Hotel Asylum Accommodation: Local Authority Consultation

Henry Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

As I have said in answer to other questions, we want to move forward to a much better level of engagement with local authorities. From my prior experience in local government and seeing the confluence of issues from Homes for Ukraine, the Afghan resettlement scheme, the Syrian scheme, the number of asylum seekers and the general lack of social housing, it is important that Departments such as mine and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities work closely together and that the Government take a place-based approach where we understand the specific pressures that we are placing on particular local authorities and work with them as closely was we can.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

A significant number of hotels in my constituency are to be used to house migrants for way more than a year beyond the Manston incident of a few weeks ago—one is booked out until July 2024—which is starting to cause community tensions and having an impact on the business community, which cannot use those hotels. When will the Minister’s dysfunctional Department get a grip and deal with the core problem that the Government have caused?

[Robert Jenrick]

It is not the Government who have caused the issue here. The primary focus of our attention should be on the tens of thousands of people who are crossing the channel illegally, putting immense pressure on our asylum system. Frankly, even the most well-oiled machine would have found it extremely difficult to deal with that. There are a number of serious issues that the Home Office must get right. Quite clearly, we have to get the backlog of cases down, we have to get people out of hotels, and we have to find sensible accommodation that is good value for money but decent, so that people awaiting the outcome of their cases can be accommodated appropriately.