COVENTRY MESSAGE BOARD

Illegal migrants see the UK as a "soft touch" and its benefits system acts as a "magnet" to them, the mayor of the French city of Calais has told MPs.



Natacha Bouchart added that the fences placed around UK border controls set up in the city "make everybody laugh".

"These people are ready and prepared to die to come to England," she told the Home Affairs Committee.

Calais has struggled in recent months with increasing numbers of migrants arriving and trying to get to the UK.

French police used tear gas this week as hundreds of migrants tried to climb on to trucks bound for the UK.

Ms Bouchart estimated that 2,500 illegal immigrants were now living in Calais and that most were Eritrean, Ethiopian, Sudanese, Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi.

Calais was suffering problems from "a lot of mafia and traffickers in this population", Ms Bouchart said.

She added: "There hasn't been a message from the British government or anywhere else that it's not El Dorado."

Asked by the committee's chairman, Labour MP Keith Vaz whether the UK was seen as "a soft touch for those that want to come here", she replied: "Oui."

Ms Bouchart, speaking via an interpreter, added: "You have a much more favourable regime in Britain than other countries. The second thing is the entitlement to benefits of £36 which are given to asylum seekers or migrants, which is a huge amount for people who have nothing in their lives."

Ms Bouchart said the "real magnet is the benefits that are perceived in Great Britain".

The official UK border was moved to France in 2003 in an effort to stop illegal immigrants reaching British soil to claim asylum.

This was recently reinforced with fencing previously used for security at a Nato conference. But Ms Bouchart said: "The fence makes everybody laugh."

Asylum: 30,000 cases still unresolved from 2007, say MPs



The Home Office is facing a fresh backlog of asylum cases, on top of 30,000 unresolved applications dating back to 2007, MPs have warned.

The Public Accounts Committee said the number of new asylum seekers awaiting an initial decision on their status rose 70% in the first quarter of 2014.

It also warned that contact had been lost with 50,000 people who had been refused the right to stay in the UK.

In a report analysing the impact of the changes, the cross-party committee said performance had "held steady" in most areas since the reorganisation but the Home Office had still "failed to deal" with the longstanding asylum backlog.

It said 29,000 cases dating back at least seven years remained unresolved, with 11,000 people yet to receive an initial decision on whether they could stay in the country.

MPs also suggested the Home Office was failing to meet its own targets for processing newer claims, which totalled 16,273 in the first three months of 2014.

It partly attributed this to the agency's "botched and ill-judged" decision to downgrade caseworkers working in the area.

Although the decision was subsequently reversed, the committee said it led to 120 experienced staff leaving, and this - combined with major problems with IT systems - meant the department lacked the data to manage the backlogs and track people through the system.

"It is deeply worrying that the Home Office is not tracking those people whose applications have been rejected to ensure they are removed from the UK," said Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP who chairs the committee.

"At the end of 2013-14, there were over 175,000 people whose application to stay in the UK had been rejected, and they are placed in a migration refusal pool to await removal.

"The number of such cases has not been reduced over time. Some may have left the UK voluntarily but without exit checks it is almost impossible to know."