•Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer
Over 108,000 people applied for asylum in the United Kingdom last year, according to government figures released yesterday.
This marked the highest number of asylum requests in any 12-month period since records began in 2001, reports AFP.
The total represented an 18 per cent increase compared to the 91,811 requests lodged in 2023.
The previous record was set in 2002, with 103,081 applications.
The surge in asylum claims comes at a time when Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government faces increasing pressure to address migration issues.
Starmer has pledged to strengthen immigration rules, making it nearly impossible for undocumented migrants who arrive in the UK by boat from the English Channel to later obtain citizenship.
His Labour government is under scrutiny following the strong performance of the far-right Reform UK party in the last general election, which won around four million votes.
It was earlier reported that among the nationalities seeking asylum, Pakistani nationals were the largest group, accounting for 9.7 percent of the total applications.
There was also a significant rise in applications from Vietnamese nationals, with numbers more than doubling to 5,259, up from 2,469 the previous year.
When Starmer took office in July, he abandoned the controversial plan of his predecessor, Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, to deport new arrivals to Rwanda as a deterrent against illegal migration.
Instead, Starmer vowed to focus on dismantling people-smuggling gangs and reducing the number of people arriving in the UK illegally.
Border Security and Asylum Minister Angela Eagle stated that the government is working to speed up asylum decision-making and enforce returns for those whose claims are not granted.
By the end of December 2024, there were 124,802 people awaiting an initial decision on their asylum applications.
Eagle also emphasised the government’s efforts to bring down legal migration, which has been running at historically high levels. Net migration for the year 2023-2024 was 728,000, down from the previous year’s record high of 906,000.
“We are also ensuring that legal migration continues to come down after the previous government quadrupled net migration in the space of four years,” Eagle said.
The government is also reversing some of the relaxed visa requirements introduced by the previous administration.
Undocumented migrants arriving in small boats across the Channel made up 32 per cent of asylum claims in 2024, with around 36,816 individuals crossing from France to England, a slight increase from the previous year.
