£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

I have not read this thread but as I have just said on another as we stare down another bleak horrendous winter...we must stop ploughing money into people who do not need our help.

The refugee and asylum system must take people of our choosing ,not people like the great hulking men who force themselves upon us without our choosing
We should be helping the truly vulnerable and those fleeing their lives .
We should be able to offer quality sanctuary to them and at no detrimental to ourselves

This is all very very wrong.

Incomers, a word i have only heard used by the far right and supporters of when trying to justify their racism.

A tip, if you lack originality, you can use chat GPT find better insults.

We must stop ploughing money into people who do not need our help ... We should be helping the truly vulnerable and those fleeing their lives

I agreed completely, @StatuteofLiberty, but a difficulty is that vast numbers of would-be asylum seekers produce well rehearsed stories insisting that they are in the second category, knowing that there's little chance of them being properly checked or even if their identity and place of origin is what they say it is

Regardless of claims about what we could do before Brexit - which conveniently overlook numerous amnesties which have been granted to swerve the difficulties - there's really no straightforward way to check someone who's wilfully hidden their history and who's only interest is gaining admittance no matter what barriers we attempt to put in place

I think there's some truth hidden in your post.

But I'm pretty sure most visas don't allow any other than partners and dependent children to to brought in. (And dependents are allowed to work, each family member has to pay health service surcharge and they aren't entitled to non-contributory benefits).

I've seen interesting and credible info on migrants' income derived from HMRC data. Average income of migrants appears to reach UK average after a few years. In other words, I'm far from convinced that migrants are a drain. Or, put another way, calling them low-skilled doesnt mean they are ALL low skilled/paid.

GDP per head can be lower because, well, there's more heads. But it is plausible that without migration the total GDP would have been proportionately lower.

To have a stable population seems to require increasing productivity to pay for investment in training and higher pay for jobs like care work. Either higher productivity, higher taxes or higher migration perhaps.

To the extent I might be a wokey-lefty I like to blame (or not) migration rather than migrants.

@Puzzledandpissedoff because we are in a reactive situation with people arriving in boats
If we can get tough and say no if you come here illegally you will not be allowed to stay.

only 14 deportations have been prevented by the ECHR

You are thinking of cases we lost at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. We don't know how many deportations have been halted because of appeals made under the ECHR at court hearings or tribunals held in the UK -'Dame Angela Eagle, the border security minister, said it would be a “disproportionate cost” to provide data on the number of deportations of foreign criminals or illegal migrants that had been stopped as a result of ECHR claims'

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/02/20/home-office-refuses-reveal-number-deportations-halted-echr/

Although there are in fact some stats for foreign criminals (but not asylum seekers) here;

Home Office management information shows that, from April 2008 to June 2021, 21,521 appeals against deportation were lodged by FNOs

Of the appeals that have been determined, 6,042 FNOs had their deportation appeal allowed at the First Tier Tribunal, with around 40% (2,392) of them doing so on Human Rights grounds.

A review of a random sample of FNO allowed appeal determinations has also been conducted to understand more specifically the grounds on which appeals allowed on Human Rights grounds were allowed... In the period 1 April 2016 to 8 November 2021, of 1,011 appeals against deportation by FNOs that were allowed on Human Rights grounds at First Tier Tribunal, an estimated 70% were allowed solely on Article 8 grounds [right to respect for private and family life].

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/foreign-national-offenders-appeals-on-human-rights-grounds-2008-to-2021

@WildLimePoet yes ,many many expose programs have covered all this over the years

The fake English language schools telling various educational institutions the level of English is good which is a lie. Fake marriages ,jobs all sorts. Collisions within council ...it's intricate and deep.

I think that is what they say. Under the UK government’s Illegal Migration Act 2023, anyone who:

arrives in the UK without permission (for example, by small boat), and

passes through a “safe” third country (like France),

is considered to have entered illegally and is not eligible to claim asylum in the UK.

Merely an observation. If you find it's being made about your vocabulary and thought processes enough to be unoriginal, maybe you should stop and consider why.

Come again, this time written coherently?

Some observations/criticisms in the report going forwards:

The number of asylum seekers in hotels is currently significantly lower than during the peak of hotel use—32,059 people as of June 2025, compared to 56,042 in September 2023, although that still represents an 8% increase on the numbers being accommodated in hotels in June 2024, which casts doubt on the Home Office’s assertion they are continuing to reduce reliance on hotel accommodation.

The Government has committed to reducing the cost of the asylum system and ending the use of hotels by 2029. This is a stated Government priority, but making promises to appeal to popular sentiment without setting out a clear and fully articulated plan for securing alternative accommodation risks under-delivery and consequently undermining public trust still further.

[There is a break clause to the contracts beginning March 2026]

The 2026 break clause and the end of the contracts in 2029 represent an opportunity to draw a line under the current failed, chaotic and expensive system and move to a model that is more effective and offers value for money. While the Home Office is considering options, it has not yet shared a clear strategy for the delivery of a sustainable accommodation system. Moreover, there has been little clarity from ministers even regarding the basis on which they will make a decision on using the break clause. There is a serious risk that if the Home Office does not expedite the development of a long-term strategy for the future delivery of asylum accommodation, when it is time to replace the current contracts the department will find itself in a similar position to that of 2019, with limited choices as to how it secures accommodation.

The Home Office has developed plans for a fairer distribution of asylum accommodation, but made limited progress, and we share the scepticism that their plans will be achieved.

Your ridiculous insinuations are meaningless. They ARE incomers. They are not already resident here therefore they have come in to our country.

Indeed, the key difference being for the UK now that since Brexit we can no longer rely on the law that determined which EU member state was responsible for examining an asylum claim, based on where the applicant first entered the EU. Which tends to be a key component of the argument against the boat people ("if they're that desperate to escape, why don't they settle in the first safe country they come to?") Well, before Brexit, we had the means with which to argue this case.

Can you say how many used this and still do for say ROI?

Generally it’s very low numbers which is why Dublin has had similar protests and issues.

Which EU country has used the DA to resolve migration issues?

It's true that the EU are replacing the DA with a new system in 2026 (which we will also miss out on) due to issues with the system. Pre Brexit, successful transfers out of the UK using the DA stood at between 7 and 16% of the total incoming. Compare that with zero now, because there is no mechanism and therefore very few are being processed.

It's true also to say that the UK was a much less effective user of the Dublin Agreement than some of its co EU member states. That responsibility of course lies with the government of the day. The fact remains that we had more control of our borders (at least when we speak about asylum seeker processing) as an EU member than we have now post-Brexit.

Wow, it's almost like we just had a major global pandemic which has left a lot of people disabled...

Hardly anyone uses it to resolve issues. It’s not what it was for. It’s not a deterrent or a way to move large numbers of people.

From another thread

In 2024 Germany has asked Bulgaria to take back 8,090 people who were registered as migrants for the first time on Bulgarian territory. Bulgaria has said it is responsible for 3,297 migrants, but in reality 290 people have been returned.

Italy was supposed to take in 12,841 migrants, but in fact it took in only three.

Other EU countries, which send the most migrants to Germany, are also taking in almost no people, despite being obliged to do so. Greece has taken in 22 people, and Croatia has returned 533 people

It’s almost irrelevant in terms of a solution to migration issues, hence protests in Dublin, and the other thing that people bring up the database has also not stopped hideous crimes in Germany, France and elsewhere.

The EU is a good trading bloc. People entering and going where they want to via vast criminal networks is outside that. You can only resolve that with barriers.

I don’t understand why you’re so resistant to accepting that Dublin did us no favours at all and we’d have been better off ditching it a few years before Brexit. Is it an anti Brexit thing? You’re so cross about it that you want to attribute all of our current issues to it? I understand that, but you’re flogging a dead horse over Dublin.

Yes, if it makes you happy, we technically had the means to argue that case, but looking at the stats, we had very few cases that met the criteria we needed to satisfy before we could argue it. I repeat, we accepted more people under Dublin than we removed. It was not a loss to the UK.

And of course, one of the criteria was demonstrating that asylum applicants had been in a particular country. Do you think EU countries would simply take our word for it that an asylum applicant had said he’d been through countries A, B and C en route to the UK? Even if he admitted to knowing his route? And bearing in mind that France is not the only country in Europe that is not landlocked, do you think they’d be willing to accept the return of thousands of asylum seekers from the UK because it’s ’obvious’ that’s where they came from? No, they absolutely wouldn’t.

In the 1990’s they were coming in the planes, then airport security got better so the lorry’s, then port security got better and truckers more vigilant so now they come on the boats.

They’re not insinuations. The right are well versed in dressing up their hate behind seemingly inert words and phrases. Illegals, fighting age men, British values, Christian Country, etc., etc, all used to strip away people’s humanity and other them. “Incomers” is just another attempt at that.

I mean, why did they even need to distinguish in that reply? Why not just say 18.2 million people arrived and 10 million left? What’s the purpose of adding that label of incomers unless it’s to mark people as “other”?

That was a perfectly coherent reply from @Middleoftheroad.

A tip, if you’re struggling to follow something that straightforward, you can always paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to explain it to you.

It didn't, though did it? What the pandemic did was make an awful lot of people realise that living on the state is pretty easy. They got used to spending the day on the xbox. Cut benefits by 50% and a remarkable number of people will suddenly decide that they can actually work.

It's 15.3 billion for ten years using contracts from 2019 from the Tories.
Asylum seekers get £49 a week to live on. Less if the accommodation provides meals.

In contrast, bailing out the banks in 2008 cost 137 billion, and the people that caused that are still getting record breaking bonuses.

Benefits are just over £400 per calender month. Noone on them is living a life of luxury.