Labour is making the illegal immigration crisis far, far worse
Asylum seekers have not magically disappeared; relocation is quite literally displacement activity
If the British public wasn’t spontaneously combusting over the number of migrants billeted in local hotels before this week’s home affairs committee’s revelations, it will be now.
The original 10-year forecast for asylum accommodation contracts was around £4.5bn. But in an all-too-familiar illustration of bureaucratic buck-passing and insouciant waste, it has somehow mushroomed to £15.3bn. Basic oversight failures have been exposed, including the 244 bed-spaces which were charged for by a provider, but never existed. The Home Office has failed to ensure value for money or penalise under-performance, once again exemplifying PJ O’Rourke’s observation that giving cash and power to government is like giving whisky and car keys to teenage boys.
The Home Office press team insists the Government is once again “furious”, a line presumably intended to mollify a despairing public but which just reinforces the impression that ministers are gormless spectators of events. Nevertheless, this performative outrage has spurred Labour’s latest bright idea: using military barracks to house illegal migrants. Sound familiar? It’s more or less what the evil Tories were proposing whilst Labour politicians flaunted their moral superiority and decried it as inhumane. The Left are capable of more contortions than Pixie Le Knot.
Already, Labour are bragging about how many asylum hotels they have closed since the Tory peak of around 56,000 beds across 400 locations. But think what that actually means: relocation is – literally – displacement activity. Ministers may boast that fewer hotels are now in use, but the migrants haven’t magically disappeared. They’ve simply been shunted into “houses in multiple occupation” (HMOs). These are surely another scandal waiting to be uncovered. I give it until Christmas.
In the first quarter of this year over 32,000 asylum seekers were in hotels across the UK, with a further 66,000 housed in taxpayer-funded dispersal accommodation. To claim that closing hotels fixes the problem is like Wes Streeting announcing he’s cured the NHS bed shortage by decanting patients from hospital corridors into car parks. Labour shouldn’t be allowed to take credit for reducing hotel numbers if the underlying issue isn’t being dealt with. And it isn’t.
You could argue that it’s marginally preferable to keep these migrants in hotels where they are easier to monitor. Local residents will at least be aware that a hotel has been repurposed, making the inadequate response to the Small Boat Armada clearly visible and maintaining pressure on a Government people are beginning to believe has no real desire to reduce illegal migration.
What’s more, hotels at least stop “asylum seekers” from competing directly with the domestic homeless for scarce social housing. The mass procurement of HMOs must be pushing already sky-high rents still higher, not least because Home Office staff, with their ever-open chequebooks, offer landlords better-paid long-term deals.
Mears, a private contractor using public money to find HMOs on the open market, went on a spending spree across the north-east of England in 2023 and early 2024 buying 221 properties for more than £20m. Serco, that ubiquitous snuffler of public money, has 1,000 leased properties for asylum accommodation. Unfortunate local residents complain of “intimidation and confrontations in the street” living next to HMOs.
The Telegraph: continue reading
Featured image: The Telegraph
Leave a Reply