Immigration minister Marjolein Faber has told news agency ANP she is pinning her hopes on three pieces of legislation introduced at the end of last year to reduce  overcrowding at the Ter Apel asylum seekers centre.

Justice minister inspectors on Wednesday repeated their calls for action, saying the situation at the centre is untenable and leading to dangerous situations.

Faber said that she agreed the entire asylum system is overloaded but pointed out that fewer people have been housed at Ter Apel, which has capacity for 2,000 people, since November.

The minister, who represents the far-right PVV, said many measures have already been implemented to solve problems at refugee centres, but said her main priority is to ensure the three draft bills pass through parliament.

The Council of State is due to publish its thoughts on the legislation in mid-February, and once the bills have been finalised, they will be debated and voted on in both houses of parliament. The council has already suggested the plans will run into problems and are likely to put more pressure on the courts.

The first piece of legislation scraps permanent residency permits for refugees, reduces the primary refugee permit from five to three years, stops adult children from joining their parents in the Netherlands, and makes it easier to declare people “undesirable aliens”.

The second bill will allow officials to differentiate between people who fled their home country because of their ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion and those who fled from war or violence, including natural disasters.

The third law will make it a crime to refuse to cooperate with deportation plans.

Experts have already said that the three measures are unlikely to have much impact on the number of asylum seekers coming to the Netherlands. Their number was down in the Netherlands last year, in line with European developments as a whole.