Home Secretary Priti Patel has pledged to fix the “fundamentally broken” asylum system in the UK to make it “firm and fair”.
Speaking at the Conservative Party conference, she promised to introduce legislation next year for the “biggest overhaul” of the system in “decades”.
And she said those against her plans were “defending the indefensible”.
It comes after it emerged this week that the UK considered sending asylum seekers to an island in the Atlantic.
Ms Patel said changes “would take time” and she would “accelerate the UK’s operational response” to the issue in the meantime.
The chief executive of charity Refugee Action, Stephen Hale, said it was a “positive step” for the home secretary to “realise what we’ve been trying to tell her – the asylum system is not fair or effective”.
But he urged her to push for “quicker decisions and better support” for those seeking asylum in the UK.
Labour’s shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds accused the Conservatives of being “the political party that broke” the asylum system, having been in power for 10 years.
Ms Patel pledged to introduce a new asylum system that welcomed people through “safe and legal routes” and stopped those arriving illegally “making endless legal claims to remain”.
The system will include expediting the removal of those “who have no claim for protection”, she said.
She added: “After decades of inaction by successive governments, we will address the moral, legal, practical problems with this broken system. Because what exists now is neither firm nor fair.
“I will take every necessary step to fix this broken system amounting to the biggest overhaul of our asylum system in decades.”
‘The indefensible’
The promised overhaul follows record numbers of people making the journey across the English Channel to the UK in September, which Ms Patel has vowed to stop.
According to Refugee Action, 35,566 asylum applications were made in the UK in 2019 – down from a peak of 84,000 in 2002.
At the same time, delays in processing UK asylum applications have increased significantly.
Four out of five applicants in the last three months of 2019 waited six months or more for their cases to be processed.
Ms Patel said the UK would make more “immediate returns” of people who arrived illegally “and break our rules, every single week”.
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