Home Office plans to significantly reduce the backlog of asylum claims will create a ‘humanitarian crisis’ by increasing homelessness among refugees, Glasgow City Council has warned.
The council believes there is a direct link between the Home Office’s announcement on Tuesday that it will close 50 hotels used for asylum seekers and a move to mass processing asylum claims later this year to clear the backlog of unresolved cases.
Robert Jenrick, the Immigration Minister, told MPs on Tuesday that the Home Office would remove asylum seekers from 50 hotels across the UK by January next year, with further tranches of hotels to be removed from use by asylum seekers in the following months.
While the full list of areas where hotels will be cleared has not been published, all but one of the locations identified during the Commons statement were in Conservative-held constituencies. It had been reported that the Home Office would be targeting marginal Tory seats for the first wave of the programme.
Glasgow City Council has been told that the Home Office will, over the same period, process the cases of 2,500 asylum seekers living in the city, which has the largest refugee population outside London.
Glasgow officials expect this to result in around 1,800 of them being granted refugee status.
Once granted the right to remain, these people will be told to leave their government-funded accommodation, with their housing becoming the responsibility of the council if they cannot find somewhere else to live.
The city estimates that around 1,400 of them will become homeless, 77% of whom will need emergency accommodation. This will dramatically worsen the city’s homelessness crisis at an estimated extra cost of more than £50 million, which the Home Office has so far refused to fund.
Susan Aitken, the leader of Glasgow City Council, said the Home Office had no clear idea where these people would be housed and that ministers had failed to properly plan for the resulting surge in homeless refugees.
“It thinks closing hotels will convince voters it is delivering on its ugly rhetoric about getting tough on asylum – when all it is really doing is moving people around like chess pieces,” she said.
Glasgow officials believe other cities, including Manchester and Liverpool, are likely to face similar challenges.
“Out of sight, out of mind is now the whole of their asylum policy – at the risk of creating a humanitarian crisis in cities across the UK,” said Aitken. “This doesn’t have to happen. We are prepared to work with the Home Office to help them approach cases in Glasgow in a planned and structured way, if they give us the resources.”
In his Commons statement, Jenrick said he would be happy to discuss the issue with Chris Stephens, the SNP’s justice and immigration spokesman, and acknowledged that Glasgow faced “particular challenges” in rehousing refugees.
On Thursday, the council will be asked by Labour deputy leader Soryia Siddique to consider building temporary villages using “modular and prefabricated buildings and other forms of temporary accommodation” for those made homeless.
Announcing the hotel plan, Jenrick told MPs that the first 50 hotels to house asylum seekers ‘will begin in the coming days and will be completed by the end of January, with further tranches to follow shortly’.
In a sometimes highly politicised statement, Jenrick accused Labour MPs of having no plans to deal with asylum seekers crossing the Channel and of wanting open borders.
At one point he told his Labour counterpart Stephen Kinnock: “The new towns he [Keir Starmer] announced at the Labour party conference will be filled with illegal migrants”.
Meanwhile, it is believed that around 5,000 asylum seekers are being forced to share hotel rooms with people they are not related to as part of the Home Office’s little-known ‘maximisation policy’, which aims to squeeze more asylum seekers into smaller hotel rooms.
Emma Birks, campaigns manager at Asylum Matters, which is monitoring the new policy, said: “The government is inflicting a physical and mental health crisis on people seeking asylum in the UK. The approach ministers are taking will see traumatised people crammed into hotels and other forms of temporary accommodation; children and young people sharing rooms with adults they do not know”.
