ROOF Blog

Labour’s record on tackling asylum faces a fresh onslaught today over figures that show a new backlog of 30,000 cases and a warning by the government’s immigration watchdog that its targets are currently ‘unachievable’. John Vine also makes clear that a special five-year exercise which began in 2006 to clear the legacy of 450,000 unresolved asylum cases is now unlikely to meet its July 2011 target completion date. The setbacks mean that despite progress the Labour government will go into the general election campaign unable to claim that the asylum system has been fixed after John Reid famously declared the Home Office’s immigration directorate ‘unfit for purpose’ in May 2006.

Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister, says a Conservative government would promote home ownership – without returning to Thatcher-era council house sell-offs. Labour, he claims, is sidelining home ownership and re-emphasising the importance of social housing. ‘Labour has given up on aspiration in their rush to shore up their core voting areas,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t disagree more with them.’

Labour’s strategy for tackling poverty has reached the end of the road and Britain risks a return to Victorian levels of inequality, according to a major two-year study by the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society and Webb Memorial Trust.

With 20 per cent of the population still stuck in poverty, the report calls for sweeping reform of the tax and welfare systems under which higher earners would finance more generous, universal benefits.

With all three main parties committed to cut spending to reduce the huge deficit in the public finances, the authors are worried that the battle against poverty will suffer.

They urge the parties to sign up to a new ‘poverty prevention strategy’ – not for the next Budget, but for the next 30 years.

Tim Horton, the Fabian Society’s research director, said: ‘We could be at a tipping point that sends Britain back towards Victorian levels of inequality and social segregation, and makes the solidarity which could challenge that social segregation ever more difficult to recover.’

Squatters have taken over the home of married Labour MPs Ann and Alan Keen, who have recently come under fire for claiming hundreds of thousands of pounds in expenses on a second home located a few miles away. The squatters said they moved in after a neighbour said the house had been empty for more than a year, and say they have the support of local residents. The BBC say they have obtained a letter from the local council telling the couple that ‘urgent action’ is required from them to explain why their main house is unoccupied.