The government’s target for closing all asylum hotels by 2029 is not soon enough. Sir Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper need to think imaginatively of ways to clear the backlog of asylum claims more quickly.
Fortunately, the Refugee Council, a charity, has done some of the thinking for them – and has come up with a plan that could enable the prime minister and the home secretary to close all 200 asylum hotels within the next year. This scheme would grant time-limited leave, with security checks, to people from countries from which applicants are almost certain to be accepted as refugees.
The council’s research finds that 40 per cent of migrants being accommodated in hotels are from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and Syria – five countries from which the overwhelming majority of applications for refugee status are granted. If claimants from these countries were granted exceptional and temporary leave to stay in the United Kingdom, they could work to support themselves and to provide for their own accommodation.
Given that more applicants from these countries are being housed in other Home Office accommodation, which could then be freed up, the Refugee Council calculates that this one-off scheme, on its own, would allow all asylum hotels to be closed by March next year.
The use of hotels is one of the most pressing challenges that Labour inherited from the Conservative government, which had cynically allowed the asylum system to grind to a halt before the election. The hotels are costing the taxpayer billions, while acting as flashpoints for division and the stirring up of racial hatred.
Sir Keir and Ms Cooper should seize on this plan to restore order to one half of the asylum system. The Conservative and Reform parties will criticise the scheme as an “amnesty”, simply giving up and waving through migrants from the five countries. They will argue that it will act as an incentive for more people from those countries to attempt to cross the Channel.
It would be fair to say that the scheme is not ideal – but it is an attempt to gain control of a system that is so far from ideal that it threatens public order. But the Refugee Council is not proposing that migrants from particular countries should be simply “waved through”: they would still be subject to normal asylum rules, except that they would be granted temporary permission to work and to support themselves, on the grounds that they are likely to be granted refugee status anyway.
The additional “pull” exerted by a strictly one-off scheme should be limited. The Independent accepts that asylum seekers generally should not be allowed to work, because that would act as a further incentive for those with unfounded claims to attempt to cross the Channel. But the corollary of that rule is that asylum applications should be processed quickly, and this scheme offers the chance, by clearing a large part of the backlog at a stroke, of getting the system back on track.
Of course, we must acknowledge that dealing with the backlog of asylum applications is only half of the problem. The other half is the challenge of stopping the boats, the most visible source of new asylum claims. This requires even more creative thinking and as much of a sense of urgency if the government is to head off the simplistic and mostly unworkable proposals put forward by Nigel Farage.
Sir Keir and Ms Cooper have made some progress towards the only scheme so far that has some prospect of deterring the small boats, namely the pilot scheme to return migrants to France. But this scheme may take a while to build up to the numbers that are required, and is, in any case, vulnerable to legal challenges and the political instability of the French government, facing a vote of confidence next month.
So the government needs to consider all options for more aggressive policing of the Channel, and a more forceful approach to deporting migrants whose asylum applications have been rejected.
Meanwhile, however, it should follow the advice of the Refugee Council to substantially reduce the asylum backlog and to clear the migrant hotels three years ahead of the target date. This would remove some of the immediate heat from the small boats issue and give the prime minister and the home secretary some breathing space to explore similarly imaginative solutions to the other half of the asylum crisis.
