£15bn on hotels?

[wineandagoodbook]

While Rachel Reeves is trying to find £10-£30 billion by more taxes, we are spending £15bn on hotels for asylum seekers, it beggars beyond belief

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

A damning report by the Home Affairs Committee says expected costs of Home Office accommodation contracts for 2019-2029 have tripled from £4.5bn to £15.3bn. This follows a "dramatic increase" in demand following the COVID pandemic and rising numbers of those arriving by small boat.

Are you certain that is just for asylum seekers or is it also the cost of housing homeless families temporarily?

Yes, just when will the Tories take ownership of their mistake in implementing this policy, as well as taking us out of the EU and therefore the Dublin Agreement?

This government is a farce. They are incapable of taking action on so many issues

The amount of money wasted by all governments in grotesque.

I struggle to circle the square of ‘austerity’ and being unable to fund basic services, alongside the endless stories of vast, unrestricted spending on projects the public are only half aware of.

Yanbu maybe Starmer will do as he says and smash the gangs and they won’t be needed.

Absolute farce

This is not a this government made problem.

They need to get on with reopening the asylum process asap

Poor people getting fleeced to enable people to come here and commit crime. At least this is how it feels at the minute. I know not all asylum seekers commit crime but why are certain groups pushing people here?

They need to get on with making this country less appealing to the chancers that are not at any risk in their home countries and just here for the money. Until they toughen up the boats will keep on coming and the cost will spiral out of control.

Home Office isn't responsible for temporary housing for British citizens, just asylum seekers. Homelessness would be covered through separate contracts with local authorities.

it was under the tories that these policies were developed and badly implemented and the money was spent. so blame Boris & co for this utter incompetence.

Well they have done sweet f all about it in the last year. There is total paralysis with this Government, which is crazy only one year in.

But I was talking more generally. They need to slash public spending but don't have the appetite for it. £100bn per year on debt Interest is disgusting. They have no plan to address this.

Agreed, process the claims, and let people get on with their lives instead of being stuck in limbo for a year or more.

Nothing on smashing the gangs failure?

Numbers crossing are going up, of course it’ll cost to house them.

If the previous government had actually processed the claimants, rather than slow the process down and let the numbers pile up then there wouldn't be this issue.

The shit that the Tories did will take years to fix. And they did it deliberately in order to make the next government look bad. They only care about power, not the country, or it's people.

Any government has to understand that no ask for belt tightening or tax increases can happen with public support while we are spending this kind of money housing every Tom Dick and Harry who rocks up at Dover. It's absolute insanity and has to stop before we can do anything else

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

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'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

What a fucking mess this country is in.

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.

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.

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.

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

Labour are in government.

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