£15bn on hotels?

I agree. It’s beyond a joke. On the one hand you have a situation where £15b is handed out to house migrants, and in only a month’s time we’ll have Rachel Reeves telling us we’ve all got to pay more tax for the poor NHS etc. Can’t imagine she’ll say we need to pay more to house migrants but that’s effectively what it’ll be.

This government, and successive ones before them, are not reading the room.

Edited as I read it as the UK paid France £15bn plus

It’s still quite a lot. £15bn plus payments to France and wherever else.

Borrowing is far too high and benefits cost a lot but if you could do as you say and end it it would resolve a problem plus save some money.

But this is like Brexit all over again. "If we leave the EU we'll have so much more money".

Even if, tomorrow, every single asylum seeker vanished from our shores, even if we cancelled every penny of foreign aid, this country would still be broke.

We have staggering debt and the interest payments on that are huge.

Our welfare bill is astronomical and increasing due to the ageing population and the consequent stage pension spending.

We are economically fairly inactive as a nation too.

Stopping all asylum support isn't going to touch the sides. It's a drop in the ocean.

Complain away!
It's the people that blame the asylum seekers themselves for this mess that are more of a problem.

How is it charity when contracts were rewarded to companies who made big profits out of it?

Investing in vanity projects like Rwanda instead of the asylum system, good use of money?

How do you suggest people start taking responsibility for themselves in case of asylum seekers?

Yep. Not many supporters left.

Completely agree.

Definitely not homeless families - that’s met by local councils

Yep, courtesy of the taxpayer. Next month, Rachel will extort more money from us to continue to pay for it.

You can’t complain about it though, because it’s makes you a racist.

Well, I fucking hate it. I am sick of this country being a big old charity case. Charity needs to start at home and people need to start taking responsibility for themselves and their lives. If that makes me a racist or any other ist, I’m happy to be called a racist/ist.

I’ll await the @‘s.

This government has made everything worse since coming in. Defending it is madness.

Small boats are higher. National debt is up, debt repayments are up. Gilt yields are worse. Unemployment is up. Taxes are higher. Businesses are exiting the UK. As are top rate taxpayers.

What a start.

Many of the contracts signed by the Home Office to provide accommodation were flawed, clauses to claim back excess profits by providers were rarely used and no penalties were issued by the Home Office for poor performance. No attempt was made to claw back any excess profits until last year.

As a result tens of millions of pounds are still in private providers’ bank accounts which, could have been collected by the Home Office to use for other public services.

The Tories really screwed us all over!

https://bylinetimes.com/2025/10/27/the-sheer-scale-of-conservative-mismanagement-of-the-asylum-system-revealed/

Yes debt servicing is up under Labour. We can’t afford that, taxes are being hiked too. And related to this thread no plan to actually smash the gangs.

A mess created by the last government. 10 year contracts ending in 2029, so started in 2019

https://news.sky.com/story/home-office-needs-to-get-a-grip-on-asylum-seeker-accommodation-after-chaotic-response-mps-say-13458475

Indeed, and what a fucking monumental mess this government is left with to try to clear up. In case you missed it, a Parliamentary term is 5 years. I will judge this government at the end of their term, not just over a year after coming into office (after a 14 year destruction of this country). That's how democracy works.

55% of the welfare bill goes on pensioners, most of which is the state pension. We have an ageing population and this isn't going anywhere any time soon; this will only increase. There is no way the welfare bill can be drastically reduced without hitting pensioners hard as well, and no government will do that.

The remaining is working age and child benefits, of which 11% is housing benefit and 24% is disability.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/benefit-expenditure-and-caseload-tables-information-and-guidance/benefit-expenditure-and-caseload-tables-information-and-guidance

Maybe you missed it but the Tories were (deservedly) booted out of office last year?

Labour are in government.

Government borrowing is actually up because it needs to pay for the out of control welfare bill. What a disaster.

Top rate taxpayers leaving the country in their tens of thousands, thousands of people going into welfare every day and out of control illegal migrant numbers and the bill for hotels, taxis, healthcare, schools.

At this point this country is beyond broken and an absolute joke.

The Tories absolutely shafted the taxpayer and stole trillions to line the pockets of their cronies. Labour are even worse. When they are not stealing money to in the name of net 0 to line the pockets of the green lobby, they are pissing taxpayer cash the wall in other ways. The recent report which tried to be covered by up by the home office shows that the department focuses more on holding listening circles for its staff to help them talk about their feelings, than actually focusing on the dumpster fire that is the department’s feelings.

Illegal immigration is up, the small boat numbers have hit a record high, the ‘one in, one out, one back in again’ is an absolute clown show and with deported migrants just walking straight back in to country, resulting in a net increase in asylum numbers.

Sexual assaults and migrant crime is now so prevalent that even the far left advocates of open borders are failing to gaslight the county into believing ‘nothing to see here’.

The amounts of cash being spent on hotels, HMOs, taxis and generally funding migrants is off the scale. Just this morning on the Today program, there was interview from a migrant hotel security guard explaining how when they try and tell people how to take public transport, they refuse and insist on taxis.

Sex offenders are walking the streets because there isn’t enough prison spaces.

The asylum system is basically an amnesty at this stage. If you arrive illegally, you’re guaranteed to stay. Like the drug dealing sex offender asylum seeker who could not be deported because his kid likes the chicken nuggets in this country too much. Or the guy in the Rochdale grooming gang case who hasn’t been deported even years after his conviction. Or the people who claim asylum but then at the first chance go back to the country origin for a holiday. The system is a joke.

Yet anyone pouting any of this out is somehow racist or far right. It won’t wash anymore.

Whether you like Reform or not, or whether you’re you believe they can change anything, the main parties need punishing by voting into oblivion and out of office.

It really is. I'm glad I'm middle-aged rather being a young-un having to start out in this shit-show. The trouble is, it seems as though lots of the brighter, ambitious are leaving so we are left with even less net contributers.

What a fucking mess this country is in.

It's not the desperate exploited people who come to the UK on small boats etc that we should be angry at but the system that spends billions on housing them in substandard accommodation that private individuals make billions out of at the expense of the taxpayer. Snouts in the trough yet again.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9r5m74de8o

This problem is extremely long in the making and will not be resolved overnight.

It started with the Labour govt in the late 1990s - early 2000s removing the right for asylum seekers to work (anyone else remember "they're taking our jobs"?). Because they could no longer work to support themselves while claims were processed, they had to be housed.

Roll around to the coalition govt and austerity in the late 2000s / early 2010s, and the provision of such accomodation is put to tender for private companies. This is when we start to see the privatised asylum accommodation contacts coming in, which are more expensive than the state provided accommodation.

Then comes Brexit in 2016. Goodbye Dublin Agreement. We can no longer return asylum seekers back to EU countries. Hello small boat crossings.

Then comes Johnson, Truss, and Sunak, who between them fairly well-sabotaged the already wobbly system. They allowed the backlog to grow, spent an awful lot of money on schemes which never got off the ground (see: prison encampments, Bibby Stockholm, Rwanda), and cut the funding for courts which deal with asylum claims.

And now we are where we are, with people stuck in asylum limbo for years, not allowed to work. With the public generally hostile. With billions of pounds being spent on frankly crap service, with a significant amount being swallowed by private company profits. With a huge legal backlog. With billions of pounds already funnelled into the hands of private shareholders.

There is no easy, cheap, or fast answer to this problem.

It will take time to get through the backlog to the point where hotels are no longer needed, it's not a quick process.