£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

Well they need accomodation because they're not allowed to work and it's in everyone's interest not to have lots of people living on the street.

The accommodation in these hotels is not of the same standard as it would be if paying guests were there (i.e. it's not 'wonderful'). The asylum seekers don't just move straight in to an unchanged hotel room, the furnishings and fittings are stripped and replaced with basic furnishings, often with multiple beds to a room.

It is likely to be worse than the student accommodation you're referencing.

Because he literally had no identification aside from that. No paperwork which was required. No money which might have been required. No ID to say he had legitimate refugee status and thus exception. Nothing to even confirm he was the person to whom the prescription was made out to and yet he accessed the NHS and walked away with free medication. Wonderful! Delighted my taxes just paid for that.

And free dentistry?

And? I don't have to show ID when I pick up my (free) prescription either. I confirm my address, that's it. I shared a house with six other people. I could have been any one of them.

How do you even know this person was a refugee?

They’re happy to leave our own people on the street though

i wish they could strongly be discouraged from coming here in the first place

Because he was using Google translate through his phone and certainly knew the word Syria and refugee. Everything else that was said was from the pharmacist and was met with ‘huh’ and a shrug until she lost patience and told her colleague to just ‘give him what he wanted’.

If you don’t think that scenarios like this playing out all over the place doesn’t feed into anti -asylum rhetoric and the certainty that Reforn will get in next time, then you have your head in the sand. It’s a scandal.

If you don’t think that scenarios like this playing out all over the place doesn’t feed into anti -asylum rhetoric and the certainty that Reforn will get in next time, then you have your head in the sand. It’s a scandal.

Well since this is the first time you've brought that up in our conversation I'm not sure how you've reached that conclusion, but I agree with you that it does feed into it.

Look closely and find out who owns and profits from these inflated prices.

You might find all roads lead back to Tory donors/supporters.....

Who knows?

Apparently he should have been given a document by some government agency to prove refugee status and I would have at least expected her to have asked him to come back with it. The way she just admitted defeat and gave up trying to make herself clear made me believe this wasn’t a particularly novel situation.

They did the same to the NHS, schools, the prison service etc etc.. now we reap what they sowed, bloody brilliant 🙄

But in regards to the hotels the only answer is to provide ways to apply for asylum that get processed quickly. Invest the money in that instead of hotel bills.

Where would you accommodate asylum seekers @PrimoPiatti?

The last government were incompetent.

The next government, if it's Reform, will be incompetent.

This government is incompetent.

This government is probably the worst of the three because it has too big a majority and the backbench MPs have the power to block anything sensible that it wants to do. Fortunately, they are yet to come up with anything sensible, so that's not actually a problem

I believe the policy of not allowing asylum seekers to work was brought in to discourage arrivals.

As was deliberately slowing the processing time.

The Rwanda scheme was supposed to discourage as well although it was only ever going to take a small number and was going to cost £££££ (which the OP was emphasising as the important issue).

I suppose I'm a bit wokey-lefty but I don't actually WANT lots of asylum seekers. I'd be more upset by their arrival if it wasn't for the fact that the UK doesn't have proportionately more than other Western European countries.

Solutions to the phenomenon of irregular migration do seem trickier than "just send them back" (or we'd have done it) and does require international cooperation.

The backlog of asylum decisions has conveniently been reduced because it moves the responsibility from the Home Office to local councils.

Denmark solved their problem. We could solve ours

We could, @JoyintheMorning, but if we so much as tried some of Denmark's measures I guarantee the shrieks of "That's illegal/against such-and-such a treaty" would be deafening - and never mind that Denmark's part of the EU and is going ahead with it nonetheless (though I believe they're not a signatory to the common asylum policy)

People seem to forget that the boat people are coming from France. Literally a country that millions of us go on holiday to every year. It is perfectly safe. The UK system must be very attractive for someone to risk their life to move from one perfectly safe place to another.' If we reduce the perks the number of people will fall.

So a city the size of Leeds every year are descending on our Country? This is absolutely insane, how long will this continue? This has to stop our country is broken as it is, what will it be like in 10 years time if this continues, I absolutely dread to think.

🙄 No, not those stats. We were talking about the Dublin Convention. I was talking about the stats showing that we received more people than we removed under the Dublin Convention.

What you’ve produced is stats referring to the increase in arrivals via small boat, which is a completely different thing, not what we were talking about at all, and not massively different from the numbers coming in via lorry or freight train from 2000 onwards. But I’m happy to address that too. The UK have spent a fortune on search technology and security, resulting in it getting harder and harder to smuggle a lorry full of people through, as was done from the late 90s onwards. So the smugglers looked for different business models because, for them, it is a lucrative business. And surprise, surprise, they found a better model and numbers of arrivals via that method have been increasing ever since. And during that time, Brexit happened. But if you seriously think that any of these people (people traffickers or asylum claimants or those simply wanting to disappear into the black market, give one shiny shit about our membership of the EU then you are deluded. It makes fuck all difference to them whether we have international trade agreements with Europe or not. Do you think they were all set to claim asylum in the EU, but when they heard that the Tories had fucked it up, they packed up and said ‘Onwards to Calais’? Of course they bloody weren’t! The things we had in place before Brexit were so ineffective that us not having them anymore would make no difference. We couldn’t just send people back to Europe before Brexit and we couldn’t do it after Brexit.

The city the size of Leeds is made up of 90%+ legal migrants.

That's an important but different issue.

This is a comment I'm genuinely confused by and hear often. I'm not having a go or deliberately being difficult but please can you (or anyone) answer this.

• This backlog that is often mentioned being the cause of the crossings. Are you trying to tell me the people arriving in the boats would have been accepted if they would have queued?

What? Are you saying that you think local councils are processing and making decisions on asylum claims? I’m sure you can’t be saying that, because surely nobody would think that, but I can’t be quite certain what you mean.

I'm talking about the burden of dispersal.

Surely no-one has forgotten this. It's a feature of every discussion on asylum seekers I've seen.

We can only send French people to France without an agreement. Nothing to do woth ECHR or treatues, just French sovereignty.

As far as I am aware there are not any particular perks that asylum seekers get that are much better than they get in France. (France has more asylum seekers that apply there than we do).
The stories of luxuries and pampering given to asylum seekers here are really not realistic.

I don't disagree at all that the status quo is not an option
Just that any policy changes have to be based on a clear understanding of the problems and impacts of amy proposed solutions

I keep hearing that even if Reform somehow miraculously got rid of the illegal immigrants it would barely make any difference, but we’ve just spent £15 billion pounds on housing them in hotels so clearly there are some significant savings to be made.

my council is bankrupt and the arrivals from the Chagos islands haven’t helped.

I really don’t want to fund these people tbh when people here need accommodation and should be prioritised