Hotel Asylum Accommodation: Local Authority Consultation Debate
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Meg Hillier
Main Page: Meg Hillier (Labour (Co-op) - Hackney South and Shoreditch)Department Debates - View all Meg Hillier's debates with the Home Office
Hotel Asylum Accommodation: Local Authority Consultation
Meg Hillier Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Robert Jenrick
On asylum seekers working, there are respectable arguments on both sides of the issue. I take the view that, for a range of different reasons, there are already significant pull factors to the UK and it would be unwise of us to add a further pull factor. However, I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman takes a different view.
With regard to the backlog, we are now going to institute the processes piloted at our Leeds office, which will ensure that productivity is increased significantly. However, he is right that we need to get through the backlog. It should never have been allowed to get to this level in the first place.
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Added to the chaos, we now see a bidding war where local authorities find themselves competing against Home Office procurement for temporary accommodation. That is not new. The Public Accounts Committee highlighted those very issues in its report in November 2020 and made a recommendation to the Home Office, which the Government accepted, that:
“The Department should, as a matter of urgency, communicate with NHS bodies, MPs and other key stakeholders such as police, setting out how it will consult and engage with them in future.”
We also asked the Department to write to us further about that approach. So this failure was on the desk—everybody knew that it was happening—and it is still a failure now. Why?
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.