Asylum Seekers Accommodation and Safeguarding

Simon Fell Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

It is a pity the hon. Lady takes that approach because I take my responsibilities to children, whether accompanied or otherwise, very seriously. We have put in place a wide range of support mechanisms. I mentioned earlier the work we are doing for unaccompanied children. The hotels, most of which are in Kent, have extremely sophisticated support. It is costing the taxpayer up to £500 a night for that accommodation, which gives her a sense of the degree of the support we are making available. The best thing she could do is to support her local authority and encourage others to take more unaccompanied children and families into good-quality local authority accommodation, or to find them foster care in the community. That is the task because we need to disperse these individuals as fast as we can across the country. She may shake her head, but I am afraid that suggests she does not understand that the way to resolve this issue is to help the children out of hotels and into the community as fast as we can.

[Simon Fell (Barrow and Furness) (Con)]

I am looking forward to my second visit to Manston tomorrow with the Home Affairs Committee. I am glad that the Minister has managed to get the numbers down at Manston. That is really important, but it strikes me that all we are doing is moving a problem from Manston into our communities. To solve this issue, we need to get through the backlogs, allow our communities to rest, and stop creating an environment where the far right can take root in constituencies such as mine and those of colleagues around the House. With that in mind, what measures is my right hon. Friend taking to surge Home Office processing capacity, so we can actually deal with the problem at the heart of this issue?

[Robert Jenrick]

It is essential that we accelerate decision making now within the Home Office. Over the summer, we piloted an approach that would very substantially increase decision making. That has been done in our Leeds office and we now intend to roll it out across the country as quickly as we can. That would take us from an average of around 1.5 decisions per caseworker per week to as many as four per week. We also want, in slightly longer time, to review all the red tape and bureaucracy that surround the process, so we can ensure our system is more streamlined, and to look at why, in the UK, we have a much higher approval rate for asylum than many comparable countries, such as France and Germany. That, at the heart of the issue, is why so many people choose to come here. They shop around for asylum and choose the UK when they are, in fact, economic migrants.