Instead of paying £1.6bn to provide unusable and unwelcome accommodation for some of the 50,000 asylum seekers currently housed in hotels (Legionella on the Bibby Stockholm barge: five questions for Home Office, 14 August), why does the Home Office not offer the UK public the opportunity to welcome people into their homes for the same £350 monthly fee as in the Ukrainian scheme? Such a plan could, for the reported £1.6bn cost, house 50,000 people for two years and still leave enough change to recruit more than 10,000 civil servants to administer the scheme and clear the backlog.
Surely the best way to deter what the Tory party deputy chair and the home secretary call “illegal migration” is to assess all arrivals quickly, warmly welcome people seeking asylum from war, torture, hunger, climate catastrophe or other persecution into our communities, and rapidly deport any others found to have risked their lives to get to the UK for some other reason?
Shareen Campbell
Miramont-de-Guyenne, France
• Enver Solomon is right in pointing out that hardline policies kill asylum seekers (We know people seeking asylum die in the Channel, but callous hardline policy kills them too, 14 August). But that doesn’t worry the prime minister or home secretary, who are banking on hardline policies being vote-winners – and are happy enough to bean-count an acceptable number of deaths in the run-up to the general election.
They’re probably perfectly content to see the boats still arrive and men, women and children drown just as long as they can keep asylum seekers and boats high on the agenda. There are votes to be won by hardline rhetoric, whatever the human cost.
David Cordingley
Lincoln
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