Max Wilkinson

We share the Minister’s concern about the approach of the official Opposition. Clearly, they left us with this mess and now they feign outrage. It appears that this Government’s proposal, sadly, is to decant asylum seekers from one kind of unsuitable and costly accommodation to another. Instead, they should be tackling the real issue: speeding up asylum decisions so that those with no right to stay are returned and those with a valid claim can work, pay tax and integrate. I will pick up the Minister’s point about the difficulty of sequencing communications. As a Member of Parliament who had an asylum hotel opened in his constituency, I was informed several weeks in advance. I offered a much better alternative form of accommodation somewhere else nearby. As I found out, the Home Office was determined to open a hotel, because that alternative was not taken up. The alternative accommodation would have been more appropriate, and my constituency feels let down. The Government have promised to end the use of hotels by 2029, yet they have put forward no credible plan to achieve that. The Lib Dems have set out a plan for ending hotel use in just six months by declaring a national emergency and setting up Nightingale processing centres to bring down the backlog. Will the Home Secretary match the Lib Dem plan by declaring that national emergency today? Will the Minister confirm whether the plan that he has put forward means speeding up decisions and returning those with no right to stay, or does it simply mean shifting large numbers of asylum seekers from one form of accommodation to another? Will he share what assessment has been made of the relative merits of Army barracks that are in or next to urban areas, as opposed to those in rural areas? Finally, will he concede that cutting overseas development spending will drive more people away from conflict zones to seek safety in Europe and onward unsafely on to boats in the English channel?