Home Office plans to significantly reduce the backlog of asylum claims will create a “humanitarian crisis” by increasing homelessness among refugees, Glasgow city council has warned.
The council believes there is a direct link between a Home Office announcement on Tuesday that it is closing 50 hotels being used for asylum seekers and a move to bulk-process asylum applications later this year, to clear the backlog of unresolved cases.
Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, told MPs on Tuesday the Home Office would clear asylum seekers from 50 hotels across the UK by January next year, with further tranches of hotels taken out of use for asylum seekers in the following months.
While the full list of areas where hotels are being cleared has not been released, of places identified during the Commons statement, all but one were in Conservative-held constituencies. It had been briefed that the Home Office would seek to particularly target marginal Tory seats for the first wave of the programme.
Glasgow council has been told that the Home Office will, over the same period, deal in bulk with the cases of 2,500 asylum seekers living in the city, which has the largest refugee population outside London.
Glasgow officials predict that will lead to about 1,800 of those being given refugee status.
As soon as they are granted the right to remain, those people will be told to leave their government-funded accommodation, with their housing becoming the responsibility of the council if they cannot find somewhere to live.
The city estimates about 1,400 of them will become homeless, of whom 77% will need emergency accommodation. That will dramatically worsen the city’s homelessness crisis, at an estimated extra cost of more than £50m, which the Home Office has so far refused to fund.
Susan Aitken, the leader of Glasgow city council, said the Home Office had no clear idea where those people would be housed and that ministers had failed to properly plan for the resulting surge in homeless refugees.
“It thinks closing hotels will convince voters it is delivering on its ugly rhetoric about getting tough on asylum – when all it is actually doing is moving people around like chess pieces,” she said.
Officials in Glasgow believe other cities, including Manchester and Liverpool, are likely to face similar challenges.
“Out of sight, out of mind is now the entirety of their asylum policy – even at the risk of a humanitarian crisis in towns and cities across the UK,” Aitken said. “This doesn’t have to happen. We are prepared to work with the Home Office to help them approach cases in Glasgow in a planned and structured way, if they provide us with the resources.”
During his Commons statement, Jenrick said he would be happy to discuss the issue with Chris Stephens, the SNP’s justice and immigration spokesperson, and acknowledged Glasgow faced “particular challenges” with rehousing refugees.
On Thursday, the council will be asked by the Labour group’s deputy leader, Soryia Siddique, to consider building temporary villages using “modular and prefabricated buildings and other forms of temporary housing” for those made homeless.
Announcing the hotels plan, Jenrick told MPs that the first 50 hotels to have asylum seekers removed “will begin in the coming days and will be complete by the end of January, with more tranches to follow shortly”.
In a sometimes highly politicised statement, Jenrick accused Labour MPs of having no plans to deal with asylum seekers crossing the Channel, and of seeking open borders.
At one point he told his Labour counterpart, Stephen Kinnock: “The new towns he [Keir Starmer] announced at the Labour party conference will be filled with illegal migrants.”
Meanwhile it is believed that about 5,000 asylum seekers are being made to share hotel rooms with people they are not related to as part of the Home Office’s little-known “maximisation policy” to accommodate more asylum seekers into smaller hotel spaces.
Emma Birks, the campaigns manager at Asylum Matters, which is monitoring the new policy, said: “The government is inflicting a physical and mental health crisis on people seeking asylum in the UK. The approach ministers are choosing to take is resulting in traumatised people crammed together in hotels and other forms of temporary accommodation; children and young people sharing rooms with unknown adults.”
