Asylum Seekers Accommodation and Safeguarding

Miriam Cates Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

As I said in answer to an earlier question, we are working hard now to accelerate decision making so that individuals can either be granted asylum or be removed from the country. I would say, however, that there is a marked trend in the data showing that some Scottish local authorities are taking a disproportionately low number of asylum seekers in every respect, so the first useful thing that the hon. Gentleman could do would be to go back to the local authorities that are controlled by the Scottish National party in Scotland and ask them to step up.

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

The town of Stocksbridge in my constituency is awaiting final confirmation of £24 million of Government funding through our town deal. That £24 million will be a transformational sum for Stocksbridge, but it equates to just four days of taxpayer expenditure on hotel accommodation for people who have arrived illegally in the UK. Does my right hon. Friend agree that as well as being a complex security and humanitarian issue both for the public and for genuine asylum seekers, the small boats crisis also represents a serious financial issue in these difficult economic times? Can he expand on his previous answer about how the Government will move away from the expensive hotel model?

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend and I have spent many happy hours in Stocksbridge and I want to see the Government investing even more in her community. She is right to say that it is an unconscionable waste of taxpayers’ money to be spending over £2 billion per year on hotel accommodation. That money could be put to better use, whether helping her constituents or fulfilling our broader mission as a country to support those in distress who truly need it at home or abroad. The approach that the Home Secretary and I are going to take is to speed up decision making so that we can get people out of hotels because their application has been decided, to disperse people more fairly and evenly across the country, to see whether better value sites are available to us, and of course to do everything we can to dissuade people from making the journey in the first place.