Home Office ‘withholding’ public opinion on asylum plans from parliament, Information Commissioner told

Exclusive: Government refuses to publish full public consultation results as controversial laws enter final votes in parliament

(AFP/Getty)

The Information Commissioner is investigating allegations that the Home Office could be “deliberately withholding” key information on its asylum plans from MPs as they vote on new immigration laws.

The department has refused to publish the full results of a public consultation on its “New Plan for Immigration” while pushing to enforce it using the Nationality and Borders Bill.

Peers were to send the laws back to MPs on Monday, after defeating the government in a wave of amendments that stripped out several controversial measures.

Priti Patel has repeatedly said the proposals implement “the people’s priorities”, but a Home Office response to the consultation suggested that many policies were opposed by thousands of respondents.

A complaint from law firm Leigh Day, on behalf of the Freedom From Torture charity, said the refusal to publish a full report “gives rise to real concern that the Home Office is deliberately withholding key information from the public, including members of parliament voting on the bill, to avoid further negative press concerning – and a potential parliamentary defeat of – its immigration reforms”.

New polling first revealed by The Independent on Sunday indicated that the majority of British people back accepting more asylum seekers, and that less than a third want a system that deters refugees.

Pressure to support Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion has increased scrutiny of the government’s plans, which include automatically criminalising asylum seekers arriving without official permission and refusing to consider their claims, as well as pushing boats back to sea and considering offshore processing centres.

Sile Reynolds, the head of asylum advocacy at Freedom from Torture, told The Independent the government had misrepresented public compassion for refugees “time and time again”.

“It is refusing to release the findings of a vast public consultation on the ‘New Plan for Immigration’ because then it would have to admit that the public does not want the heartless and anti-refugee proposals being taken forward in the Nationality and Borders Bill,” she added.

“Legislation must not be made in the dark. We are appealing to the Information Commissioner to compel the government to publish the findings of this consultation because we believe that MPs, who will vote as the bill returns to the Commons, deserve to know exactly how unpopular and dangerous these proposals are.”

The Home Office commissioned the Britain Thinks consultancy to carry out research on its strategy last year, which received more than 8,500 responses from an online questionnaire, meetings, interviews and focus groups.

Details of their responses have not been published but a Home Office response, published last July, suggested significant opposition to core proposals and concern over plans to treat refugees differently depending on how they arrive in Britain.

“The majority of public and stakeholder respondents were sceptical that these reforms will make the asylum and appeals system faster and fairer,” the document said.

It also admitted that most respondents opposed measures to criminalise refugees who arrive in Britain on small boats or other irregular routes.

Freedom From Torture launched a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for documents summarising the consultation responses in July 2021, but the Home Office refused the request and upheld its decision in an internal review.

It cited an exemption for information that “relates to ... the formulation or development of government policy”, but Freedom From Torture argued that the policy had already been finalised in the borders bill.

Leigh Day solicitor Carolin Ott, who is representing the charity, said it was concerned that politicians were being asked to vote on the Nationality and Borders Bill “without any adequate understanding of what the public thought about some of its key content”.

“At a time when Europe faces the fastest-growing refugee crisis since the Second World War and the bill has been described as ‘the single biggest legal assault on international refugee law ever seen in the UK’, there is clearly a strong public interest in the requested information being disclosed on an urgent basis,” she added.

Ministers have continued supporting the Nationality and Borders Bill while setting up bespoke visa schemes for Ukrainians, which do not amount to grants of asylum or refugee status.

Following defeats in the Lords, the government will seek to reinsert clauses that would declare applications by asylum seekers who travelled through safe third countries like Poland “inadmissible”, allow people to be deported to a different country while their claim is pending, treat refugees differently according to how they arrive, and make it illegal for people to arrive in the UK without “valid entry clearance”.

Following a spate of prosecutions of asylum seekers who steered dinghies in the Channel, peers also voted to ensure that offences can only be committed if done “for gain”, and added new clauses to expand resettlement and family reunion pathways.

They also added a requirement that planned pushbacks by border forces do not endanger life, after an apparent attempt to create partial legal immunity for any resulting deaths.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We reject these claims. Last year the government launched an extensive and wide-reaching public consultation with stakeholders, relevant sectors and members of the public, including those with lived experiences, to inform the New Plan for Immigration.

“The findings from the consultation were carefully considered and a summary of them was published in the government response in July last year.”