Western Jet Foil and Manston Asylum Processing Centres

Olivia Blake Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

Yes, I appreciate the seriousness of the issue. It has been my No. 1 priority since September. It is unacceptable that we are spending £6 million a day on hotel accommodation for asylum seekers. It is unacceptable that we have 35,000 asylum seekers in hotels distributed around the country. We need to bring that to an end. We need a comprehensive plan of alternative sites, we need to speed up our processing of asylum, we need to remove people from the UK more quickly, and ultimately we need to change our law. We will introduce legislation later this year to ensure that there is no longer any abuse of our laws.

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)]

I refer hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a member of RAMP, the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy project.

I have been listening carefully. I would like to ask the Home Secretary again: how many extra hotel rooms has she personally procured in her position? In her letter of resignation, she wrote:

“Pretending we haven’t made mistakes, carrying on as if everyone can’t see that we have made them, and hoping that things will magically come right is not serious politics.”

Does she agree that she has made yet another mistake, that she should accept responsibility, and that she should resign?