Small boats scandal proves UK must do one thing if we're ever to get a grip

So much has been written about the small boats, and quite rightly. The arrival of dinghy after dinghy on the south coast, overwhelmingly carrying young men, many with their ID documents thrown overboard and left floating in the English Channel, matters for lots of reasons. Firstly, there is the sheer economic cost of housing them, whether in hotels, former military bases or other places. Plus all the other costs we often forget. Like residential care for minors, which can run to many thousands of pounds per week per child. We have asylum seekers claiming to be under 18 in the hope of better treatment, and civil servants looking past their beards and taking their claims seriously.

Then there is also the threat to our national security, social cohesion and safety represented by legions of unvetted men from culturally alien countries thrust upon unwitting towns and villages. We know, despite the Home Office's refusal to release crime data broken down by asylum status, that some of the nationalities most heavily represented in the asylum system like Afghans are disproportionately likely to commit sexual offences. We also know that asylum seekers are far more likely to arrive with serious mental health afflictions and even PTSD, with all the potential risks that that brings to our streets.

And this week we learnt just how broken the system is – how deeply the rot extends. A whistleblower, who worked for years as an asylum decision maker, blew the lid on what is going on inside the Home Office, claiming that less than one in 100 asylum claims are genuine.

He spoke of asylum seekers reeling off the same script: hundreds of claims from Pakistani men claiming to be in fear of their lives in their home country because of their apparent gay relationship with the same man – who provides bogus letters in support. And applications furnished with topless photos from the same east London LGBT venue.

Meanwhile, in the face of these absurdities, this blatant exploitation of our hospitality, officials – even when presented with obviously fake documents – are not allowed to contact origin countries to assess their legitimacy because of "international confidentiality rules".

Decision-makers are instructed by Home Office bosses to call asylum seekers “customers” because the civil servants are there to provide a service to the asylum seekers – and apparently not to the taxpayers paying their wages.

The British people are being treated like mugs. Everything this Home Office whistleblower says rings true. It sums up everything I saw during my time in Whitehall. The truth is we could stop the industrial-scale abuse if we wanted to. We don’t because our state bureaucracy allows it – and at every stage insists on tying one hand behind its own back so it can never truly deal with the problem.

Something else happened this week. The UN refugee agency no less criticised our government for granting asylum to migrants "who aren't entitled to it". Let me get this straight. The international organisation charged with looking out for the interests of asylum seekers says our processes are so dysfunctional and compromised that our civil servants are being more generous in who we take in than even international law (supposedly) requires of us? The whole rotten system is falling apart.

Yet, just days after these revelations, the story has died and the news cycle has moved on. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, hailed as the one member of Burnham’s cabinet who really understood the scale of the asylum seeker racket, now appears to have gone quiet. Her bark is clearly bigger than her bite.

In this context, little wonder hundreds of anti-immigration protesters have blocked roads in Dover and confronted police in Portsmouth where more asylum seekers had been brought ashore. People unsurprisingly find the sight of these men – the majority dressed in black and balaclava-clad – intimidating. It is the sign of a fracturing society.

But if we truly wish to deal with this, we cannot continue to ignore the rightful grievances these citizens are trying to express. We must be honest. Through a combination of lucrative people trafficking, economic migrants and our own hopeless bureaucratic dysfunction, we have allowed our asylum system and borders to be utterly abused. The exploitation has been almost total. We must start again, from scratch, and – finally – get a grip.

Ameer Kotecha is CEO of the Centre for Government Reform. He was formerly a senior diplomat, serving as the head of the British consulate in Russia 2023-25