Jack Straw: Promise of tighter controls

Mr Straw is due to explain plans to draw up a list of countries and groups from which asylum applications would be automatically refused.

In a speech earlier this year Mr Straw suggested that people should apply for refugee status while abroad, before reaching the UK.

The Home Secretary will also examine fingerprint technology, used to check on asylum seekers arriving in the UK, on a visit to Heathrow Airport.

And he will speak at the Foreign Press Association in London which will examine the future of the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which he has said should be modernised.

There were more than 76,000 asylum applications last year - the highest recorded total.

A House of Lords committee will say that the European Union should agree a common policy on immigration to encourage migration to offset Europe's growing skills shortages.

Baroness Harris, of Richmond, the Liberal Democrat committee chairman, has called for an end to the "demonising" of economic migrants, who she argued were vital to Europe's prosperity.