Both together

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 508.

Both together

Tony Blair: I know but it, but it's, it's – you know...

Jon Sopel: Hasn't the Home Office been a great advert for the way the government is run over the past two or three weeks?

Tony Blair: Well of course there's been huge problems in the Home Office, but what else has happened in the Home Office? Last Thursday, the publication of the recorded crime figures that yet again, showed a reduction in crime, this time a reduction, a big reduction actually in violent crime with injury, and we're down to what the lowest chance of becoming a victim of crime for, for almost twenty-five years.

Jon Sopel: And prisons full to the bursting point with...

Tony Blair: Well, why are prisons full to the bursting point? Why, why is it that prisons...

Jon Sopel: Because you haven't built enough prison places...

Tony Blair: We've built twenty thousand extra and we've got another eight thousand coming. But you've also got a situation, where today, people are in prison for longer and you've got of course the new indeterminate sentences where people can be kept in for indeterminate period, if they remain a danger to the public. Now I'm not saying that there haven't been big problems in the Home Office, but let's be clear, some of these things like foreign prisoners, or these offences that have been committed abroad by British people who then return back home, the reason we're dealing with these now is that for the first time there is a process in place to deal with them. You take asylum, right, when we came to office, it – the backlog of asylum claims was over 50,000. It took eighteen months to process a claim.

We removed one in five of failed asylum seekers. Today, you've got the backlog down to a few thousand, it takes most claims are actually done within two months and for the first time we're actually removing more unfounded claims than we're taking in. So all I'm saying to you is, and it's the same with the Health Service. What wasn't...