Labour leader Keir Starmer is facing strong criticism after it was revealed that his government will continue to house asylum seekers in hotels, going back on a key promise made during the election. Labour had originally promised to stop using hotels for asylum seekers, which was supposed to save a large amount of money for the country. However, new information shows that migrants could stay in hotels for up to three more years due to a massive backlog of asylum cases.
When Labour came into power, they said they would end the use of hotels for housing migrants, but with over 225,000 asylum applications waiting to be processed, this has become difficult to achieve. The situation has been made worse by the continuous arrival of more migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats, adding even more pressure to the system. In the last few months, 11,000 more migrants have arrived, further increasing the backlog.
Conservative politicians have been quick to point out this broken promise. Robert Jenrick, a leading Conservative, accused Starmer of failing to strengthen migration controls after cancelling a previous government plan that aimed to send some migrants to Rwanda. Jenrick stated that instead of reducing the number of migrants, Starmer’s government has allowed more to arrive and will now be forced to spend billions of pounds on hotels for the next few years.
James Cleverly, another senior Conservative, said that Labour has no clear plan for dealing with the migrant crisis and is only making things worse. He blamed the government for scrapping previous plans and warned that hotels will remain in use because of their failure to manage the situation.
Reform UK, a smaller political party, also joined the criticism. Their deputy leader, Richard Tice, said it was unfair that Labour was cutting money for pensioners during the winter months while continuing to spend huge amounts of money on housing unemployed migrants in hotels. Tice claimed that only his party was standing up for pensioners and working-class people.
The decision to keep using hotels for asylum seekers has sparked anger from political opponents, who argue that Starmer’s government is wasting money and not delivering on promises. The challenge for the Labour government now is to find a better solution to the growing number of migrants arriving in the UK while addressing the large number of cases that still need to be processed. This issue is likely to remain a major point of debate in the coming months.
