Migrants are set to share hotels with the public under plans being considered by Suella Braverman to regain control of the Channel crisis.
Home Office officials are drawing up proposals for spot bookings of rooms rather than reserving entire hotels as part of a series of measures to tackle "catastrophic overcrowding" in the main asylum processing centre for Channel migrants at the disused Manston airfield in Kent.
The proposal was disclosed as pressure on the Home Secretary intensified after new questions emerged about her reappointment following her resignation for breaching the ministerial code and her handling of the migrant crisis.
Overcrowding at the processing centre worsened on Sunday after hundreds of migrants had to be transferred to Manston after their quayside reception centre at Tug Haven in Dover was petrol bombed by a man who then killed himself.
An estimated 1,900 migrants crossed the Channel at the weekend, taking the total for 2022 to more than 40,000, compared with 28,500 for the whole of 2021.
Home Office officials are considering the use of holiday parks and former student accommodation to take people from Manston.
The facility was overwhelmed on Sunday night, with 4,000 having to be housed in a centre originally designed for 1,600 to be moved on and processed within 24 hours.
Ministers are also proposing a major expansion of the Manston camp amid warnings by officials that the Home Office is at risk of acting unlawfully by detaining so many within it – including some for up to four weeks – without additional accommodation on the site.
"To make it easier and more efficient, we are looking at spot booking of hotels rather than requiring a whole hotel," said a government source.
"We have two competing legal duties. First, we don’t want to have people in Manston for too long. Secondly, we have a legal duty not to make people destitute. You cannot have thousands of people sent away with no plan to safely accommodate them."
Mrs Braverman was accused of failing to help solve Manston's overcrowding problem by refusing to approve new hotels where asylum seekers could be sent in disputed reports published at the weekend.
It follows a week of criticism over her reappointment as Home Secretary. In an attempt to tackle the criticism head on, she is understood to be ready this week to set out her version of events over her resignation to counter claims that she gave a misleading account of the security breach that led to her departure.
'The system has broken down'
On Sunday, senior Tory MPs expressed concern at rising community tensions over the migrant crisis. They urged the Government to take immediate action to ease the crisis at Manston and urgently negotiate a new deal with France to stem the crossings.
Sir Roger Gale, the MP whose constituency covers the centre, will on Monday seek to summon ministers to the Commons to give an "undertaking that instead of trying to pretend things can be handled at Manston, they commission enough accommodation" to ensure migrants can be processed and moved on within 24 hours.
He said he was concerned by disputed claims that Mrs Braverman had blocked transferring people from Manston to hotels in an attempt to save on the £6.8 million-a-day cost of housing them.
"The system has broken down because they are not being moved on," Sir Roger said, as he warned that he would strongly oppose any move to expand the Manston centre.
Natalie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover, said that even before Sunday’s petrol bomb attack she had spoken to Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, about "rising tensions" following an earlier incident last week.
"We have to see the Prime Minister speaking directly with President Emmanuel Macron to get a different agreement in terms of stopping the small boats immediately and dealing with the source of the problem," she said.
Witnesses to the attack at the Tug Haven centre said the man drove a white Seat sports utility vehicle towards it before throwing three incendiary devices, causing a fire, at around 11.22am.
Tim Loughton, a former minister and Conservative member of the home affairs committee, said: "The Government has not got a grip on this. The Home Office is still in a shambolic state."
He said it needed to quadruple the number of officials working to reduce the 100,000-plus backlog of asylum claims to free up space.
He added that it should introduce a separate fast-track deportation route for Albanian Channel migrants, who now account for nearly a third of those who have reached the UK this year.
Migrants to be moved out
Mr Jenrick visited the Manston centre on Sunday, having admitted last week that the Government needed to "get a grip" and promising a more "constructive" relationship with France and a bespoke route for Albanian migrants.
It is understood around 600 people will be moved out of Manston on Monday.
Around 30,000 people - including Afghan refugees - are being held in hotels that have been hired en bloc.
Apart from detention centres, dispersal accommodation provided by local authorities or spare beds provided by the Home Office’s private contractors, the source said options range from "hotels to holiday parks to former student accommodation".
Lt Gen Stuart Skeates, an Army chief, has been seconded from the Ministry of Defence to help tackle the crisis at Manston, which could include a major expansion. At present it covers a quarter of the disused airfield.
It would see the camp split into two. One part would detain the migrants for processing within 24 to 48 hours, while a second section would provide "non-detained" accommodation for those that had been processed.
Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said the Government had failed to put in place contingencies even though a Home Office analysis in 2021 predicted that up to 60,000 people would come across the Channel this year seeking asylum in Britain.
"Ministers failed to take any meaningful action to cut the backlog of 100,000 cases so that the asylum system was not clogged up despite officials giving them options to do so," he said.
