The Government is now spending almost £7 million a day housing asylum seekers in hotels - and the cost could continue to rise, MPs heard. The Commons Home Affairs Committee was told £5.6 million a day was being spent on hotels for people who have arrived in the UK and have submitted a claim, with an additional £1.2 million paid to house Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban takeover while long-term accommodation is sought.
The total £6.8 million is over £2 million more than the Government said it was spending in February (£4.7 million). Asked by committee chairwoman Dame Diana Johnson if the cost was likely to go up again, Abi Tierney, director general of the passport office and UK visas and immigration, replied: “Yes.”
During the wide-ranging session, MPs also learned the Home Office has only processed 4% of asylum claims by migrants who crossed the Channel last year. Officials admitted the interception rate made by French police, of migrants attempting the journey has fallen.
Concerns were also raised about conditions at the Manston Airport site in Kent, which is meant to be a short-term holding facility to process migrants when they arrive in the UK. MPs heard the number of people arriving was “outstripping” the capacity of the site and some were being held there for as long as a month, compared with the 24 hours intended.
Officials told the committee 96% of asylum applications submitted by migrants crossing the Channel in 2021 are still outstanding. Of the 4% completed, 85% were granted refugee status or another protection status.
Dan Hobbs, director of asylum, protection and enforcement, said there is a “challenge in processing asylum claims in a timely way at present” and confirmed only a “small proportion” of last year’s arrivals had been granted asylum. The cost of the UK’s asylum system has topped £2 billion a year, with the highest number of claims for two decades and record delays for people awaiting a decision.
Home Office spending on asylum rose by £756 million, from around £1.4 billion in 2020/21 to £2.1 billion in 2021/22. This is the highest on record and more than double the amount spent in 2019/20, as officials struggle to keep up with the number of new applications.
Clandestine Channel threat commander Dan O’Mahoney told the committee in 2021 the interception rate for French police stopping migrants trying to cross the Channel was 50% and this year it has dropped to 42.5%. He accepted this was a lower percentage but stressed it was a “much, much bigger number”, telling how French authorities had stopped 28,000 migrants crossing the Channel and intercepted and destroyed 1,072 boats so far this year.
“I should put on record my thanks to the French … this is around double what they managed to achieve last year, so that is really, really significant,” Mr O’Mahoney said. He added: “It is correct to say that migrants can attempt to cross on more than one occasion and therefore those 28,000 migrants may not be individual, different migrants, so it’s 28,000 attempts.”
In France migrants are not detained and processed after being caught attempting to cross the Channel. Mr O’Mahoney said French laws make it “difficult for French officers to take any action in that way”.
He told the committee French beach patrols in the north of the country were only “one brick in the wall” of the efforts to curb Channel crossings. Work by the UK and French authorities have led to 55 serious organised crime gangs behind such crossings being “dismantled” since a joint intelligence cell was set up in France a couple of years ago, he added.
More than 38,000 people have arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in over 900 boats in 2022 to date, compared with 28,526 last year. In October alone, at least 5,000 have made the journey, according to provisional Government figures, but no crossings were recorded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on Monday or Tuesday.
