Bradley Thomas

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Jack Rankin) on securing this important debate. As a Conservative, I firmly believe that people who enter our country illegally have no right to stay here. We need to have strong borders, we need an effective deterrent to stop people making what is often a perilous journey, and the Government must take all possible steps to drive down numbers of illegal crossings. I am not going to repeat all the numbers that have been cited, because I think people, in this House or in the country at large, are aware of the scale of the issue. We have seen numbers go up as a direct result of the Government’s decision to scrap the Rwanda deterrent and repeal the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which prevented those who came to the UK from claiming asylum. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor that more than 60% of them are granted asylum and leave to remain. That increase in the numbers means that Labour has increased the number of hotels open since the election—I think the number cited was 14. Communities across the country, including mine in Bromsgrove, have a legitimate fear that hotels are going to emerge in their area, where people have not previously seen the benefits of such accommodation being used to house illegal migrants pending the processing of their applications. The reopening of such hotels is a political choice by the Government—they chose to do that; they did not have to. They could have chosen to use alternative accommodation sites, including military barracks or the Bibby Stockholm barge. They also chose to repeal tough legislation to protect our borders. Bromsgrove has hosted asylum hotels in the recent past. Fortunately, it does not at the moment, but there have been three instances in recent years.