Truth about German claims and the real numbers Britain takes

IN Whitehall, there is deep irritation at the attempt by Germany to present Britain as a country which does not take its fair share of asylum seekers.

In the 2000s, Britain consistently processed more claims than Germany – including 103,081 in 2002 alone.

Indeed, there were so many applications that the system run by the last Labour government almost collapsed under the strain.

Between 2006 and 2010, despite numbers in the UK beginning to fall, we still accepted almost 10,000 more claimants over the fiveyear period than the German authorities.

It’s also a fact that numbers in the UK are again beginning to rise. Some 32,344 adults and their dependants applied in 2014, the

highest annual number since 2004. In the first quarter of 2015, the figure was 7,435.

There is also some scepticism inside Whitehall over Germany’s claim that it will take 800,000 asylum seekers this year.

In the first three months, it received 83,130 applications and, even with the scale of the current crisis, the numbers arriving would need to increase dramatically.

Much of the criticism of the Home Office centres on the ‘vulnerable persons relocation scheme’, which critics point out has given refugee status to only 187 people. But officials say this is a specific route to the UK that prioritises victims of sexual violence and torture, the elderly and disabled and allows them to apply from overseas.

Syrians continue to be able to claim asylum in the normal way after reaching the UK and, since 2011, around 5,000 claims have been approved, including 1,000 last year.

Very few genuine Syrians (people from other countries increasingly claim to be from Syria to boost their chances of suc- cess, having destroyed their papers) are turned down.

Nobody disputes that, currently, Germany is accepting larger numbers of applications. But, crucially, the political situation in the two countries could hardly be more different.

As Migrationwatch chairman Lord Green of Deddington argues, based on the UK’s net migration rate of 330,000 last year, our total population would grow by three million every five years. To ask the public to accept tens of thousands of refugees on top of this – at a time when concern about immigration has never been higher – would be a very difficult ‘sell’ indeed for David Cameron.

In Germany, by contrast, the low birth rate means that its population would fall by 25 per cent by mid- century if it had no net migration.

England is also nearly twice as crowded as Germany and has more migrants per head of population.