Tony Vaughan

I do not know what is going to happen; I cannot predict the future. The point I am making is that the measures that are being taken are moving us faster in the right direction than even we had intended at the outset of the Parliament. Labour also promised to clear the asylum backlog created by the last Government’s effective pausing of asylum decision making. This Labour Government have recruited more decision makers and sped up processing. In the first six months of this year, the Government processed about 60,000 asylum claims—around 70% more than the same period last year. On removing those with no right to stay, enforced returns have been increased by 25%, compared with the Conservatives’ final years in office. There is of course still much more to do to win back public confidence in our asylum system. Mr Barnes supports the use of larger sites such as Napier barracks in Folkestone and former RAF Wethersfield. I visited Napier recently; while it has historically had poor conditions, they have improved in recent years. Napier costs the state around £106 per night, which is less than hotels, albeit not drastically so, and we should not forget that the set-up costs for large sites are huge—in the case of Wethersfield they were around £49 million. The real alternative to hotels could be social housing. We must push for a better way than paying billions of pounds to private companies that make millions in profit, when that money could be spent on buying up assets and replenishing our national housing stock for the future. The BBC reports that the Home Office is looking into pilot schemes on that front. Any option that redirects even some of this accommodation expenditure into publicly owned housing assets, while supporting the asylum accommodation even temporarily, deserves serious attention.