Asylum Seeker Hotel Accommodation: Reopening

Debate between Angela Eagle and John Hayes

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Border Security and Asylum (Dame Angela Eagle)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. Having sat in the Westminster Hall Chair many a time, I can report that in this Parliament it seems to be much warmer in this room. It used to be freezing, but perhaps my complaints about the heating when I was in the Chair have had a positive effect in this Parliament—for the comfort of us all, I hope.

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

I’m going to take all the credit.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

It is a pleasure to respond to this debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Windsor (Jack Rankin) on securing it and thank all Members who have contributed.

I remind hon. Members of the strained asylum system that this Government inherited. Listening to all the contributions, I had to pinch myself and think about the reality: we had 14 years in opposition; we have had six months, getting on for perhaps seven, in government—yet everything is somehow our fault. There was a slight nod in some of the contributions, including those of the hon. Members for Windsor and for Stockton West (Matt Vickers), towards the mistakes that were made in the running of the asylum system during the past 14 years. Mistakes certainly were made, and they leave legacies: messes to clear up and difficult things to do.

We inherited a system with massive backlogs. There was an attempt to introduce a completely different system, the so-called Rwanda deterrent and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which distracted the Government from the day job, as I have called it. Because of the design of the Illegal Migration Act, we also had a huge build-up of those who had arrived in the system from March 2023, when the switch was meant to be being arranged. They were put in hotels with absolutely nowhere to go, with no prospect of having their claims looked at and awaiting a theoretical trip to Rwanda. No trip ever happened.

To those who say that the Rwanda scheme was a deterrent, I gently point out that from when it was first announced in the Bill to when it was scrapped, 84,000 people crossed the channel in small boats. If that is a deterrent, it is a very peculiar one. Deterrence is difficult to achieve when people are desperate. We have to look to see whether that worked, and I do not think it did. It led to a huge build-up. The hon. Member for Stockton West hinted at that when he pointed out that the previous Government had more than 400 hotels open at one point. That was because of the build-up in the old system and the build-up in the new system. In the old system, people were in huge queues. With the new system, the previous Government’s idea was that they would not even process any of them: they would just hold them in hotels until the new system was up and running. In essence there were two backlogs.

The previous Government then decided that they would make a massive attempt to clear what they called the legacy backlog: the people who arrived before the Rwanda scheme was designed and announced. They did that for first asylum decisions in 2023. Those who were granted asylum left the system, and many ended up homeless, but those who were not granted asylum appealed. Those who were not granted asylum in that gallop to deal with the legacy backlog are still in the appeals system. The number of people in the appeals system doubled as a result of the previous Government’s work on the legacy backlog. We then had the legacy backlog dealt with at first hearing, with half of those cases going into the appeals system, and a growing number of asylum seekers who had arrived after March 2023, with no prospect of being dealt with at all, just filling hotels. That is why the previous Government had more than 400 hotels.

We can disagree about whether the Rwanda scheme would have worked. Personally, I do not think it was a deterrent—that so many people crossed the channel while it was in prospect demonstrates that it was not a deterrent. It also cost a great deal of money: the National Audit Office said that the payments the Government agreed to make to people who were going to be deported to Rwanda amounted to around £156,000 per person over five years. In theory, they were going to deport 250 people a week. I do not think that was realistic or that it was ever going to be deliverable. Opposition Members are entitled to a different view, but the view of the Government is that the scheme was not going to work.

We are dealing with an issue with no easy answers. There are international agreements that we have signed up to, including the refugee conventions that give protection to people who are fleeing danger and were put into place after the second world war. We are now in an era where we have more people on the move because of events around the world than we have had since the second world war, which has put pressure on the asylum systems of all countries.

There are asylum seekers and there are economic migrants. When listening to the hon. Member for Windsor’s contribution, I was a bit distressed that he did not distinguish between the two; he seemed to think that everyone who arrives is automatically an economic migrant who ought to be deported. That is his view, but it is not the view of the law. The previous Government, under his party, had a system that tried to see whether people who were claiming asylum were actually asylum seekers or were failed asylum seekers—there is a difference.