MINISTERS faced fresh embarrassment over immigration last night when it emerged the legal aid bill for immigrants and asylum-seekers rose above £200 million last year to almost eight times the amount spent in 1997.

Official figures showed the provisional total for legal aid on immigration and asylum cases for 2003-04 was £204 million, 16 per cent up on the previous year’s £176 million, despite asylum applications being halved last year.

In the year before Labour came to power the bill stood at just £26.1 million. Immigration and asylum cases took up 9.2 per cent of the total legal aid bill for England and Wales in 2002-03, up from 7.4 per cent the previous year and almost three times the 3.2 per cent level of 1998-99.

The figures were published in a written answer from David Lammy, Constitutional Affairs Minister. The size of the bill is a further embarrassment to Tony Blair who has been forced to personally intervene in both asylum and immigration policy after the public appeared to lose faith in the system. Most recently, he has pledged reform of the immigration service to crackdown on a series of abuses which cost one of his ministers her job.

The issue has prompted even more controversy in recent weeks, after it emerged that radical cleric Abu Hamza was seeking legal aid in his attempt to avoid deportation.

In today’s figures Mr Lammy said that asylum cases took up the lion’s share of the legal aid spent on asylum and immigration matters.

• A record number of migrants — about 513,000 — entered the UK in 2002, and 359,000 left, according to the Office for National Statistics. Nearly 125,000 people left the UK to live elsewhere within the European Union in 2002.

  The net increase of 154,000 was lower than the 172,000 estimated for 2001 and the 163,000 estimated for 2000. Outward-bound migrants expected to stay abroad longer than those travelling into the UK, the ONS found.

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