Tory Letwin slams asylum figures

The furious row over asylum seeker figures was reopened when shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin branded them "a fiddle".

Applications fell by one third in the first three months of this year, according to figures just released.

A total of 16,000 people claimed asylum in the first quarter of the year, compared with 23,300 in the last quarter of 2002.

Mr Letwin provoked fury when he said the figures must have been manipulated.

Home Secretary David Blunkett called him a liar and invited him to sue.

Mr Letwin today said: "David partly should calm down a bit and partly he is engaged in a very skilful manoeuvre of distracting attention from the real nature of the problem."

The shadow home secretary said he was not calling in to question the accuracy of civil servants' figures.

"The question is what it is actually telling you," he told Sky News.

The Home Office "very skilfully" withheld the figure for January but gave instead the total for the first three months of the year and individual figures for February and March, he said.

Numbers dipped at the end of January when the social security changes preventing asylum seekers claiming benefit came in, he explained. But that did not mean the numbers arriving in Britain had dropped - just that the loss of benefit meant there was no point registering an asylum claim.

Most watched News videos