Thousands of asylum seekers 'lying about their age' to 'break in' to Britain as Home Office accused of 'performative empathy'

A few weeks ago, the department made its quarterly migration data public - as it does, on a rolling basis.

In it, the Home Office identified that the top five nationalities making so-called "detected irregular arrivals" in the UK were Afghan, Iranian, Vietnamese, Turkish and Syrian nationals - a bloc which together accounted for 16 per cent of illegal arrivals.

The majority of illegal immigration to the UK is not accompanied by asylum claims, but a Freedom of Information request by GB News revealed a pattern in asylum application data between 2019 and mid-2024 which has been identified by analysts as a "really significant statistical spike, which just does not look natural".

In three of the aforementioned top five, such spikes in the data can be seen in the 16-17 age range.

The pattern is repeated across a swathe of countries - but asylum applications filed by nationals from a handful of east African countries show even greater spikes in that age range.

In Eritrea, 1,830 out of 14,052 men, and 522 out of 4,962 women said they were aged between 16 and 17.

In Ethiopia, that number was 351 out of 2,384 men, and 68 out of 993 women.

In Somalia, it was 293 out of 2,082 men, and 100 out of 1,042 women.

And in Sudan, it was 3,095 out of 13,571 men.

Former British diplomat and chairman of Migration Watch UK Alp Mehmet labelled the figures evidence of a "scam" in which people "pretend to be much younger than they are" because the UK is more accepting of - people who purport to be - unaccompanied minors.

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Sam Bidwell, Director of the Next Generation Centre at the Adam Smith Institute, warned that "there are people applying for asylum that we don't necessarily want to be applying for asylum".

One group, he said, were economic migrants "who will use asylum as an additional means to get under the radar", while another - using Afghanistan as an example - would be "normal people" not immediately under threat from their regimes, for whom the bar for entry "will be low if they can say that they're a child".

French interior minister Gerald Darmanin, in the wake of a botched small boat crossing which saw more than a dozen would-be migrants die off the French coast, had blamed a loosely regulated low-wage job market in the UK for a recent surge in arrivals and attempted crossings.

He said people from Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq were drawn to Britain by the knowledge that they were just one Channel crossing away from finding work - even without proper documentation.

In some of the countries Darmanin and Bidwell name-dropped - Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Iran - the numbers are similar.

In Afghanistan, 3,475 out of 26,889 men - this time purporting to be 15 and 16 - filed asylum applications in Britain.

In Iran, that number was 3,555 out of 32,765 men, while in neighbouring Iraq, it was 1,484 out of 20,206 men.

Across all those countries, that number dwarfed the amount of people claiming to be 15 or 18.

In comparison, asylum applications from countries like Nigeria showed no evidence of visible age spikes.

Rupert Lowe had pointed to the UK's adherence to Council of Europe recommendations that migration officers must use "the principle of presumption of minority for persons undergoing age assessment" as one explanation - but he urged that "anybody found lying about their age should undergo deportation".

Sam Bidwell told GB News that organisations which help foreign nationals come to the UK - both legally and illegally - will be advised that "if you are 17 or 16, you're more likely to be accepted than if you're 18, 19, or 20".

But he cautioned that some of the blame lies at the Home Office's door.

He said: "There's a confusion about what the asylum system is for. Most people in Britain think there should be some kind of asylum system. They don't think it exists to solve all the world's ills, and - take Afghanistan - nobody thinks that a viable solution to the Taliban being in charge in Afghanistan is to let them all live in the UK. Not every Afghan can apply for asylum in the UK.

"It's the same with Iraq. There are 48 million people in Iraq. Not all of them can live in the UK, just because we destabilised the country 20 years ago. That's not a viable solution.

"But to some extent, people in the Home Office's view will nevertheless be 'as many people as possible is good'.

"There's a kind of performative empathy at certain rungs of the Home Office which says, well: 'We have the resources these countries don't... We should take them on where we can.'

"Of course, in an individual sense, lots of migrants can tell a very sad story. Lots of asylum seekers certainly can tell a very sad story about what life is like at home and the difficulties they've had with XYZ group.

"But the job of the Home Office is not to solve the world's ills. It's to deliver on a democratic mandate."

The Home Office insists that there is extra work which goes into age verification - GB News understands that dedicated decision-makers who work on children's claims are given comprehensive extra training to deal with children's asylum claims.

But Mehmet was scathing about the department's acceptance rates, declaring the UK was allowing people to "break in" - just because "we can't be a**ed to check them out properly".

His remarks follow even more Home Office data which reveals that, until 2018, Britain had refused more asylum applications than it granted.

In every year since, except 2020, this has reversed.

Throughout 2023, the UK granted asylum to more than 50,000 people and refused just under 25,000.

By the year ending June 2024 - the most recent data - this stood at just under 53,000 grants and just under 39,000 refusals.

Bidwell told GB News: "At the basic level, there is an issue with importing large numbers of people from these parts of the world anyway because the social norms are very different.

"There's an extent to which, if you import a large number of people with very different social norms, you end up with negative externalities."

"We've seen examples of, if you import people from a single part of the world - poorly-vetted and poorly-integrated, you end up with negative externalities."

The figures appear to have ruffled unexpected feathers - in a recent BBC interview, Tony Blair - "even Tony Blair", as Mehmet put it - asked: "We've swapped out single people coming from Europe... for families from Asia and Africa. How has this helped us?"

Mehmet added that most Britons "welcome manageable, reasonable migration... but mass uncontrolled immigration, illegal immigration, those coming in illegally? No, they feel very strongly about that. And I think the Government would do well to take heed of that."

A Home Office spokesman told GB News: "Some individuals arrive in the UK without documentary evidence. Where there is doubt on someone's age, there is a need to assess it.

"The Home Office has processes in place to verify and assess an individual's age where there is doubt.

"This includes the National Age Assessment Board, which consists of a team of trained social workers whose task is to conduct full age assessments."