Minister says Sunak will meet pledge to stop the boats ‘in fullness of time’ as Labour says it would end migrant hotel use
Good morning. Conservative commentators believe that Keir Starmer took quite a risk yesterday when he announced a new, or newish, approach to small boats, suggesting Labour would have a returns agreement with the EU that might involve the UK accepting a quota of asylum seekers. Our overnight story, by Rajeev Syal, Peter Walker and Diane Taylor, is here.
Whatever the reaction, Labour is not giving up. This morning Labour has set out more details of what it is proposing, claiming that by speeding up the processing of asylum applications it could end the use of hotels for migrants. In a news release, Labour says it would:
– Hire over 1,000 new caseworkers on an expedited process (a 50% increase on current asylum casework levels) to bust the backlog and get through cases efficiently.
– Implement targets and standards to ensure decisions are made well and productivity increases. New staff will be recruited at a higher grade than recent Home Office casework recruitment to improve productivity after the Tory downgrade of staffing in 2013 led to productivity falling.
– Create a returns unit to triage and fast-track removals of those such as failed asylum seekers with no right to be in the UK, with 1000 staff to ensure enforcement.
– Invest in temporary Nightingale-style courts to ensure appeals can be quickly heard, and removals processed
Under Labour’s plans, once the backlog created by the Tories is cleared, it should no longer be necessary to accommodate asylum seekers in hotels, barges or former military sites, like RAF Scampton, which are currently costing the taxpayer over £2bn a year.
Instead, a Labour government will rely on long-standing, cost-effective asylum accommodation, which has space for 58,000 asylum applicants at any one time. This has been sufficient in the past, but the Tory government’s failure to tackle the record backlog has made them reliant on costly hotels once this asylum accommodation reached capacity.
This chart, from a Home Office report, shows how the number of people waiting for a decision on their asylum application has soared over the past decade.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has been giving interviews this morning promoting Labour’s policy. The government has had Chris Philp, the policing minister, making its case, and he has been restating the Tory claim (which Labour denies) that its policy would lead to 100,000 migrants being admitted a year. He defended the government’s approach, but did not sound confident about the government being able to “stop the boats” before the general election, as Rishi Sunak implied he would when he made this pledge. Philp said this might happen “in the fullness of time” – which in some contexts can mean over years, decades, or never. He told Sky News:
Let’s start with the small boats. So, the number this year compared to last year, the same time last year, is around about 20% down. Now, we’d like to go a lot further, obviously, but it’s a good start.
Asked if Sunak would meet his pledge, Philp replied:
I’m confident in the fullness of time, yes, we will stop those boats. We must stop those boats. They’re illegal crossings of the Channel, they’re dangerous. They’re also unnecessary because France is a safe country, it’s not a war zone.
I will post more on this row shortly.
The Commons is not sitting today, and there is not much in the diary, but we’ll manage for politics news.
If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line, privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate), or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.
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This morning Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister, defended the plan, saying it would save lives. Referring to an estimate that it would make car journeys a tiny bit longer, he told the Today programme:
Even if you add a minute to every journey, I say to people – and when I’m speaking to people, I think people understand this – it’s going to take you a minute longer to make your journey, and we will save 10 people’s lives in Wales every year as a result of that one minute contribution that you are making. It doesn’t seem a bad or unfair bargain.
Drakeford said a similar cut to the speed limit in Spain had reduced road deaths in urban areas by a fifth, with cyclist fatalities down by 34%. He went on:
Driving more slowly in built-up urban areas saves people’s lives.
I think the evidence is incontrovertible. It’s why we had this in the Labour party manifesto at our election in 2021 and this weekend we will deliver that promise.
Minister says Sunak will meet pledge to stop the boats ‘in fullness of time’ as Labour says it would end migrant hotel use
Good morning. Conservative commentators believe that Keir Starmer took quite a risk yesterday when he announced a new, or newish, approach to small boats, suggesting Labour would have a returns agreement with the EU that might involve the UK accepting a quota of asylum seekers. Our overnight story, by Rajeev Syal, Peter Walker and Diane Taylor, is here.
Whatever the reaction, Labour is not giving up. This morning Labour has set out more details of what it is proposing, claiming that by speeding up the processing of asylum applications it could end the use of hotels for migrants. In a news release, Labour says it would:
– Hire over 1,000 new caseworkers on an expedited process (a 50% increase on current asylum casework levels) to bust the backlog and get through cases efficiently.
– Implement targets and standards to ensure decisions are made well and productivity increases. New staff will be recruited at a higher grade than recent Home Office casework recruitment to improve productivity after the Tory downgrade of staffing in 2013 led to productivity falling.
– Create a returns unit to triage and fast-track removals of those such as failed asylum seekers with no right to be in the UK, with 1000 staff to ensure enforcement.
– Invest in temporary Nightingale-style courts to ensure appeals can be quickly heard, and removals processed
Under Labour’s plans, once the backlog created by the Tories is cleared, it should no longer be necessary to accommodate asylum seekers in hotels, barges or former military sites, like RAF Scampton, which are currently costing the taxpayer over £2bn a year.
Instead, a Labour government will rely on long-standing, cost-effective asylum accommodation, which has space for 58,000 asylum applicants at any one time. This has been sufficient in the past, but the Tory government’s failure to tackle the record backlog has made them reliant on costly hotels once this asylum accommodation reached capacity.
This chart, from a Home Office report, shows how the number of people waiting for a decision on their asylum application has soared over the past decade.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has been giving interviews this morning promoting Labour’s policy. The government has had Chris Philp, the policing minister, making its case, and he has been restating the Tory claim (which Labour denies) that its policy would lead to 100,000 migrants being admitted a year. He defended the government’s approach, but did not sound confident about the government being able to “stop the boats” before the general election, as Rishi Sunak implied he would when he made this pledge. Philp said this might happen “in the fullness of time” – which in some contexts can mean over years, decades, or never. He told Sky News:
Let’s start with the small boats. So, the number this year compared to last year, the same time last year, is around about 20% down. Now, we’d like to go a lot further, obviously, but it’s a good start.
Asked if Sunak would meet his pledge, Philp replied:
I’m confident in the fullness of time, yes, we will stop those boats. We must stop those boats. They’re illegal crossings of the Channel, they’re dangerous. They’re also unnecessary because France is a safe country, it’s not a war zone.
I will post more on this row shortly.
The Commons is not sitting today, and there is not much in the diary, but we’ll manage for politics news.
If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line, privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate), or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.
