The Home Office is paying for around 5,000 empty hotel beds for asylum seekers to avoid overcrowding at a detention centre amid high numbers of Channel crossings.
It is already paying more than £6m a day to house around 50,000 migrants in hotels, with controversial projects to use barges and military bases hit by delays and legal action.
The spending is a key driver behind the record £3.6bn annual cost for Britain’s asylum system and is being controversially funded through international aid money that should be going to crises abroad.
More than 1,300 migrants have arrived in small boats in three days, bringing the total figure for 2023 close to last year’s record levels despite Rishi Sunak’s pledge to stop the boats.
Appearing before parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, officials said there would not be a repeat of last autumn’s crisis at the Manston initial processing centre in Kent.
A man died during a diphtheria outbreak and some migrants attempted suicide, as people were detained unlawfully for weeks in crowded marquees.
A recent report by the prisons watchdog warned that the risk of overcrowding, disorder and disease would be repeated if the situation did not improve after the government extended detention time limits and downgraded safety standards.
Simon Ridley, the Home Office’s second permanent secretary, told MPs it had created “ringfenced hotels” to stop Manston from becoming overcrowded again.
“We have ringfenced hotels where we can move people quickly as an overflow out of Manston before coming into the permanent estate,” he said.
“We’ve got a buffer of as close to 5,000 beds as we can have so we always have an outflow. We’re carrying a large number of empty beds in order to let us move people out.”
Mr Ridley said the number of empty beds was currently under 5,000 because of large numbers of arrivals in recent days, but admitted that they were all being paid for.
Home Office permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft defended the move, saying: “We have to have a buffer somewhere because if we don’t, we know what happens.”
It came weeks after lawyers representing home secretary Suella Braverman told the High Court that the Home Office was facing a potential shortage of hotel places that could leave vulnerable asylum seekers homeless.
Fighting a council injunction against plans to house 1,700 migrants at the former Wethersfield RAF base in Essex, a barrister said the current situation qualified for a controversial emergency bypass of planning laws because it “threatens homelessness”.
Home Office lawyers told the High Court a potential shortage of hotel places legally qualified as an ‘emergency’ (Joe Giddens/PA)— (PA Wire)
Paul Brown KC said it was Ms Braverman’s “position that the situation generally is an emergency”, and suggested that hotels may withdraw from Home Office contracts because they want other business.
The government is planning to use the same emergency planning process for other planned asylum camps, including one at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, and a full legal challenge brought by local councils is to be heard at the High Court later this week.
But asked when the Home Office would stop using hotels to house asylum seekers on Monday, Mr Rycroft told the Public Accounts Committee he could not “put a date on it”.
The senior civil servant added: “There are too many variables, there are too many factors, but we are determined to do it as quickly as possible.”
He said accommodation and the slow pace of asylum decision-making were two areas being focused on by the Home Office and insisted it was “on track” to fulfil Rishi Sunak’s pledge of clearing a “legacy” backlog of claims by the end of this year.
“The government is pursuing legislation and other approaches to reduce new arrivals through small boats and we are hoping that by the time we have done all of that and established accommodation through this programme we will have a system that can deal with the volume coming in,” Mr Rycroft said.
He admitted that internal modelling assumes that small boat crossings will not fall, but insisted that was not a judgement on ministers’ claims that a raft of punitive new laws would “deter” asylum seekers.
The Illegal Migration Bill, which aims to see all small boat migrants detained and deported, was shredded by the House of Lords as peers backed 20 amendments limiting key powers.
MPs will vote on the changes, and concessions made by the government on Tuesday, but the bill cannot be implemented without an operational deportation deal.
Nothing is in place following the Court of Appeal’s ruling that the Rwanda agreement is unlawful, and the Supreme Court is not expected to hear the final stage of the case until September at the earliest.
