Migrants could be in taxpayer-funded hotels for another THREE YEARS due to backlog
Migrants could be staying in taxpayer-funded hotels for as many as three more years thanks to an uncleared “asylum backlog” – despite Labour’s pledge to “restore order to the system”.
Across 250 British hotels, some 30,000 migrants are being put up at Britons’ expense – to the tune of £4.2million every day.
That sits alongside a further 61,778 in “dispersal accommodation” – smaller private accommodation across the country or former university student halls.
Despite Labour’s own manifesto vowing to “end asylum hotels”, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and other ministers have realised that cutting down on the backlog will take much longer than previously thought, The Times reports.
Home Office officials had expected to close the last hotel within a year – but an unnamed Whitehall source has raised fears that it might take thrice as long.
They told the newspaper that the situation was “much worse than we thought”, adding: “It’s going to take a lot longer to clear than we anticipated. It certainly won’t be cleared in a year.”
During General Election campaigning, Sir Keir Starmer had said: “If we were to carry on with this Government, we would have the best part of 100,000 asylum seekers in this country, none of whom are being processed.”
The backlog currently stands at some 87,217 claims awaiting initial decisions within 12 to 18 months.
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Alongside that five-figure sum sit an additional 137,525 migrants awaiting the outcome of appeals or waiting to be removed from Britain.
The backlog was worsened by a slide in productivity immediately after Rishi Sunak called the General Election.
The number of decisions made by case workers at the Home Office plummeted from 14,148 per month in April, to just 2,990 in June – despite the number of staff remaining the same.
Each of the department’s 2,500 case workers was getting through just two asylum cases or substantive interviews per month on average in June, down from seven in April.
However, Home Office sources have insisted that this has been reversed, claiming that productivity has improved substantially with about 11,000 claims being processed in the last month.
A Labour source was bullish on the turnaround, telling The Times: “We have inherited a completely failed immigration system from the Tories, including them spending over £700million on Rwanda and gimmicks that didn’t work.
“We’re working on clearing down the backlog they left behind… They clearly did nothing at all in the months before the election.
“The numbers speak for themselves.”