Britain’s asylum racket is news to no one

The BBC has done the country a genuine service – no laughing at the back. On the front page of the BBC News website today is an investigation into immigration lawyers, who were found to be coaching fraudulent asylum claims, fabricating backstories, inventing persecution, selling identities wholesale to anyone who can pay. This is important journalism, and the team responsible deserves credit for it. Real, old-fashioned, get-your-hands-dirty investigative reporting, of the kind that used to be the BBC’s reason for existing. Congratulations, sincerely, to everyone involved.

Now, can we have a moment of honesty about what this ‘revelation’ actually reveals? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever that anyone paying attention did not already know. This has been going on for decades. Decades during which successive home secretaries of both parties stood at despatch boxes and talked about the integrity of the system, the rigour of the process, the robust safeguards in place, while the asylum industry quietly got on with its work, billing by the hour, gaming by the year, and laughing all the way to the legal aid pot.

The Daily Mail did an undercover investigation in 2023 that was near-identical in its findings. Reporters posing as economic migrants were offered elaborate fabricated backstories – featuring sexual torture, political persecution, support for Khalistani independence – for between £4,000 and £10,000 a time, complete with coached testimony and forged supporting evidence. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) intervened in three firms within days of publication. Three. Out of how many? The warning notice the SRA issued afterwards conceded that wrongdoing might be ‘more widespread than simply a handful of firms’. Might be. A remarkable understatement for a system operating at industrial scale.

In 2017, the BBC’s own File on Four caught an immigration solicitor on tape advising an undercover journalist how to fabricate a second job, sourcing a bent accountant to certify the fiction. That solicitor fought his way through 17 interlocutory applications, two failed judicial reviews, and an application to the Court of Appeal before being struck off. The system rewarded his defiance with years of delay. As they say, this isn’t a bug. That is the feature.

And then there are the cases that go beyond paperwork fraud into something far more consequential. Abdul Ezedi – remember him? The Afghan national who doused a mother and her two daughters with corrosive chemicals on a south London street in January 2024, then fled through the night, was last seen leaning over Chelsea Bridge, and was subsequently found dead in the Thames. He had arrived illegally in 2016. His first two asylum applications were refused. He was convicted of sexual assault and indecent exposure in 2018 and placed on the sex-offenders register. Then he claimed he had converted to Christianity. A church minister vouched for him. A tribunal judge was persuaded. He was granted asylum in 2020, despite the Home Office’s own assessment that he was ‘using religion for his own ends’, an assessment the judge chose to override.

Then there’s Emad Al Swealmeen, the Islamist who detonated a homemade device outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Remembrance Sunday 2021. He had arrived from Iraq in 2014, claimed asylum, was refused, lost his appeals, and then converted to Christianity at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral five-week Alpha course – complete with a baptism, confirmation and clergy support. Asylum granted. A pastor in south Wales later admitted he had baptised up to 500 asylum seekers in those years, with more than half vanishing after the ceremony, never again setting foot in any church. A curate at Liverpool Cathedral, himself a former refugee, told a reporter plainly: ‘There are many people abusing the system. I’m not ashamed of saying that.’ He was not ashamed. Neither, it seems, were any of the institutions through whose hands these cases passed without consequence.

The Home Office, to its credit in the Ezedi case, had seen through the fraud. The immigration tribunal overruled it. This is a pattern that border officials and even judges have been noting for years. The then independent border watchdog wrote in 2017 that there was ‘considerable evidence’ of last-minute asylum claims designed purely to frustrate deportation. By 2019, the former immigration enforcement chief David Wood was describing a system ‘rife with abuse’ processing thousands of fraudulent applications annually. Nobody resigned. Nobody was charged. The machinery ground on. And now the BBC has found it all over again.

So let us be precise about what needs to happen, because warm words and £15,000 fines for rogue advisers, the government’s response in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act (2025), are not remotely adequate to the scale of what has been operating, openly, for 20 years.

Every individual found to have coached fraudulent asylum claims must be struck off, charged with fraud and conspiracy, and have their assets seized to repay the damage inflicted on the public purse and on the genuine refugees whose cases are crowded out and cheapened by this corruption. This is not a matter for regulatory proceedings conducted at the speed of cold treacle. It is fraud. It must be treated as such.

Every individual found to have obtained asylum status through fabricated claims should be deported. Without the interminable procession of appeals that the legal aid budget currently subsidises at public expense. They are here fraudulently. Fraud voids the claim. This principle is not complicated, and the Human Rights Act must not continue to function as a permanent veto on removing people who lied their way into the country. We must repeal it and leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

Every charity that has received public money while facilitating, enabling or turning a blind eye to this fraud should have its charitable status stripped and be required to repay every penny of taxpayer funding it received in connection with that work. The charitable sector has too long served as a laundering mechanism, not for money but for moral credibility, allowing organisations engaged in the systematic gaming of the asylum system to present themselves as humanitarian bodies beyond scrutiny or accountability.

There must be a full root-and-branch investigation across the entire immigration-law sector. Not a review. Not a working group. Not a consultation with stakeholders. An investigation, led by people with the powers and the will to follow the evidence wherever it goes – across every firm, every adviser and every associated charity that has been touching this system for the past two decades at least.

The Home Office, under Labour and the Conservatives alike, has been asleep at the wheel for so long that the wheel has rusted solid. Ministers have from time to time stamped their feet, spoken darkly about ‘crooked lawyers’ and ‘industrial-scale abuse’, and then left every mechanism of accountability untouched. The machinery grinds on. The boats keep coming. The briefs keep filing. The legal aid clock keeps ticking. The public keeps paying.

Billy Kember and the other BBC journalists behind this investigation have done their job. Now it is time, long past time, for the state to do its.

Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Gawain’s Fainting in Coils Substack.