Asylum and Migration

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for securing this important debate and pay tribute to the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee for her powerful opening speech and for the outstanding work that she is doing on these issues.

The Home Office spending figures, detailing an astronomical overspend of £5.9 billion last year, represents such a shockingly cavalier attitude to taxpayers’ money that it really does beggar belief. Two thirds of that £5.9 billion was for asylum costs—a staggering £4.3 billion overspend over the past 12 months, taking the total spend on emergency asylum hotels and asylum seeker support up to a quite astonishing £5.4 billion. These costs also include a whopping £1.2 billion to pay for the implementation of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which, let us not forget, has not even been implemented yet.

We also know that, should the Government manage to be able to realise their fever dream of sending asylum seekers rather than Home Secretaries to Rwanda, the first 300 will cost an astonishing £570 million and account for just 1% of the 30,000 asylum seekers who crossed the channel in small boats last year. That works out at almost £2 million per asylum seeker. Just let that sink in: £2 million of British taxpayers’ money to send one asylum seeker to Rwanda. The country knows it, this House knows it, the Home Secretary knows it, and the Minister knows it: the Rwanda scheme is the worst value for money policy in history.

The Conservatives will point to the asylum seekers crossing the channel. It is correct to say that more than 100,000 have made that perilous journey since 2018, which is when the Conservative party started to well and truly lose control of our borders. It is also correct to say that, of that 100,000, a staggering 40,000 have crossed since the current Prime Minister was appointed by default, which tells us all we need to know about his vacuous “Stop the boats” pledge and how it is going. Labour is clear that tackling the Tory boats chaos cannot be achieved through headline-chasing gimmicks, such as the Rwanda plan, which just absorb vast amounts of money, time and resources.

Instead, we need a laser-like focus on practical common-sense measures that get the job done, which is why Labour has set out a detailed plan to smash the criminal smuggler gangs that are running Britain’s borders and trading in human misery. If this Government cannot restore order to the border, then the next Labour Government will, but the fact is that the asylum backlog had already grown fourfold even before the small boats started coming in large numbers. It was the Conservative Government’s decision to downgrade the seniority of asylum decision makers in 2013 that led to the backlog spiralling, due to slower, poorer-quality decision making and larger numbers of appeals, plus high staff turnover, resulting in the total chaos that we are now seeing.

Let us not forget that the Government have an estate of more than 50,000 relatively cost-effective asylum beds that keep the system within budget, but the use of nearly 400 hotels last year to house as many as 56,000 asylum seekers at any one time has sent costs through the roof. According to the House of Commons Library, spending on asylum hotels and support has increased by an astonishing 733% in the past five years alone. That is what happens when we try to cut corners and costs: we end up paying 10 times as much in the long term, clearing up the mess that we have made. It is the definition of a false economy. Labour has a plan to clear the backlog within one year by surging the number of caseworkers, thus saving the taxpayer £2 billion in hotel bills. We will also create a new returns unit, with 1,000 immigration enforcement officers, to remove people from safe countries who have failed in their asylum claims. Those are the key pillars of our plan for a firm, fair and well-managed asylum system.

Of course Britain faces a forced migration challenge caused by increasing geopolitical turbulence and the proliferation of authoritarian regimes, with violence and persecution spreading across the world, but the Government have utterly failed to rise to that challenge. Successive Home Secretaries have had ample opportunity since the small boats started coming in large numbers in 2018 to work with our European partners and allies to end the vile trade of people smuggling in the channel, but rather than seeking to engage constructively they have spent the last six years trashing their working relationships with our European neighbours through their damaging rhetoric and frequent promises to break or ignore international laws and treaties.

The Government have traded hard graft, quiet diplomacy and common sense for unworkable legislation and headline-chasing gimmicks that are not based on reality and are therefore destined to fail. Meanwhile, the public has been forced to watch on helplessly as the criminal gangs have taken hold, with prosecutions of people smugglers down a startling 34% since 2010. We are clear that co-operation with Europe is the only way to restore our border security. Labour has promised a cross-border police unit to go after the criminal gangs upstream by forging a new security partnership with Europol based on intelligence sharing and joint work, paid for by redirecting some of the vast sums of money that are being squandered on the Rwanda shambles.

Given the central role that the Minister is playing in all this, I have the following questions for him. The Prime Minister promised to end the use of hotels for asylum seekers by the end of last year. Can the Minister therefore explain why, at the end of December, there were still more than 46,000 asylum seekers in hotel accommodation? We now know that hundreds of millions of pounds have been committed to the Rwandan Government as part of the Tories’ failed plan. Can he tell me how much of that money the UK will get back if no flights take off?

Can the Minister explain why the Rwanda money could not have been invested in border security instead? Does he truly believe that spending nearly £2 million on every person sent to Rwanda, just to get “a few symbolic flights” off the ground—to quote a previous Immigration Minister, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick)—in an election year represents good value for taxpayers’ money? Does the Minister agree that Rwanda is the worst value for money policy in history? The NAO revealed that the Home Office would spend £11,000 per person on flights to Rwanda. Can the Minister explain why taxpayers are paying 11 times as much as a commercial flight would cost?

The failures of Home Office Ministers are not just impacting on their own budgets and overspends, but causing severe challenges for other Departments and for local councils. As my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee pointed out, a huge amount of the spending is being channelled through overseas development assistance, which is having a huge impact on the amount of ODA available to spend in countries that are generating large numbers of asylum seekers and in the neighbouring countries. It is a lose-lose situation. The money that should be spent to address push factors is instead being spent on hotel bills in this country. Will the Minister therefore set out whether he feels that using ODA in this way is a viable long-term strategy? Does he agree that that is the very definition of robbing Peter to pay Paul, and that it is working against the strategic objectives of ODA and against what any sensible Government should be doing to address the crisis in our asylum system?

The latest estimates are part of a long-running and increasingly predictable pattern. The Home Office goes cap in hand to the Treasury, asking for billions of pounds, over and above what was already a multibillion-pound annual budget, to deal with a set of crises entirely of the Government’s own making. The Treasury then duly signs blank cheque after blank cheque to the Home Office, and yet still somehow manages to make matters worse. Ministers are trying to claim that an alternative to Rwanda would somehow be more expensive, but the problem with that argument is that they are comparing the Rwanda plan with the cost of doing nothing; they are not comparing the Rwanda plan to Labour’s common-sense plan to go after the gangs, to get removals back up and running, and to clear the backlog.

The Minister for Legal Migration and the Border said:

“It is not acceptable to spend £8 million a day in the asylum system.”—[Official Report, 4 March 2024; Vol. 746, c. 647.]

That is £3 billion a year, and I could not agree more. It should not be necessary to remind him that it is on his party’s watch that the cost of the asylum system has rocketed tenfold since 2010. That is why the Conservatives need to get out of the way, so that Labour can restore order at our border and fix this broken and unaffordable Tory asylum system. Let us have that general election, and let us have it now.