Rachel Reeves will fail to meet her flagship pledge to end the use of asylum hotels by 2029, the UK’s borders watchdog has warned.
David Bolt told a committee of peers there was not enough housing stock to deal with the number of people in the system – as he also questioned the government’s ability to achieve Keir Starmer’s promise to “smash the gangs”.
Ms Reeves has said her plan to end the use of hotels, by cutting the asylum backlog, hearing more appeal cases and returning people to their home countries, would save £1bn a year.
Asked by members of the House of Lords what the challenges would be to achieve the chancellor’s aim, Mr Bolt replied: “I don’t think it will be achieved, frankly.”
He said: “The numbers within asylum system (are) not very tractable, they’re very large numbers and it’s very hard to see how they’re going to be reduced significantly even over the length of Parliament.”
He added despite the Home Office appearing to be going in a different direction with getting more local authorities engaged in asylum housing: “I think there’s a more fundamental issue about accommodation, or at least housing stock, there simply isn’t sufficient housing stock to be able to deal with the sorts of numbers in the system.
“I think it’s really, really challenging.”
Mr Bolt, who previously served borders watchdog between 2015 and 2021, and returned as interim chief inspector in June last year, also told peers he wrote to ministers to say he “wasn’t convinced smashing the gangs was the right way of thinking about things” in tackling Channel crossings.
He said: “It did seem to me the challenge was to change the risk reward ratio for those people involved in organised immigration crime, that’s really a difficult thing to achieve, because it’s relatively low cost, relatively low risk for the perpetrators and highly profitable.
“I’m not sure I feel very optimistic about the ability to smash the gangs and, in any event, it seems to me with organised crime, the best thing you can do is deflect it to something else you’re less concerned about rather than expect to eradicate it.”
But he also agreed more needed to be done to tackle the issue in the UK and look at what is attracting people to come to the country.
Mr Bolt said: “The availability of illegal working, that I think is one of the issues the Home Office has tried to focus on and tried to close down as best it can and will continue to have to work very hard on that.”
It comes after shadow home secretary Chris Philp posted a message on X on Tuesday saying he made an unannounced visit to an asylum hotel last Friday and found “clear evidence” of illegal working for Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats.
A Downing Street spokesman said border security minister Dame Angela Eagle will meet food delivery companies next week, adding that the Government will not stand for the “racket”.
Home Office figures show just 299 migrants made the journey to the UK by crossing the English Channel in 2018.
This year so far, more than 18,000 migrants have arrived via the Channel, in a record for this point in the year since data collection began in 2018.
The highest year of total arrivals on record was 2022, at 45,774.
