Tag: 2022

Matt Warman – 2022 Parliamentary Question about Skegness and Asylum Seekers

The parliamentary question asked by Matt Warman, the Conservative MP for Boston and Skegness, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)

There are now five hotels in Skegness occupied by asylum seekers and a further one in my constituency. I thank the Minister, and indeed the Home Secretary, for the engagement he has had with me ahead of what he knows will be a public meeting on Friday with a very concerned local community. I wonder if he could say what his message would be for that public meeting.

Robert Jenrick

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and wish him well with that meeting. We want to ensure that we exit hotels as swiftly as possible, and I set out in answers to other hon. Members how we will do that. I appreciate the burden that this is placing on his constituency and I hope the increase in engagement from the Home Office and its partners will ensure a better and more fruitful relationship with his local authorities.

November 24, 2022
George Howarth – 2022 Parliamentary Question on Using Hotels in Knowsley for Asylum Seekers

The parliamentary question asked by Sir George Howarth, the Labour MP for Knowsley, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

The right hon. Gentleman is right about one thing: the Home Office has not covered itself in glory. In January, I was informed 24 hours earlier that 150 asylum seekers would be relocated to a hotel in Knowsley. Unfortunately, the Home Office notified the wrong local authority about what was about to happen—although, to be fair, it did apologise. There are now 180 asylum seekers in that hotel. I was told that it was initially only going to be for three months. It is now over 10 months. Can the Minister give me some indication of when that arrangement will end? It has already massively exceeded the prediction of how long it would be.

Robert Jenrick

I would be very happy to get back to the right hon. Gentleman and set out in detail the strategy for hotels and accommodation in his constituency. My approach has been: first, to ensure that Manston is brought to a legal and decent situation as quickly as possible—I think we are broadly there—secondly, to move to good-quality engagement with local authorities while we are still in a difficult and challenging situation; and thirdly, to move to a point where we are not relying on hotels at all, or doing so very judiciously, but accommodating people in dispersal accommodation or larger sensible sites. I am afraid that will take us some time because, as I have said in previous answers, there has been a failure to plan for accommodation over a sustained period. We need to correct that now.

November 24, 2022
Philip Hollobone – 2022 Parliamentary Question on the Royal Hotel in Kettering

The parliamentary question asked by Philip Hollobone, the Conservative MP for Kettering, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

I believe that the situation is now so bad and chaotic that the Minister should consider his position.

On Friday, North Northampton Council, Northants police and other local agencies had an online meeting with the Home Office and Serco regarding the potential use of the 51-bed Royal hotel in Kettering, slap bang in the middle of the town centre. Serious environmental health issues, including mould and no kitchen facilities, were raised. Northants police raised serious concerns about community safety and the vulnerability of the asylum seekers. The Home Office and Serco officials agreed that the hotel would not be used until those issues were properly addressed. Yesterday, the council was advised that 41 asylum seekers had been moved into the hotel on Sunday afternoon, without any notification at all, and that could rise to 80. No biometric of previous offending history data has been shared with the local police. It is totally, 100% unacceptable.

On 27 October, I asked the Minister face to face for a meeting. I asked him again on the Floor of the House last Wednesday. No such meeting has been forthcoming. This is a wrong-headed decision. The local police, the local council and I have been misled, and I have no confidence at all that the Home Office, Serco or the Minister have the first clue what they are doing in relation to asylum seeker relocation.

Robert Jenrick

I will be happy to make some inquiries and come back to my hon. Friend.

November 24, 2022
Diana Johnson – 2022 Speech on Local Authority Consultation on Hotel Asylum Accommodation

The speech made by Diana Johnson, the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

I welcome the fact that Manston is empty today, but can I say to the Minister that it should never have got into the mess that it did, because the Home Office was working on forecasts of up to 60,000 people travelling across the channel this year? The Home Affairs Committee produced a report in the summer, and our No. 1 recommendation was to deal with the backlog to stop people having to go into hotels.

Can I highlight to the Minister that Home Office contractors that seek accommodation for asylum seekers are really only interested in the bottom line? They have concentrated the accommodation they have sourced in the poorer, cheaper areas—places such as my own constituency in Hull—and even when local councils in Yorkshire have come together to try to ensure equitable distribution across Yorkshire, Mears, which provides the accommodation for the Home Office, actually overrules local councils and does not do a service to the Home Office. Will the Minister look at the role that his contractors are playing in the inequitable nature of the distribution of asylum seekers?

Robert Jenrick

I met the contractors and outsource partners of the Home Office earlier in the week, and I conveyed the frustrations that many Members have expressed to me, including some of the points that the right hon. Lady has set out. She is right that, for as long as we have this issue, we need a fairer and more equitable distribution of those accommodated in contingency accommodation. There is clearly a role for the Home Office in leading that. There is also a role for the outsource partners, and I made that point to them. It does seem to me as if some parts of the country are bearing a disproportionate burden, and we need to encourage those outsource partners to look more broadly for suitable accommodation. They undertook to do that, and my officials are going to provide better data to them so that there is a better picture of where the hotels and other accommodation are when they form those judgments.

November 24, 2022
Stuart McDonald – 2022 Speech on Local Authority Consultation on Hotel Asylum Accommodation

The speech made by Stuart McDonald, the SNP spokesperson on immigration, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

I think we are all agreed in this House that it is important that the Home Office liaises in advance with local authorities, service providers, non-governmental organisations and local representatives. The Minister has made some commitments in that regard today, and we will obviously monitor closely how those are implemented and how they work. We should also be agreed, and I think we are close to being agreed, that hotels really should be a matter of last resort, rather than routine, so I have a couple of thoughts on how we get there.

First, on where the Home Office spends resources, I hate to say it—well, I do not mind saying it—but the £140 million spent on Rwanda is a complete waste of money. Could the Minister confirm that about 4,000 or 5,000 caseworkers could have been employed for that sort of sum? Let us not waste any more money on that at all. Will he also look at the tens of millions of pounds that contractors are now raking in in profit through that scheme, and seek to provide that money directly to local authorities to procure accommodation in their communities?

Secondly, on the backlog, as I have said before, there are thousands—tens of thousands—of Afghans and Syrians in the system who could be taken out of it with a quick decision. The inadmissibility procedure is a complete waste of time. It achieves nothing, and it clogs up 10,000 spaces.

Finally, we did hear confirmation today that decision makers are among the lowest-paid civil servants going, but they make life and death decisions. Surely that has to be looked at again, and they need to be paid properly.

November 24, 2022
Stephen Kinnock – 2022 Speech on Local Authority Consultation on Hotel Asylum Accommodation

The speech made by Stephen Kinnock, the Shadow Immigration Minister, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

It seems that we come to the Chamber at least once a week to hear about the mess that the Home Secretary is making of an asylum system that her Government have broken. The root cause of today’s urgent question is the failure of the Government to process asylum claims with anything like the efficiency required. In 2012, the Home Office was making 14 asylum decisions a month; it is now making just five.

Tory Ministers like to blame covid, but the truth is that this is a mess of their own making. They chose to downgrade asylum decision makers from higher executive officer grade to lower executive officer grade, leading to a less experienced workforce on lower wages with lower retention rates and collapsing morale. The inevitable consequences were slower decisions, more decisions overturned at appeal, an increasing backlog and ballooning taxpayer costs.

With the average time to process an asylum claim standing at 449 days, the people smugglers see the backlog as a marketing opportunity—an open invite from this Conservative Government to those who want to melt away into the underground economy. All this catastrophic incompetence has led to the Minister scrambling around to find contingency hotel accommodation, resulting in what the Home Secretary described this morning as “poor communication” between central and local government.

Will the Minister therefore confirm whether he really feels that his undertaking to give local authorities as little as 24 hours’ notice is reasonable? Did he recently pull out of two meetings with council leaders at short notice? What mechanisms is he using to monitor the performance of contractors and subcontractors? I have heard from councils where the public health team was not informed about serious health issues, including pregnancies, so does he accept that he is failing to give local authorities key health-related information? What progress is he making on tackling the crisis of unaccompanied children being placed in hotels— 222 have already gone missing—and will he apologise to the couples who have had to cancel their wedding receptions in hotels at extremely short notice as a result of this Government’s chronic mismanagement?

November 24, 2022
Giles Watling – 2022 Parliamentary Question on Consultation on Asylum Seekers with Tendring District Council

The parliamentary question asked by Giles Watling, the Conservative MP for Clacton, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

Giles Watling

I thank the Minister for his answer. Last Sunday afternoon, the Home Office contacted my local authority by email to give it 24 hours’ notice that it had selected a hotel to act as contingency asylum accommodation. That gave the excellent people at Tendring District Council no time to respond properly to the issue of services. It is an inadequate timeframe and shows how poor the comms from the Home Office have been; I have not been contacted personally about the issue at all. I am glad that the Minister finds it unacceptable, but will he agree to meet me and the local authority to discuss the plans for Clacton?

Robert Jenrick

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising those important issues. I will, of course, be happy to meet him, as I have met hon. Members on both sides of the House in almost every case where someone has requested to do so.

In respect of the hotel in Tendring, as I understand it, having spoken to officials this morning, a proposition was put to Tendring District Council to use a former care home in my hon. Friend’s constituency, which would have accommodated a small number of asylum seekers. Short notice was given because it was to be a backstop accommodation option in the light of the extreme situation that we were contending with at Manston. On further inquiries, and prior to his inquiry to the Department and the calling of the urgent question, the proposition was dropped by the Home Office and there is no intention of proceeding with it.

For information, had that proposition been taken forward, it would have been for a very small number of individuals. At the moment, there are 39 asylum seekers accommodated in my hon. Friend’s constituency, 14 of whom are in hotels and 25 in dispersed accommodation. That accounts for 0.02% of the population of Tendring’s local authority. I do not say that to diminish the legitimate concerns that he raises, but merely to provide context. If we are dealing with 40,000 individuals crossing the channel illegally, there will be a need for all local authorities in the country to work with the Home Office and to play their part. It is absolutely incumbent on the Home Office in return, however, to provide good standards of engagement so that we can ensure that the right accommodation is chosen in the right places. That is exactly what I intend to achieve.

November 24, 2022
Robert Jenrick – 2022 Statement on Local Authority Consultation on Hotel Asylum Accommodation

The statement made by Robert Jenrick, the Minister for Immigration, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

On my appointment by the Prime Minister three weeks ago, I was appraised of the critical situation at the Manston processing centre. Within days, the situation escalated further with a terrorist attack at Western Jet Foil that forced the transfer of hundreds of additional migrants to Manston. I urgently visited Western Jet Foil and Manston within days of my appointment to assess the situation for myself and to speak with frontline staff, during which time it became clear to me that very urgent action was required.

Since then, the numbers at Manston have fallen from more than 4,000 to zero today. That would not have been possible without the work of dedicated officials across the Home Office—from the officials in cutters saving lives at sea, to the medical staff at Manston—and I put on record my sincere gratitude to them for the intense effort required to achieve that result.

To bring Manston to a sustainable footing and meet our legal and statutory duties to asylum seekers who would otherwise have been left destitute, we have had to procure additional contingency accommodation at extreme pace. In some instances, however, that has led to the Home Office and our providers failing to properly engage with local authorities and Members of Parliament. I have been clear that that is completely unacceptable and that it must change.

On Monday, a “Dear colleague” letter in my name was sent to outline a new set of minimum requirements for that engagement, backed by additional resources. This includes an email notification to local authorities and Members of Parliament no less than 24 hours prior to arrivals; a fulsome briefing on the relevant cohort, required support and dedicated point of contact; and an offer of a meeting with the local authority as soon as possible prior to arrival.

I have since met chief executives and leaders of local authorities across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, among many other meetings, to improve our engagement. We discussed their concerns and outlined the changes that we intend to make together. I have also met our providers to convey my concerns and those conveyed to me by hon. Members on both sides of the House in recent weeks, and to agree new standards of engagement and conduct from them.

These new standards will lead to a modest improvement, but I am clear that much more needs to be done, so this performance standard will be reviewed weekly with a view to improving service levels progressively as quickly as we can. In the medium term, we are committed to moving to a full dispersal accommodation model, which would be fairer and cheaper. We continue to pursue larger accommodation sites that are decent but not luxurious, because we want to make sure that those in our care are supported appropriately but that the UK is a less attractive destination for asylum shoppers and economic migrants. That is exactly what the Home Secretary and I intend to achieve.

November 24, 2022
Ian Murray – 2022 Speech on the Supreme Court Decision on a Scottish Referendum

The speech made by Ian Murray, the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

I begin by thanking the Supreme Court for examining this case in detail, for reaching a unanimous decision and for doing so in a speedy manner. I also thank the Scottish Lord Advocate for referring this case to the Supreme Court. She was right not to allow it to be launched in the Scottish Parliament before seeking legal clarity on this matter, and we are all in a better place now for that clarity having been put forward. The Supreme Court’s ruling is absolutely clear and concise.

The Leader of the SNP has just accused those who are against independence of “triumphalism”. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are deeply disappointed and angry that the politics in Scotland is paralysed by this constitutional grievance. It is now time for all of us in Scottish politics to focus on the problems facing our country, from rocketing bills to the crisis in the NHS, and I wish the SNP had such passion for doing that. I fear that that will not happen after the First Minister announced that she will turn the next general election into a de facto referendum. As an example, the SNP has made such a mess of our NHS that, earlier this week, it was reported that NHS chiefs have been discussing plans to privatise our health service—Labour’s and perhaps our country’s greatest achievement.

There is not a majority in Scotland for a referendum or for independence, but neither is the majority for the status quo. There is a majority in Scotland, and across the UK, for change. This failing and incapable Tory Government are unfit to govern this country. They have crashed the economy and they are as big a threat to the Union as any nationalist. People in Scotland and across the UK are sick of watching their incompetence, our national standing falling in the world, and working people paying for their decisions, but change is coming. It is coming with a UK Labour Government that will bring economic growth, raise living standards and restore our nation’s place in the world.

Does the Secretary of State agree that change is indeed coming and that Scottish voters will lead the way by kicking his Government out of office and helping to elect a UK Labour Government?

Mr Jack

No, I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman on his last point.

November 24, 2022
Ian Blackford – 2022 Speech on the Supreme Court Decision on a Scottish Referendum

The speech made by Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, in the House of Commons on 23 November 2022.

Thank you for granting this urgent question, Mr Speaker.

It is right that the UK Government answer questions today, and answer them quickly, because this morning the Supreme Court dealt with a question of law; there is now a massive question of democracy. Some of the Westminster parties are already wildly celebrating this morning’s decision, but I think it is safe to say that their thoughtless triumphalism will not last very long, because this judgment raises profound and deeply uncomfortable questions about the basis of the future of the United Kingdom.

The biggest question of all is how the Prime Minister can ever again repeat the myth that the United Kingdom is a voluntary union of nations. In 2014, the Smith Commission made it clear that

“nothing in this report prevents Scotland becoming an independent country in the future should the people of Scotland so choose.”

If that is true and if the Secretary of State’s Government are still committed to that promise, will he urgently amend the Scotland Act 1998 to ensure that the Scottish people have the right to choose our own future? If he fails to do that, is he deliberately choosing to deny democracy, because a so-called partnership in which one partner is denied the right to choose a different future, or even to ask itself the question, cannot be described in any way as a voluntary partnership, or even a partnership at all?

Today’s decision casts focus on the democratic decisions of the Scottish people. Since 2014, the Scottish National party has won eight elections in a row. We have secured multiple mandates. The question is: how many times do people in Scotland have to vote for a referendum before they get it?

The more contempt the Westminster establishment shows for Scottish democracy, the more certain it is that Scotland will vote yes when the choice comes to be made. Scotland did not vote for Brexit. We did not vote for a new age of Tory austerity. We did not vote for this Prime Minister, and we have not voted for the Tories in Scotland since 1955. What we did vote for was the choice of a different future. If Westminster keeps blocking our democratic decisions, lawfully and democratically Scotland will find a way out of this Union.

Mr Jack

This idea that a mandate was delivered in 2021 in the Holyrood elections is completely misleading. As the First Minister herself said very clearly in an interview in The Herald—this is when she thought that the former First Minister, the previous SNP leader Alex Salmond, was gaming the system with his party Alba—that parties should stand on both the list and first-past-the-post constituency systems. The Greens did not fulfil that and neither did Alba. Let us be clear: in the 2021 Holyrood elections—the so-called mandate—less than one third of the Scottish electorate voted for the SNP.

November 24, 2022