UK Edition
The Home Office has had to find an extra £2 billion to fund hotel rooms for asylum seekers, as the Government admitted there is no deadline to end their use.
The number of migrants being housed in hotels has passed 50,000 for the first time, up from just 2,600 in March 2020, at a cost of more than £6 million a day.
Analysis by the Telegraph shows there are now asylum hotels in 90 per cent of England’s 48 counties.
It has prompted fears among MPs that tens of thousands of migrants will still be housed in hotels across the country by the next election, widely expected to be in 2024.
Treasury figures have been pushing for the Home Office to scale back the use of “expensive” hotels while Suella Braverman's department wanted more money to plug the black hole in its budget.
The Treasury has now agreed a package of efficiency cuts within the department and money from its own reserve to cover the £2 billion overspend on migrant hotels, although the agreement is unlikely to be a prominent part of next week’s budget.
The news comes as the Prime Minister is set to announce that Britain will give hundreds of millions of pounds in funding to France to invest in policing, security and intelligence to prevent the small boats crisis.
Mr Sunak will on Friday meet with President Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris for the first Anglo-French summit in five years, with the Prime Minister reportedly set to give sums totalling more than £200 million over a three-year period as part of a strategy to stop the boats at source.
A senior Whitehall source familiar with discussions said: “The Treasury has been frustrated that the Home Office is placing migrants in expensive hotels and has pushed them to look at cheaper alternatives.”
There have been fraught discussions between the Home Office and Treasury officials in recent weeks about the ballooning cost of hotel accommodation ahead of next week’s Budget.
It also comes following a wave of protests targeting hotels housing asylum seekers, as tensions build in communities.
On Tuesday, Home Secretary Mrs Braverman unveiled the Government’s Illegal Migration Bill to detain Channel migrants, remove them from the UK within weeks to either their home country or a safe third country like Rwanda and ban them from ever returning. The Bill will have its second reading in the Commons on Monday.
Measures in the Illegal Migration Bill are expected to cost £3 billion a year. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirmed his backing earlier in the week and is understood to have privately told Mrs Braverman that “money is no issue” in stopping the boats, one of Mr Sunak’s five priority policies ahead of the election.
On Friday, Rishi Sunak will meet French president Emmanuel Macron at a summit in Paris to agree on an expanded, longer-term deal to devote more officers, surveillance equipment and infrastructure to stop the migrants from leaving the northern France beaches.
Up to 80,000 more Channel migrants could reach the UK this year, according to Home Office projections.
Mrs Braverman is said to be “on the cusp” of announcing plans to move thousands of migrants out of hotels into bigger sites including disused military bases that are designed to cut the cost to the Home Office by at least half.
Mr Sunak said in December that the Government had identified locations that could accommodate 10,000 migrants, with the aim of adding thousands more places in the coming months.
The number of migrants housed in hotels was then 40,000 but has since increased to 51,000 after the Home Office emptied the Manston processing centre following a record surge in small boat arrivals in the final five months of last year.
The announcement of the new sites has been delayed after facing local opposition including from James Cleverley, the Foreign Secretary, who is among critics of plans to turn a former RAF base in Wethersfield, Essex, into an asylum camp.
David Davis, the former Brexit secretary who successfully blocked plans to turn former student accommodation into a 1,000-bed site for migrants in Hull, said: “No one expects this to be solved by the next election despite the rhetoric. It’s a really difficult intractable problem whether you are in a Red or Blue Wall seat.
“What the public wants to see is movement. They want to see an improvement. The point of having people in hotels in constituencies is that it makes it very visible. If things are not getting better, it magnifies the political effect. If it does get better, it will magnify the political impact.”
Jonathan Gullis, MP for Stoke on Trent, which has more than 300 migrants in two hotels, warned that the Government risked losing red wall seats like his - and the election as a result - unless voters saw hotels being emptied of migrants and deportation flights to Rwanda and other safe countries.
Red Wall areas are housing seven times as many asylum seekers per person as south east England, an analysis by the Telegraph of Home Office data has revealed.