Hotel Asylum Accommodation: Local Authority Consultation

Kevin Foster Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

Dear me! The reason I had to pull out of the meeting with local authority leaders was that the hon. Gentleman had called an urgent question and I was here answering his questions. The idea that the Labour party knows how to get a grip of this challenge is, frankly, laughable. The last Labour Government left the Home Office in such disarray that their own Home Secretary declared it not fit for purpose and had to split the place up. The backlog of cases was so high that he had to institute an amnesty, where they literally wrote to people and said, “Welcome to Britain. We can’t process your application—you’re in.” That is not the approach that we are taking.

Labour Members have no credible proposals to stop the problem at source. They voted against the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, and they opposed the Rwanda scheme. Their own leader, in his leadership campaign, called for the closure of immigration removal centres—the places where we detain people, often foreign national offenders, while we are trying to get them out of the country. The truth is that, in the last Labour Government, the party was committed to mass migration and uncontrolled immigration. We are only the party that believes in the British public. We are the party that wants to ensure that we secure our borders and have a controlled migration system.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

As always, I have some sympathy for my right hon. Friend in having to deal with an urgent question such as this. Recent examples in Torbay show that previously there was engagement with local authorities, although I must say that the news that we were looking to use accommodation was never welcomed. It would be interesting for him to reflect on how the new standards he has laid out will operate and work. Is he saying that this will be an interim period with a bare minimum of 24 hours’ notice and that he hopes to go back to giving a longer period of notice, both to MPs and to councils, particularly those with responsibility for children’s services, because it is really unacceptable that people are finding out about this from staff working at hotels and residents living next door?

[Robert Jenrick]

I can only speak to the situation as I found it when I arrived in the Department, and at that point there were almost 4,000 people at the Manston site. There were serious concerns about conditions at the site and, indeed, about its legality, and there was insufficient accommodation available to us to house the asylum seekers. We have set out, through immense efforts in the last few weeks, to rectify that situation. It is clear to me that insufficient accommodation was procured over a sustained period, and we need to tackle that. We will do it in a number of different ways, including through dispersal accommodation with local authorities; through judicious use of hotels, with good engagement with local authorities; by using larger sites that provide us with decent but not luxurious accommodation; and, of course, by tackling the problem at source. We cannot build our way out of this challenge. We have to reduce the pull factors to the UK and we have to ensure that the backlog of cases is cleared as swiftly as possible.