Asylum Seekers Accommodation and Safeguarding

Jack Brereton Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

It is not the convention for the Government to publish legal advice, but I have made it clear today and in other public appearances that it is absolutely essential that Manston, like other sites, operates within the law. In this case, that means ensuring that individuals are treated decently and humanely there and stay for 24 hours unless there are exceptional reasons to the contrary. In this case, it was right that the Home Secretary balanced that among wider concerns to leave individuals destitute. It was also the case that this is a site that took at short notice large numbers of migrants who crossed the channel illegally, which put huge pressure on our facilities there. We also had to deal with the aftermath of what is now being treated as a terrorist incident, which led to 700 individuals being evacuated to the site. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that we have made huge progress over the course of the week. We are now at the right level of capacity and we are working to ensure that individuals do not stay there any longer than 24 hours.

[Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)]

It is extremely disappointing that we continue to see the Home Office pursuing hotels in Stoke-on-Trent, particularly given the concerns that we have raised about the risks associated with doing so and the fact that more than 800 refugees have already been resettled in Stoke-on-Trent. Will my right hon. Friend look at measures to ensure that other parts of the country that have done little to nothing to help to provide accommodation are told to do so?

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the burden of migrants in hotel and other accommodation has historically been borne by our cities, and that Stoke has disproportionately borne a significant quantity of migrants. We have now tried to disperse individuals more broadly, and some of the issues that we have heard about today are a result of migrants being placed in hotels in locations where that would not previously have happened, so it is a new issue for those local authorities to cope with. We need to ensure that we provide the right support to those local authorities. We now have a dispersal strategy to encourage individuals to be placed more fairly across the country, which we hope should in time provide a fairer settlement for places such as Stoke-on-Trent.