DAVID BLUNKETT, the home secretary, already reeling from the resignation of Beverley Hughes, his immigration minister, was last night facing a fresh crisis over government attempts to manipulate figures for asylum seekers in Britain.

Home Office e-mails leaked to The Sunday Times reveal that Hughes’s office ordered staff to avoid arresting illegal immigrants. Some would have been suspected criminals.

It was feared that the immigrants would apply for asylum if detained and would therefore undermine the prime minister’s pledge to reduce the number of asylum seekers by half.

A number of new civil service whistleblowers have come forward to confirm that the government’s much-trumpeted asylum target was partly achieved by allowing illegal immigrants to stay at liberty.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, yesterday described the e-mails as “devastating” and called for a full independent public inquiry into the matter. “These e-mails show that ministers were operating a policy utterly corrupted by the prime minister’s promise to halve the asylum figures,” he said.

“This non-arrest policy is a public scandal because it’s the Home Office of all people who are talking about not enforcing the law. It simply beggars belief.

“It seems that illegal immigrants, including foreign criminals, were allowed to stay at liberty as a deliberate result of this secret policy.”

The e-mails were written by senior officials in the immigration enforcement directorate, which investigates and arrests illegal immigrants so they can be deported. They were leaked to The Sunday Times by a Home Office official who believes they illustrate how Blunkett’s immigration and asylum policies are a charade.

Dated August 29 last year, the e-mails inform Home Office investigators that a planned raid on a company thought to employ illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers has had to be aborted. This was despite three previous visits by the immigration investigators.

They wanted to raid the company and possibly prosecute it because it was employing “removable offenders”, many of whom were “working under assumed identities”.

However, one senior official told his staff that he feared losing his job unless he could be sure that those likely to be arrested were all failed asylum seekers (FAS).

Immigrants who have failed to obtain asylum rarely reapply and would therefore not increase the figures.

The senior official said: “I have already been speaking to Bev Hughes’s office on another operation and if I report anything other than FASs detected and removed next week, then I will be looking for another job.”

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