Introduction

Until recently, asylum seeking in the UK involved only a few high-profile individuals and there was no need for a national asylum policy, statutory forms of support for asylum seekers, or for a formal refugee integration policy. Refugees had been persecuted dissidents from behind the Iron Curtain or individually tortured human rights activists: recognised fugitives from world-stage catastrophes. No complex legal process was required to decide whether claims for asylum were genuine. It was not until the 1993 Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act that asylum was dealt with in primary legislation. Before that, the UN Convention was incorporated into Immigration Rules that operated according to the discretion of the Home Office. Quota refugee resettlement projects in recent years – the Polish programme 1945-49, Ugandan Asian programme 1972-73, Chilean programme 1974-79, Vietnamese programme 1979-82, Bosnian programme 1992-95, and the Kosovan humanitarian programme in 1999 – were one-off responses to specific, recognised emergencies rather than statutory arrangements, each drawing only a little on the lessons of its predecessor. But this all changed in the late 1980s with the arrival of large numbers of spontaneous asylum applicants, from persecuted ethnic groups and from a wide range of countries of origin. It ushered in a decade of national asylum policy making, followed by national asylum support arrangements and, more recently, a national integration policy.

Policy and practice have been developed to meet the new challenges in the context of a government commitment to generate an evidence base to inform national policy making . The research programme on asylum and refugees, introduced by the Labour government in 1997 to underpin asylum and immigration policy, can be seen as part of this. Robinson (1998) describes the ideal process: