Tory MP Instructs His Office Not to Deal With Asylum Cases

A Conservative MP has told the House of Commons he has stopped a large number of asylum seekers from attending his surgeries due to “limited resources.”

Marco Longhi, representing the constituency of Dudley North, urged the government to hold a debate on the pressure that asylum seekers are putting on local services.

Addressing the leader of the House of Commons on Thursday, Mr. Longhi said he has instructed his office to not deal with asylum cases for two reasons.

“As MPs, we have zero authority, zero mandate or influence over Home Office decisions. We have very limited resources and I, for one, want to dedicate my resources to putting Dudley people first. Can we have a debate on the pressure that asylum seekers are putting on our nation’s resources and on our local services?” Mr. Longhi said.

During his statement, other MPs were heard shouting “resign” and “shameful.” In her response, Commons leader Penny Mordaunt addressed the concern of the “piling” pressures experienced by local services.

“The honourable gentleman raises a specific point, which I could generalise from because our approach to this issue has been to recognise that we have finite resources and we want to be able to direct them in the most efficient and effective way possible.

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“That’s why we have to control our borders, that’s what the British people want—they want a Government to be able to control access of foreign nationals to the UK,” Ms. Mordaunt said.

She added that the government has been speeding up the review of asylum cases, which she said was “close to 300 percent” at the moment.

During a Commons debate on Wednesday, Mr. Longhi expressed his doubt that the government’s priority was to secure borders.

Dudley North constituents “can see hundreds of people, if not 1,000 a day, landing on the beaches with no documentation whatsoever, and being allowed to stay in this country,” Mr. Longhi said.

“If they go on to commit a crime, several years later, they may still be allowed to stay in this country. It is a very real frustration, and something that even I cannot reconcile,” he added during a debate, led by legal migration minister Tom Pursglove.

Under the recently approved Rwanda scheme, migrants who enter Britain illegally, including those who crossed the English Channel in small boats, will be deported to the African nation.

Last month it emerged that 3,555 illegal immigrants have dropped off the Home Office’s radar after being earmarked for deportation to Rwanda. The government has vowed to locate those who were no longer formally reporting to the Home Office.

This comes amid concerns over the mounting asylum case backlog, Ms. Mordaunt said the government was “cracking through.”

“We will get on top of it,” she told the MPs on Thursday.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged in Dec. 2022 to “abolish” the asylum applications backlog by the end of 2023. The target was later clarified to mean some 92,000 outstanding applications submitted before June 28, 2022, when new rules in the Nationality and Borders Act took effect.

A total of 67,337 applications for asylum were made in the UK last year, which related to 84,425 individuals. The most common origin region of asylum seekers was Asia.

New routes introduced to Ukrainians in 2022 added to the migration flow, which has been described as “larger in scale than any other single forced migration flow to the UK in recent history.”