The problem with Rishi Sunak’s migrant housing plan

All politics is local, as the old saying goes. It is, of course, an exaggeration.

But it contains easily enough truth to merit keeping in mind if you are, say, a government approaching the last year of its mandate and anxiously seeking a path to a new one.

One lesson contained within the phrase is that a policy can lumber you with a net loss of votes or seats even if it is found to be nationally popular: it may just be that where it bestows a broad benefit the policy is of low-salience, while where it impacts negatively it becomes the overwhelmingly dominant issue.

This might well prove to be true of the government’s new approach to accommodating Channel migrants. Rishi Sunak and his immigration minister Robert Jenrick are rightly determined to end the use of hotels, which are costing taxpayers more than £6 million a day and serving as a pull factor for new waves of illegal arrivals.

So they have proposed more basic and larger accommodation centres – including a former prison in Bexhill-on-Sea, a giant accommodation barge to be anchored at Portland harbour in Dorset and former military bases at Scampton in Lincolnshire and Wethersfield in Essex – as replacements.