‘Lessons learned’ on asylum camps
Murray also asked Mahmood about what he described as “blood boiling” amounts of money spent on accommodation for asylum seekers, including the last government’s cancelled proposals to repurpose the former HMP Northeye site in East Sussex.
The home secretary said the department is “in a better position because all of the mistakes that have been made in the past”.
“There have been a lot of lessons to learn from previous attempts to move into large sites,” she said. “Almost every mistake that could have been made has probably been made.
“The thing I’m confident about is that there is a bit more rigour in making sure that we’ve learned those lessons from what’s gone wrong before. It’s always tricky to move to a new model and a new design of providing accommodation in this way.”
She added that, despite past "bad experiences”, the RAF Wethersfield asylum seeker accommodation centre in Essex appeared to be working “quite well” now.
“So there are examples we can point to that are better practice that should become the practice overall,” she said.
“As we’re moving to new large sites, I’m very clear that we have to do so in a controlled way and have all of the checks in place before anything happens: That we move, yes, at pace. But not at the expense of getting things right.”
Mahmood added that the Home Office had improved its contract management in relation to asylum accommodation.
“We’ve been able to claw back £74m in the past few months,” she said. “I think it shows there’s just more rigour in the contract-management side of things at the Home Office.
Mahmood said she has “ensured that the department is sweating the contracts”.
She said those contracts have also been the subject of an internal review, which is due to report to her.