Asylum Accommodation

With permission, Mr Speaker, I will make a statement on asylum accommodation. It is important to remind the House of the wider context, and in particular the events that have brought us here today. In the years before the general election, the number of people arriving in the United Kingdom illegally, particularly via small boats across the channel, rocketed. The dismal consequences of that abject failure to secure our country’s borders are grimly familiar to us all: individuals risking their lives to come here via dangerous means, criminal gangs growing rich from the proceeds of organising those journeys, community cohesion placed under severe strain, and public trust in the state’s ability to perform one of its most basic functions shredded. Over the last two years this Government have taken concerted action to turn the situation around. We have begun by implementing major asylum reforms to reduce the incentives that draw people to this country. We have cut overall asylum costs by nearly £1 billion, while asylum decision making, which effectively ground to a halt under the previous Government, is at a 24-year high. More foreign criminals and illegal migrants are being removed than at any time in many years, and in partnership with our French counterparts we have stopped more than 44,000 crossing attempts. We have also put in place a groundbreaking scheme that means that small boat arrivals can, for the first time, be returned to France. All that work is important and it is making a difference. However, perhaps the most totemic and tangible manifestation of the failing system that we inherited is the continued use of hotels to house asylum seekers. That issue has, quite understandably, been a source of widespread concern and anger. The Government recognise those frustrations, and we share them. Hotels ought to be local assets serving their communities, not propping up the asylum accommodation system. When hotels are used for that purpose, there are significant implications for local services, community cohesion and public safety. Clearly, that unsuitable, unsustainable and costly practice must be stopped, which is why this Government made a commitment to end the use of asylum hotels in this Parliament. We are well on track to deliver on that aim. In April we announced that 11 asylum hotels had been closed and given back to local communities. We were clear at that point that more would follow in the subsequent weeks, and so that has proved, with a further 20 now having closed. That means that just under 170 asylum hotels remain in use, which is a reduction of more than half compared with the peak of around 400 under the previous Government. The number accommodated in hotels has also seen a significant fall from 56,000 in 2023, to around 21,000 now. Progress is being made but we must go further, and that means scaling up our use of larger, more basic facilities. There are currently two such sites in operation: Wethersfield in Essex and Crowborough in East Sussex. Those sites began housing asylum seekers in 2023 and January this year respectively. Across both sites there is, at present, capacity to accommodate up to 1,340 individuals, with additional contingency capacity at Wethersfield of 400. In the meantime, work has continued to identify further viable locations. Today I can confirm to the House that three new ex-military sites are now under consideration: Barnham in Suffolk, Bicester in Oxfordshire and Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire. Together, those sites could eventually provide accommodation for around 3,750 asylum seekers, subject to feasibility assessments, planning permission and the necessary approvals. Those caveats are important, because while our commitment to the promise we have made on hotels is absolute, we must ensure that we get this right and carry out all relevant due diligence, so that if we decide to proceed with an alternative site, our plans are as strong as they can possibly be. Let me assure hon. Members that we have learned from the previous Government’s forays into this arena. No final decision will be taken on any site until, in each case, all necessary arrangements, assessments and approvals are in place and have been properly considered. Work on those three potential sites is ongoing, in conjunction with local and national partners. To further support the exit from hotels, we are exploring the possibility of extending the use of the site at Crowborough, which is currently due to end next January. At Wethersfield, we are exploring both an extension and the best use of capacity. Finally, following detailed assessments, the Government have decided not to proceed with Cameron barracks in Scotland as a potential site for asylum accommodation, and it will be returned to the Ministry of Defence. Before I finish, I assure the House that we understand our responsibilities in this space. With any decision on asylum accommodation, public safety is and will continue to be a critical consideration. We will always take every possible step to minimise the impact on communities. To be clear, wherever asylum seekers are located, they should be in no doubt that if they break our laws, they will be caught, face justice and, like the thousands of foreign offenders already removed under this Government, made to leave our country. To conclude, it was always going to take time to fix the mess we inherited, but as the measures I have set out today clearly demonstrate, we are acting decisively to achieve the change the country voted for at the general election by closing asylum hotels for good, by securing our borders and by restoring order and control to the immigration system. That is what the public rightly expect and that is what the Government are working relentlessly to deliver. I commend this statement to the House.

I call the shadow Minister.

I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, which confirms what we have suspected since last week: this Government are planning to put more illegal migrants into sites across the country. Some of those sites are due to host illegal migrants until 2030, yet the Government did not think that it was worth alerting the hon. Members who represent those communities and live nearby ahead of the announcement in the press. Rather than subjecting the plans to proper scrutiny here in Parliament, the Government tried to sneak the news out quietly before the weekend, without discussion here in this place by those people’s democratically elected representatives. That is exactly the same playbook that the Government have tried to use in places like Inverness where, thanks to the work of the Conservative group on the Highland council, the Home Office’s plans to house illegal migrants at Cameron barracks were blocked. We have seen in far too many cases the risk that illegal migrants, most of them young men, pose to the public, particularly to women and children. If the Government are planning to force communities to live alongside people who have shown complete contempt for our laws and norms by the very act of coming here illegally, the least that they can do is to allow those plans to be subject to proper scrutiny. Now that we finally have an opportunity to scrutinise the plans, we can perhaps see why the Government were so keen to hide them. For all the talk of smashing the gangs, they reveal that this Government do not have any faith in their own ability to fix the problem. If they are so sure that they are ending illegal channel crossings, why are the Government making plans to host illegal migrants in this country until 2030? What does that tell us about their confidence in their own approach? The truth is that this Government have no intention of fixing the problem: they care only about managing people’s perceptions of it. While they talk up the reduction in illegal migrants living in hotels, they conveniently leave out the fact that thousands more migrants are being housed in so-called dispersal accommodation: homes in the middle of our towns and cities where illegal migrants pose an even greater risk to the public. Since the last election, 75,000 people have crossed the channel. In the past few weeks alone, 3,000 have made the crossing. For all the Government’s talk of removals, nearly all of them—some 93%—are being allowed to stay. The Minister boasts about a reduction in outstanding decisions, but they have achieved that reduction by granting asylum to thousands upon thousands of illegal migrants. The Minister said in his statement that to stop the use of asylum hotels for good “we must go further, and that means scaling up our use of larger, more basic facilities.” He is right that the Government must go further to stop the use of asylum hotels for good, but he is utterly wrong that the problem is solved by instead spending huge resources to create other places to live for those who arrive here illegally. As Conversative Members have made clear time and again, the only real solution to the crisis at our border is to remove illegal migrants as soon as they arrive. People must know that if they try to break our laws, they cannot stay. For it to be possible to remove people as soon as they arrive, we must leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights that prevents us from doing so, but the Government refuse to recognise that. They are in hock to activist lawyers in this country and unaccountable judges in Strasbourg, and keeping those people happy takes precedence over keeping the British people safe and delivering on their democratic will. The plans before us are another sorry example of that. More illegal migrants will enter the endless cycle of appeals and legal challenges, allowing them to stay here for years at the taxpayer’s expense. More people will be put at risk because of these plans and because of the Government’s unwillingness truly to solve this problem for good.