A whitepaper, unveiled by Home Secretary Jack Straw last night, authorises immigration officers to forcibly enter premises to bust bogus marriages and outlines a new strategy to deal with the huge backlog of 73,000 cases of asylum seekers.

The Blair government also announced creation of a home office special unit to tackle unscrupulous immigration advisers and dismissed speculations that an amnesty was in the offing for asylum seekers already in Britain for more than a decade.

Home office staff explained amnesty might be granted to 10,000 people, including 3,000 from the Indian sub-continent, who entered the country before 1993.

A further 20,000 who applied for asylum between 1993 and 1995 were likely to be given exceptional leave to stay for four years.

On the other hand, the home secretaryannounced a greater use of detention for applicants, a target for immigration authorities to grant decisions within two months and hear an appeal within four, and a promise to failed applicants that they would be ejected from Britain swiftly.

``We are going to get tougher as the past 10 years has seen a ten-fold increase in the number of people seeking asylum and most of them are economic migrants to this country,'' Straw told the House of Commons yesterday.

Straw wants registrars to have statutory powers to demand documentary proof of identity and nationality and belives this could curb growing tendency of new asylum seekers, mostly from India, Pakistan, Turkey and Eastern European nations, to opt for marriages of convenience to evade immigration laws.The new package include tough measures like setting up of a special cell in home office to search and deal with unscrupulous immigration lawyers. This provision followed recent media reports of lawyers lurking at airports to grab asylum seekingclients.

The home office also announced increasing the number of overseas liaison officers who work with airlines abroad from five to 20 and said most of the new officers would be posted in the Indian sub-continent and eastern Europe.These officers work at foreign airports to spot and debar travellers with forged documents from boarding Britain-bound aircraft.

The whitepaper, which will be followed by legislation in the next session of Parliament, provides for right of appeal to visitors refused entry. This follows complaints that many relatives of British residents, particularly from India, had been refused entry to attend family functions.

The home office had also finally moved, in a far reaching decision, to ease restrictions on foreign domestic staff granting them the right to leave their employers, if ill-treated. There has been a large influx of domestic staff to Britain from countries in the Indian sub-continent and the Philippines.

Britain currently has 51,800 people awaiting the outcome ofimmigration requests. Another 24,600 are appealing against decisions denying them refugee status.

Official figures show applications have increased 10-fold in the past decade and that it now costs an annual 400 million pounds ($ 650 million) to process applications, allow appeals, and to provide welfare. Straw described the current systemas ``a shambles.''

The home secretary also announced a new national body to provide welfare to applicants, which would minimise cash payments and offer benefit in kind or through vouchers.

New immigrants in Britain are not allowed to work while they await the outcome of their requests for residence and are reliant on welfare.``What the genuine asylum seeker needs is food and shelter, not a cheque,'' Strawtold the Commons.