Imagine if a government had set out deliberately to stir up the public over illegal migration, or perhaps to do as one former Tony Blair aide said of his government’s policy, to ‘rub the noses of the Right in diversity’. Could it have done a better job than the past two governments have managed by putting up thousands of asylum seekers in hotels, at an average cost of £145 per person per night – hotels whose owners, some owned by companies linked to the Chinese Communist party – have raked in a fortune thanks to poorly-negotiated contracts?
If we haven’t already passed a watershed of public opinion on the issue of illegal migration, the report of the House of Commons Committee on Home Affairs into the growing scandal of asylum hotels is surely it. The report condemns the Home Office’s ‘failed, chaotic and expensive’ system of housing migrants in asylum hotels, the cost of doing which was allowed to soar from £4.5 billion to £15.3 billion as a result of poorly-negotiated contracts and, in one case, a failure to collect £46 million of revenue it was due under a profit-sharing arrangement.
Labour and the Tories both have their fingers deep in the pie of the asylum hotel scandal
The report undermines all efforts the Conservatives have been making to try to reclaim the initiative on illegal migration. It was under the last government that the practice of housing migrants in hotels began and under them that it was allowed to get out of hand.
But if Labour thinks it can capitalise on the bad news, it has another thing coming. In opposition, Labour screamed outrage when Rishi Sunak’s government attempted to put up migrants in alternative accommodation: a barge moored in Portland harbour which had been happily used by generations of oil workers and students, without anyone complaining that their human rights had been infringed.
Keir Starmer’s government decommissioned the barge as soon as they came to office last year – just one of the reasons why the quantity of hotel accommodation being used to house asylum seekers has risen again over the past year. They dumped, too, the Rwanda scheme, which did at least seem to be beginning to act as a deterrent. And of course, Labour figures have been trying to damn anyone who dares to protest about the use of asylum hotels as members of the far right.
Labour and the Tories both have their fingers deep in the pie of the asylum hotel scandal. The more they try to blame each other, the more they hand the initiative to Reform UK.
But the asylum hotels scandal cannot simply be seen through the lens of illegal migration. It is indicative of a wider problem in government: the failure of ministers and civil servants to negotiate contracts which are advantageous to the taxpayer. Time and again, they behave like octogenarians being fleeced by a tarmac gang. That is what has happened with asylum hotels but it is also what happened with protective clothing during Covid, with HS2 and many other things.
If we want to stop a repeat of the asylum hotels scandal we don’t just have to close down illegal migration but to improve the negotiating skills of those who work in government. That is the underlying problem, and it is hard to see anyone either inside or outside government who yet has an answer.
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