Labour’s pledge to “restore order” to the asylum system—and, most significantly, to “end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds”—won’t be implemented for up to three years, if not more.
A government source yesterday told The Times that the asylum backlog is “much worse than we thought,” meaning “it’s going to take a lot longer to clear than we anticipated.” This is despite Labour’s insistence ahead of the election that it would not step into office and declare that everything was much worse than we thought.
The source added that the 87,217-strong backlog “certainly won’t be cleared in a year.”
The taxpayer is currently funding the housing of around 30,000 illegal migrants in 250 hotels, costing £4.2 million (€5.05 million) every day.
Journalist Peter Lloyd said the fact Britons are forking out for these costs while the government has scrapped winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners is “an astonishing betrayal.”
Labour appears to be taking no responsibility for the fact it could take them years to get a grip on illegal migration, if they are ever to do so. One source, talking to the Times, explained that “we have inherited a completely failed immigration system from the Tories.”
This is true. But so too is the fact that 10,000 migrants crossed the Channel to Britain in just 75 days of Labour prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership—over 100 more than arrived in former Tory PM Boris Johnson’s first year in office. And that migration experts have warned that Starmer has shown no “huge commitment” to tackling this most important of issues.
In fact, the prime minister’s own new border chief argued late last month that Labour’s focus on “smashing” the smuggling gangs was not going to be enough on its own to stop illegal migration, and that deterrence was “always going to be part of the overall picture,” too.
