New statistics from the Home Office reveal the taxpayer is now forking out £8 million a day to house asylum seekers in hotels, with most of the cost coming out of the foreign aid budget. The overall cost of the government’s asylum and accommodation system is now a whopping £3 billion overall. Yvette Cooper points out that the cost of hotel accommodation has gone up by a third since Rishi promised to end hotel use. Labour say they will end hotel use – without explaining how.
Emma Churchill, the Home Office Director General for Migration and Borders, raked in a bonus of between £15-20,000 on top of her £135,000 salary before she departed for the Cabinet Office. A reminder that more migrants were detected crossing the channel in the first weekend of this month than the entirety of March…
Despite the eye-watering sums and unprecedented asylum claims, Guido hears officials are quietly of the view that the worst has passed, and the Home Office is beginning to break the backlog. Productivity is supposedly up, and claims are finally being processed quicker. Given the appalling state of these figures, you’d hope so. The proof will be in the pudding…
Ex-Home Secretary Priti Patel has written a furious public letter to her successor Suella Braverman and Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick over new reports that the Home Office is planning to house migrants on RAF bases for up to five years, attacking the government directly for being “evasive” and bypassing planning rules under the pretence of emergency need. Nothing like blue-on-blue melodrama to keep hacks busy over recess…
Patel suggests the government has been “secretive about its intentions” over plans to keep migrants on RAF Wethersfield for years longer than publicly stated, and accuses the Home Office of offering “no clarity” to Patel personally on the issue. She points out she asked three Written Questions on the time frame and funding for the project, and received “no definitive answer”…
“The lack of a direct response to my questions relating to the length of time the Home Office plans to use the site for asylum accommodation gives the impression that the Home Office is being evasive… Ministers have been evasive over their plans for the future of Wethersfield. They’ve bypassed the usual planning requirements, claimed the site is temporary for emergency use only and now we see they‘ve been planning to use the site for five years. This is unacceptable.”
The letter ends with four questions – which Patel politely asks to be answered “urgently”:
- How long the base will be used as a migrant camp?
- What does the government’s financial modelling on the camp say, including value for money?
- What is the average cost-per-bed?
- What are the details for the approach to planning for the site?
Read the furious letter below:
The Home Office have announced Bas Javid has been appointed the new Director General of Immigration Enforcement, joining in November. It will be his responsibility to “lead the efforts to tackle illegal migration”, and he will work alongside the police and Border Force to crack down on what Suella calls the “scourge on our society“. He’s currently the Deputy Assistant Commissioner at the Metropolitan Police Service. He also happens to be Sajid Javid’s brother…
Commenting on the appointment today – on the same day the total number of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats since 2018 reached a whopping 100,000 – Suella Braverman said:
“Immigration abuse is a scourge on our society and I will leave no stone unturned in clamping down on this illegality. Bas brings a wealth of law enforcement experience and will further ramp up our efforts to tackle immigration offending, as the British people would expect.”
Bas joins the Home Office after 30 years’ experience in the police force. Luckily it shouldn’t take too long for him to adjust to the new gig. His brother was the Home Secretary four years ago…
Small Boats Week is already in choppy waters, and it’s only Monday morning. Home Office minister Sarah Dines was on the airwaves earlier claiming the government is “hoping” the Bibby Stockholm barge will house 500 illegal migrants by the weekend. She told the BBC just hours ago:
“We’re expecting pretty soon, imminently this week, in the coming days that people will be on the Bibby Stockholm. For operational reasons, you wouldn’t expect me to confirm the hour or the day but it is pretty soon […] quite possibly it will be 500. We are hoping.”
The Home Office tells Guido, however, that they are not hoping for this at all. Asked if 500 was the target for this weekend, a Home Office source simply said “no, it’s not.” According to The Sun’s Harry Cole, they added that Dines “misspoke“, and 500 is the overall target figure, not the one set for this week. Dines’ suggestion that the government is “looking at” shipping illegal migrants to Ascension Island was also shot down. That idea was junked in 2020, and apparently it’s not coming back…
Tomorrow is Windrush Day, in which communities across the UK “celebrate the contribution of the Windrush Generation and their descendants”. One of those communities, it turns out, is none other than… the Home Office. Specifically, the UK Visa & Immigration civil servants up in Sheffield…
To commemorate the day, the civil servants working in the department which oversaw the whole fiasco are jazzing up their canteen menu with a smorgasbord of “Windrush themed” items. Here’s what’s being served up in the Vulcan restaurant tomorrow…
This afternoon, meanwhile, Suella Braverman has has defended the government’s handling of the Windrush compensation scheme despite figures showing just 26% of compensation claims have been successful. She also refused to apologise for the scheme. At least civil servants will be washing down jerk chicken with Caribbean burst Lucozade tomorrow instead. Delicious…
Home Office civil servants are threatening to strike over the government’s Rwanda deportation policy, with the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union claiming they are “going to have to consider” walkouts if members are “forced” to implement policies they consider unlawful. PCS ‘Head of Bargaining’ Paul O’Connor spoke on behalf of his fellow unelected bureaucrats this morning:
“If the Government carry on in the way they have, we are going to have to consider an industrial response to it. We have taken a view that it cannot go on. The hostile environment has got to be dismantled. It is just not working. It is not an effective immigration system. Our members are at the sharp end of this day in, day out and have to work in horrendous conditions. There will be no stomach amongst our members for implementing the Rwanda deal and Illegal Migration Bill, and they will inevitably come to their trade union to see if there is recourse to stop it happening.”
This is yet another instance of jumped-up civil servants going rogue on policy. Last year, Guido reported similar threats under Priti Patel, with Home Office staff claiming the Rwanda policy was affecting their mental health and some felt they had some kind of moral duty to speak out against the elected politicians who actually have a democratic mandate. A government source tells Guido they expect most of this is, as usual, coming from the lower-ranking staff who’re worried how they’ll explain themselves to their friends at dinner parties:
“I think that at senior levels of the home office civil servants understand the system is broken and are working hard to make it possible […] I suspect that is a low/middle ranking bureaucrats mouthing off…”
Of course, with the Home Office half-empty most of the time, will anyone even notice?
