The new Immigration Minister has condemned his own Government for the way it handled migration and asylum-seekers.

Phil Woolas said the Government’s failure to remove unsuccessful asylum applicants had caused misery and division within the country.

He also said the public lacked confidence in what the authorities did about immigration because they correctly believed that the Government did not know what it was doing.

He said: “Our failure to resource the asylum processes has caused untold human misery and division within our communities. My attitude to this issue is [that] I am going to clear the backlog because it is the right thing to do morally for asylum-seekers and the right thing to do for the country as a whole.”

Officials are currently working through a backlog of 450,000 asylum cases uncovered when John Reid was Home Secretary. The latest asylum figures show that removals of failed asylum-seekers fell by 22 per cent to 21,705 last year as the Borders and Immigration Agency focused on removing foreign national prisoners from the country.

Within hours of making the comments, during a debate in London with the Dutch justice secretary, Mr Woolas issued a statement clarifying his remarks and saying that he was trying to put current successes in an “historical perspective”.

He said that his criticism of the asylum system applied equally to Conservative governments. However, he admitted that Labour had failed to provide a proper policy for removing asylum-seekers.

Mr Woolas said: “I do accept that the Government didn’t provide the framework of policy [for asylum removals] that anticipated the problems well enough.

“Just like in the Netherlands . . . people didn’t believe the authorities knew what they were doing and there’s a very good reason for that - they didn’t.

“If you cannot have border controls that you can count people in and count people out of the country . . . if you can’t have that proper system, and carry the confidence of the public with you, you cannot help the immigrant to integrate into society.”

Embarkation controls allowing officials to count who was leaving the country were abolished in two phases in 1994 and 1997.

Mr Woolas’s comments came just a day after he backtracked on an interview in The Times in which he caused controversy by saying that the Government would set a limit on migration.

Yesterday Mr Woolas said he wanted to help immigrants to “help themselves become part of our society” and “earn” citizenship in Britain by integrating and learning English. He gave his full support for multiculturalism, which has come under sustained attack for discouraging integration. “Our starting point is that multiculturalism is a good thing,” he said.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said Mr Woolas was conducting a “24hour spin operation”.

He said: “We welcome this admission by the minister, but the public will be sceptical that the Government, which spent 11 years building up this problem, is the right one to solve it.”

In his later statement Mr Woolas said: “We are carrying out the biggest shake-up of the immigration system for a generation. Britain's borders are now stronger than ever, with asylum applications at an historic low and an immigration offender removed every eight minutes.

“My comments put the current successes into historical perspective – making it clear why we have brought in so many of the changes we have.”

Times Recommends

• How I lost the gift of joy for a while
• Why Ann Widdecombe has got it wrong
• Alas, it’s the end of the road for petrolheads