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Migrants could be housed in hotels for up to three more years because of the asylum backlog, it has emerged.
Since Labour’s general election win, home secretary Yvette Cooper is said to have realised that clearing the backlog of asylum seekers will take longer than she had hoped.
It could now take as long as three years to deliver on her promise to “end asylum hotels” made during the campaign, with Whitehall sources saying the picture is “much worse than we thought”.
One told The Times: “It’s going to take a lot longer to clear than we anticipated. It certainly won’t be cleared in a year.”
A Labour source added: “We have inherited a completely failed immigration system from the Tories. Including them spending over £700m on Rwanda, and gimmicks that didn’t work. We’re working on clearing down the backlog they left behind, they clearly did nothing at all in the months before the election.
“The numbers speak for themselves.”
According to Home Office figures released in August, a total of 118,882 people were waiting for an initial decision on an asylum application in the UK at the end of June 2024, down by 32 per cent from 175,457 at the end of June 2023, which was the highest figure since current records began in 2010.
But the latest total was up slightly from the 118,329 waiting to be dealt with at the end of March this year, indicating a rise in the last three months of the 12-month period.
Earlier this month, Ms Cooper told broadcasters that the government was making progress on clearing the asylum backlog and returning those with no right to be in the UK “so that we can end these very costly asylum hotels”.
The Labour manifesto released ahead of the general election said that the party would “restore order to the asylum system so that it operates swiftly, firmly and fairly”.
“We will hire additional caseworkers to clear the Conservatives’ backlog and end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds,” the manifesto said.
