All The Mad Places The Home Office Reportedly Wants To Send Asylum Seekers
Since Downing Street refused to deny suggestions that the government is looking at plans to ship asylum seekers to offshore locations to process their claims, the newspapers have been chock-full with leaks about what officials have been proposing.
With plans ranging from floating asylum centres in old ferries to sending migrants more than 8,500 miles away to have their cases heard, some of the proposals seem more likely than others.
On Thursday, the prime minister’s officials spokesman said the government was “developing plans to reform our policies around illegal migration and asylum to ensure that we are able to provide protection to those who need it while preventing abuse of the system and the criminality associated with it”.
That includes looking at what other countries do, he said. But there was an “awful lot of speculation” in reports about what was under consideration.
Asked whether Scottish islands could be turned into asylum processing centres, the spokesman said there were “lots of ideas reported today” and “there are a significant number of them that I really don’t recognise”.
Meanwhile, Matthew Rycroft – the most senior civil servant in the Home Office – claimed the civil service had purely been answering ministers’ questions about how other countries deal with migration.
“We have been leaving no stone unturned in doing that,” he said. “We’ve been looking at what a whole host of other countries do in order to bring innovation into our own system. [But] no decisions have been taken.
“No final proposals have been put to ministers or to anyone else.”
He added: “This is in the realm of the brainstorming stage of a future policy and, I think as ministers have said in the House, everything is on the table, and so it should be at this stage of the policy-making process.”
Rycroft refused to say which offshore proposals had been discussed.
With that in mind, here are five proposals officials have reportedly floated...
