Writing for The Mirror, Home Office minister Dame Angela Eagle said the Government is clearing up the Tory mess – but it needs to be done properly
Since coming into government, we have returned more than 35,000 people with no legal right to be here – including more than 5,200 foreign national offenders.
Enforced returns are now at their highest level since 2018 and returns of those in detention have nearly tripled since 2022. We’re clearing up the mess of the previous government but this needs to be done properly.
As the Home Secretary has said, we agree with communities across the country that all asylum hotels need to close and we have committed this will happen by the end of this Parliament. But this needs to be done in a managed way right across the country without creating problems for other areas and local councils. That is why the government is appealing the recent judgement on the Bell Hotel in Epping.
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The number of asylum hotels has dropped from a peak of 400 in 2023, at a staggeringly high cost of £9 million a day. Now, just over 200 remain in use at a much lower daily cost of £5.5 million.
I n the first half of this year alone, the number of asylum seekers in hotels has been cut by 6,000 – a 16% reduction.
Overall, asylum costs are down 11%, saving nearly £1 billion in hotel spending last year. This progress is a product of our unwavering determination to start fixing 14 years of failure and waste under the previous administration.
For far too long, people smuggling gangs have been allowed to exploit our immigration system by embedding themselves along our borders and fuelling illegal entry into the UK.
As well as undermining our border security and putting lives at risk, this leads to people gaming the appeals process and delaying deportation. This must be stopped. This government will not stand by and let it continue.
That’s why we have announced we are overhauling asylum appeals and establishing a new independent body to speed up decision making and the time it takes to consider appeals. Our reforms will resolve asylum appeal cases faster, get people out of hotels and cut costs to taxpayers.
We have always said there is no one single solution to tackling illegal migration. The last government tried that with the wasteful Rwanda policy, which saw just four people voluntarily removed at the cost to the taxpayer of £700 million.
Over the past year, we have also introduced reforms to take back control of our borders, disrupt the criminal gangs’ business model and ensure those who have no right to be in the UK are rapidly removed.
At the core of our efforts are strengthened international partnerships to confront organised immigration crime and disrupt those who exploit the system. This year, we’ve forged new agreements with Bulgaria, Romania, and India to boost intelligence sharing and tackle criminal networks at their source. We also signed a joint action plan with Vietnam to prevent dangerous journeys and dismantle trafficking gangs.
This summer, we secured unprecedented deals, including our landmark UK-France treaty, which has already led to the detention of illegal migrants, with removals to France expected soon – striking a blow to people smuggling gangs.
We’ve toughened our approach with the Deport Now, Appeal Later scheme, ensuring foreign criminals face appeals from abroad, not from within the UK. Just this week, we signed a new agreement with Iraq to fast-track the repatriation of individuals with no legal right to remain.
These agreements complement our operational work through the £250 million-backed Border Security Command and the National Crime Agency, targeting smuggling kingpins. To speed up deportations from UK prisons, we’ve lowered the threshold for removal from 50% to 30% of sentence served.
Our Immigration Enforcement teams are cracking down on illegal working, with raids and arrests up 50% since we took office. This criminality will no longer be tolerated. But we aren’t just delivering for the here and now, we’re future proofing for the months and years ahead through our Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill that will apply counterterrorism style laws to organised immigration crime to ensure we never go back to the sheer chaos we inherited.
Because we know the public is concerned about the impact that illegal migration is having on their lives. Illegal migrants skipping the queue to arrive here on a small boat isn’t fair and it isn’t right.
But we know that by taking this determined action in the round, from increasing returns to tackling the gangs, by going further and faster than ever before, we will start to see real change, stopping people from coming to the UK in the first place, speeding up the decision making on claims, removing those with no right to be here and ultimately ending the use of asylum hotels by the end of this Parliament.
No gimmicks, no games, this real work is all part of our system wide approach to delivering necessary, lasting change for the British people. It will take time and hard graft to achieve, and there is no silver bullet, but we have a serious and credible plan to strengthen our borders and crackdown on illegal immigration.
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