Dear oh dear. As Steerpike wrote on Tuesday afternoon, asylum seekers will be removed from the Bell Hotel in Essex after Epping Forest district council was granted a temporary injunction by the High Court. The legal action comes after a series of protestors gathered outside the venue after a resident was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl – and the move sets a significant precedent that could pose problems for the government. On the airwaves to talk about it all this morning was Labour’s security minister, Dan Jarvis. But rather than providing clarity, the MP’s disastrous interview only threw up more questions…
Quizzed on Radio 4’s Today programme by Emma Barnett about where migrants would be housed, if not hotels, Jarvis seemed rather confused himself.
EB: You still have asylum seekers here looking at the numbers, looking at the difficulty of, as the Prime Minister repeatedly says, smashing the gangs. But what is it going to be? Is it going to be secure detention camps, or is it going to be putting asylum seekers into flats and accommodation?
DJ: Well, fundamentally you have to address the problem at source. So you have to stop people coming here.
EB: No, no, I accept that. But I’m also, as you are, I’m sure, a realist. And these people are here, there are thousands of them and they are still coming. We know what those numbers are. So what are you going for? If you get rid of hotels, are you going for camps or are you going for flats?
DJ: Well, the fundamental point is about speeding up the process of making decisions about people’s asylum status. The problem that we’ve inherited is that the previous government basically stopped making decisions about asylum. The whole focus was on a hugely expensive Rwanda scheme, and that meant that there wasn’t appropriate levels of resource going into the asylum processes. So we’ve shifted the resource that was being wasted on the Rwanda scheme, invested in it, in ensuring that we are now able to take asylum decisions in a much more timely and effective manner.
It’s still not quite answering the question. Barnett tried again:
EB: What are we doing in the meantime? There’s some time between now and 2029, which is the goal that you’ve set yourselves as a government.
DJ: This government and the Home Office are absolutely committed to ensuring that we phase out the use of hotels.
EB: For the use of what instead?
DJ: Other, more appropriate accommodation.
EB: What is that, though? Other, more appropriate accommodation? To quote you to yourself. What is it?
DJ: The reality is that there’s likely to be a range of different arrangements in different parts of the country.
EB: What does that mean, though? There’s only a few types of accommodation… Could you at least answer, just so specifically, if it’s not hotels, as security minister? What is it?
DJ: It won’t be hotels because of the commitment that we’ve made, and therefore it will have to be a range of other more appropriate accommodation.
Talk about clueless, eh? Listen to the clip here:
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