Asylum applications rose in the first three months of the year and the number of failed applicants removed from the country fell, government figures published yesterday show.

Britain received the largest number of asylum applications in Europe during the same period.

Applications increased by 16 per cent to 6,595 in the first quarter of the year, compared with 5,680 in the same period last year. The number of failed applicants removed from the country fell by 13 per cent. The number of applications in the whole of 2007-08 was higher than for the previous year and the number of removals was lower.

The figures are a blow to the Government and indicate that the drive to remove foreign prisoners who have served their sentence has been at the expense of removing failed asylum applicants.

Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said that an overhaul of border security was producing results with “asylum applications falling again”.

He was referring to a 1 per cent fall in the first quarter of this year compared with the final quarter of last year. When compared with the same quarter of last year, there is a 16 per cent rise.

Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said: “This undermines the Government’s pledge to remove more failed asylum-seekers than arrive, let alone to make inroads into the massive backlog.”

A separate set of figures showed that the number of migrants from eight Eastern European states was slowing down.

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