Time is running out for Labour to get a grip on the cost of housing Channel crossers
25 November 2024
The Government has admitted that they have now opened more hotels for asylum seekers than they have closed. In the four months since the general election, the number of hotels in use has jumped from 213 to 220. While seven hotels were emptied, another 14 have been brought into use.
Despite Labour’s election promise to close the hotels, there is no sign that they will be able to manage this anytime soon. That means taxpayers are continuing to support over 30,000 asylum seekers in hotels, at a cost of £4.2 billion a year.
Similarly, the Government has had to row back on their intention to end the use of large sites for asylum accommodation, with RAF Wethersfield in Essex due to expand from 540 beds to at least 800.
There are two big problems, both the result of Government policy. The first is that their plan to “smash the gangs” isn’t working. The numbers crossing the English Channel have actually increased since Labour took power, despite a series of arrests, most recently during a pan-European operation targeting a gang which smuggled at least 750 Syrians to Britain.
That’s to be commended – but that 750 only makes up 0.5 per cent of the over 147,000 people who have illegally entered Britain via “small boats” since 2018. Nor is there much clarity over the size of the gangs. Is conducting 20 arrests a major part of the smuggling gangs being taken out of action or is it only a small part? We don’t know.
While there is broad agreement that the gangs who control the Channel are largely Kurdish, the Government hasn’t set out who is running them or how many smugglers are involved. Without these basic details, the only metric we have to measure success and failure is the number of illegal immigrants arriving here – which is only increasing.
The second problem is the government’s rolling back of the Illegal Migration Act, which had meant that asylum seekers arriving illegally after March 7 2023 wouldn’t have their cases processed. That has been reversed but it suddenly created a big backlog of cases to be heard. What’s more, the high risk countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea – which have asylum grant rates around 90 per cent – have been prioritised, so the remaining backlog is increasingly made up of more difficult cases, which take longer.
More asylum decisions also mean more appeals to come, even as the number of asylum lawyers available has fallen. The backlog is likely to remain high for the future, so even if the “smash the gangs” strategy does work, the Government will need to keep many of the hotels open while the asylum cases drag on.
Even if the Government was able to end the flow of new asylum seekers, or to process the asylum backlog faster, the grant rate of around 60 per cent means that asylum seekers will just be shifted from the Home Office to local authorities. The taxpayer will still be on the hook for the bill.
Combined with local government buying up homes to house Ukrainian and Afghan refugees who came through the legal routes, it means that in increasing parts of our housing market, ordinary people are now competing against their own Government to find accommodation.
The continued housing of asylum seekers also poses a risk of creating further disorder. The riot in Knowsley was sparked by an asylum seeker harassing an underage girl. The August riots were based on the false belief that the Southport killer was an asylum seeker, but built on widespread anger over the failure to stop the boats and a series of well-reported crimes involving asylum seekers.
Dropping 300 male asylum seekers into pleasant places like Altrincham, near several girls’ schools, seems needlessly risky. Increasingly the issue is that Britain’s asylum obligations are directly harming the British people. Why should farmers suffer another tax to raise a paltry £500 million, when asylum accommodation costs many times more?
Britain simply cannot handle the financial costs of being unable to secure its own borders. If the number of those arriving on small boats continues to be high, or even gets higher, then the asylum system will destroy the financial foundations of the British welfare state.
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