£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

Yes, I am concerned that this ‘processing’ is not as robust as we’d like to imagine and any pressure to speed things up with allow more terrorists and extremists to get in and be 10x more difficult to remove.

We’ve seen this with actual rapists being allowed to stay on spurious human rights grounds. No consideration for the human rights of women in this country.

If you commit a crime in the UK that has the death penalty in your home country, you can't be deported. Which is convenient.

Vetting also seems to be close to non-existent. Basically if you're from certain countries, eg Afghanistan, and know the right things to say, there's no way your application will be refused. To be doubly sure, you can buy fake "threat letters" from the Taliban to strengthen your case:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/10/10/asylum-seekers-pay-taliban-to-write-fake-death-threats/

Plus declare you're a minor - apparently it's the stresses of war than mean you arrive with crow's feet, grey hair and baldness.

I've been seeing rumours also for a while now about certain countries emptying their jails in the direction of the UK and Europe, and given how egregiously awful some of the crimes committed are, this doesn't seem implausible.

I don’t think that’s safe though. Our ‘processing’ already hasn’t many failings - we gave allowed men to stay who are a danger to society. Any pressure to speed things up will just degrade the results and end up with more bad people becoming impossible to remove.
The speed and failures in the system is partly the fault of the asylum seekers. Not all are seeking asylum in genuine grounds, we have had terrorists fleeing justice in Egypt (caught when convicted of raping a woman here), a rapist fleeing justice from Italy (I think, or some other European country where he was refused asylum) etc etc.

The sheer volume of people, inflated by criminals and terrorists, leads to pressure on and failings in the system. It’s not all the governments fault.

Because the people doing the pressuring are confident that it won’t happen to them?

So they feel free to virtue signal away with their ‘kind benevolence’.

It might not be "robust", @bundleboogie, but it can hardly be worse than admitting 100s of 1000s with amnesties to massage the waiting list figures

Naturally it was claimed this only applied to the least risky, but we've heard the flannel about risk before and look where it's got us

Most are granted asylum, so most are here genuinely.
Per head, we have far less asylum seekers than other European countries, and the wait time for your claim to be processed is far longer. So yes, fault lies with the government, not the asylum seekers (generally speaking, it goes without saying some are criminals and should be brought to justice, same as any other group of people).
I'm not saying that the system is perfect, or that some asylum seekers aren't here when they shouldn't be, all I am saying is that asylum seekers as a group are not a risk and shouldn't be treated as such.

Yes, it all sounds pretty horrendous tbh.

The bit I can’t get my head around is why are the people in charge doing this? They seem to be literally trying to destroy the fabric of our society - the trust and relative safety we have.

Is it unbelievable incompetence, is it deliberate? I can’t work it out. And how horrendously badly are Labour doing if they make Farage look like a viable alternative for so many?? It’s like the Democrats forcing people to vote for Trump because they were so awful.

*... you can buy "threat letters" from the taliban to strengthen your case"

I hadn't heard of that one, @SpaceRaccoon, but have to wonder why they bother if some charities would provide them for free

After all they already provide crib sheets of stories they can't actually know to be true, so might this not just be an extension?

Most are granted asylum, so most are here genuinely.

I don't think this follows. Most are granted asylum because they're from countries with the high likelihood of approval, they know what to say, and there's zero way to verify their claims.
And, per the Telegraph link I posted, there's the option of paying the Taliban for a "threat" letter to strengthen your case, if you're from Afghanistan.

Most are granted asylum, so most are here genuinely.

I’m afraid that, with the known shortcomings of our asylum process, being granted asylum doesn’t necessarily mean a) the asylum seeker was genuine, as Spaceraccoon described there are many known ways of bucking the system.

Per head, we have far less asylum seekers than other European countries, and the wait time for your claim to be processed is far longer. So yes, fault lies with the government, not the asylum seekers

Every asylum seeker, genuine or not, has to be processed which takes time and expense. The government has to find a balance with spending more money in speeding up processing asylum seekers with all the other demands on public money. Therefore every person turning up here seeking (or demanding) ‘asylum’ adds to the burden.

Therefore it is partly the fault of the asylum seekers. Obviously the false claims and criminals make it worse for the genuine claims.

all I am saying is that asylum seekers as a group are not a risk and shouldn't be treated as such.

But this is a basic safeguarding principle. Within the group of ‘asylum seekers’ there are the ones that don’t to hurt us and some that do. This means that ‘asylum seekers’ as a group present a risk because we don’t know which ones are ok and which are bad at the time it matters. We need to have a respectful and humane process that also doesn’t take everyone’s word for it that they are the good guys.

It’s the same reasoning that we use for keeping all men out of female only spaces. Obviously not all men are likely to hurt us, but some men are and they don’t wear a helpful sticker to warn us.

It would be interesting to know how much scrutiny there is if the activities of these charities or whether all checking has been deemed ‘racist’.

We saw the issues with the fake university visa scandals where vast numbers of people got into the U.K. on fake education visas and then managed to have children to prevent deportation.

How many more asylum seeker charities are just falsifying information to help ‘asylum seekers’ with a claim that would otherwise fail?

It sometimes feels like our democracy, sense of fair play and laws are being weaponised against us.

Every asylum seeker, genuine or not, has to be processed which takes time and expense. The government has to find a balance with spending more money in speeding up processing asylum seekers with all the other demands on public money. Therefore every person turning up here seeking (or demanding) ‘asylum’ adds to the burden.
Therefore it is partly the fault of the asylum seekers. Obviously the false claims and criminals make it worse for the genuine claims.

I wouldn't blame asylum seekers for wanting to live in a place of safety. Seeking asylum is legal, the fact that the system is broken is not the fault of those people who use the system, as they are entitled to do.

We need to have a respectful and humane process that also doesn’t take everyone’s word for it that they are the good guys.

Totally agree with this. I just think that we need to remember that most asylum seekers are no risk at all.

How many more asylum seeker charities are just falsifying information to help ‘asylum seekers’

I can't comment on others, @bundleboogie, but the one I once attended for an interview certainly did - they openly admitted to lying about being a general legal advice facility in order to get the funding, and the very fact they did so rather suggests they expected nothing to happen about it

Totally agree with this. I just think that we need to remember that most asylum seekers are no risk at all.

What people have been noticing more and more, though, is that asylum seeking males are per capita a greater risk to women. And there are stats to verify that if you look at what's been collated from Germany, Scandinavia etc.

On that basis, of course there will be massive community discomfort at a large group of these men housed nearby in hotels etc.

I wouldn't blame asylum seekers for wanting to live in a place of safety. Seeking asylum is legal, the fact that the system is broken is not the fault of those people who use the system, as they are entitled to do.

Trouble is, an unknown number of the people entering our country are not actually seeking asylum in the recognised legal sense. They are illegally entering our country with spurious or made up claims and costing us a lot of money in dealing with them.

I think we have gone past the point of ‘poor them, I don’t blame them for wanting to better their lives’. (Genuine asylum seekers excepted obviously) Our generosity has been abused for years. We now have worrying numbers of people in this country that hate us and want to kill us. They hate our way of life and are just here for what they can get and to fulfil their religious duty to convert or kill us. There are hate preachers in mosques in Birmingham and other cities preaching all this. MI5 have 75% of their workload trying to b to stop them killing us in the name of Islam. Prevention of terrorist attacks is also costing us a lot of money.

Yet the left vilifies and screams racist at anyone who even wants to talk about immigration or the many abuses perpetrated on our society.

Totally agree with this. I just think that we need to remember that most asylum seekers are no risk at all.

Until we invent a brain scan that reliably identifies the bad guys among the group of ‘asylum seekers’, we need to have safeguarding commensurate to the risk. The consequences of this risk level have already been seen with a number of murders and rapes committed by people among the group ‘asylum seekers’.

Yes I think you are right.

it has become truly awful and I feel sorry for my grandchildren who will have even more of this foisted on them