Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation

Richard Foord Excerpts

Monday 20th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Dr Murrison.

I can entirely understand where the petitioners are coming from. After all, hotels are holiday accommodation, and for most people, the idea of spending a few days a year in a hotel is desirable—if probably unaffordable as things are at the moment—so I can completely understand people’s anger and outrage at the taxpayer paying for others to stay in hotels. However, I want to point out that the issues of asylum seeking have been conflated with other migration—migration supported by visas. I also want to talk about how alternatives to hotel accommodation might be found.

A September 2025 Reuters report concluded that the UK media frames immigration overwhelmingly through the lens of illegality and crisis, giving disproportionate attention to small-boat crossings relative to their scale. Legal migration is routinely lumped into that same narrative, and the distinction is blurred. We can see that very well from the numbers. In the year ending March 2025, the UK issued 875,000 visas for work, study and family purposes—legal migration. Subtract from that number those leaving, and net migration is 431,000, which is a large figure. In the same period, there were around 44,000 irregular arrivals, largely on small boats. Arrivals that were not supported by a visa therefore made up about 5% of all new arrivals and 10% of net migration.

On migration supported by visas, 260,000 people who were born outside the UK work as doctors, nurses and care workers in our health and social care system. Without legal migration supported by visas, our hospitals, care homes and even some farms would simply grind to a halt.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point; we desperately need people to come and work in our national health service and care sector. Does he agree that the case for legally working migrants and refugees who genuinely need asylum, perhaps from Syria or Afghanistan, and the case for our communities, who want stability, have been undermined by the staggering incompetence of the asylum system? Waiting times for decisions have gone up to more than a year, or more like a year and a half in nearly two thirds of all cases. That incompetence is stirring division and disbelief, and it needs to be addressed urgently.

[Richard Foord]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. The Government have to speed up decisions, cut backlogs and return those asylum seekers who are unsuccessful in their applications and have no right to stay, and they must that so swiftly.

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making a really powerful speech. The Conservatives and the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) created this crisis in small boat crossings. Before the botched Brexit deal, we had, in effect, a returns agreement with every other EU nation under the Dublin system, as our hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (John Milne) said. Now this Government, like the last, are struggling to manage a rise in small boat crossings. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government must urgently negotiate more returns agreements with other EU countries?

[Richard Foord]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for talking about Europe, because our European neighbours are contending with exactly the same problems as us in this respect. The longer asylum seekers are drawn to the UK, the longer they are drawn into the European Union, so it is in our common interest to address this issue. I will talk a bit more about the EU and its member states later in my speech.

Pundits are blurring the two issues, and while people say that immigration is wrecking the economy, the truth is quite the reverse. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, higher legal net migration is expected to raise our total GDP by around 1.5% by 2028-29, while GDP per capita is likely to be raised by 0.8%.

Migrants arriving with visas tend to arrive in their prime working years, paying more in taxes than they take out in services. According to the Migration Advisory Committee, in 2022-23, the average skilled migrant made a net contribution of around £16,300 to the UK public finances in their first year in the UK. Legal migration is a cornerstone of our economy, and because of our ageing population, it will continue to be so for years to come.

I will now address migration through irregular routes, which is the focus of this debate, and in particular the use of immigration hotels. In May 2025, the Government noted that they would spend £2.2 billion this financial year on migrant hotels. That is an eye-watering sum, but it is part of the £1.28 trillion—or more than £1,200 billion—that the Government spend each year, so we are talking about less than 0.2% of public spending. None the less, £2.2 billion is an enormous sum of money.

The UK counts these domestic refugee costs as official development assistance, and the House of Commons Library reported that in 2024, one fifth of all foreign aid was spent domestically on hotels. That makes me really angry. I am angrier, perhaps, than any of the petitioners on this point, because when we spend that money here in the UK, we do not use it to its full effect or achieve its full purchasing power.

Let us think about what official development assistance has achieved for us in recent years. Between 2013 and 2019, the UK committed £400 million to the eradication of polio and helped to vaccinate millions of children, leading to Africa being declared polio-free in 2020. These sorts of things are partly benevolent, but they are also in Britain’s interests. During the 2014 to 2016 Ebola outbreak, the UK provided £427 million in aid to Sierra Leone to address it. Had it arrived on these shores, we would certainly have had to spend so much more on addressing this absolutely appalling disease.

[Sir Ashley Fox]

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that it is Liberal Democrat policy that asylum costs should not come out of the foreign aid budget?

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[Richard Foord]

I am of the view that asylum hotels should not be paid for by the foreign aid budget. This country has an international development budget that has fallen from 0.7%—when my party was in government with the hon. Gentleman’s—to 0.3% today, which is honestly a great pity. That is not helping us to prevent conflict and deal with the problem at source.

From 2014 to 2015, we had the Syrian vulnerable persons resettlement scheme, which was set up by the coalition Government. It brought 20,000 of the most vulnerable refugees, including survivors of torture and violence, to the UK, but in a way that was safe and legal. Those people were assessed for their suitability by the UN high commissioner for refugees. We are talking about women and children at risk, as well as those in severe medical need and survivors of torture. Those were people who did not try to get to the UK through Europe, because they were assessed for their vulnerability in the region, in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

Let us remember the vulnerable three-year-old refugee, Alan Kurdi, whose fragile body washed up on a beach, with waves lapping into his dead face. A lot of people had a lot of sympathy at that time for taking asylum seekers who were in genuine need through a safe and legal route. Today, we need to think about deterring illegal ways of approaching the UK, and Britain should work with neighbouring countries and look to collaborate on proposing a third country where failed asylum seekers may be processed overseas, such as one in south-east Europe. That is something that EU member states are looking into at the moment. Unsuccessful applicants could appeal from third countries, rather than from within the UK or EU, as is happening right now. We should work with our European partners so that we can find a continent-wide solution, because the UK will not be able to solve this alone.

While such schemes may act as an incentive for people to apply from their own region, we also need to think about a deterrent. I was wholly opposed to the Rwanda scheme, which was brought forward by the Conservative Government at a cost of £700 million and then scrapped. More could be made of the fact that people are coming to a pretty appalling end in the English channel. The Migration Observatory reports that 73 people were confirmed to have drowned in the English channel while attempting small boat crossings in 2024. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution recalled rescuing children with chemical burns from leaked petrol, and others so frozen that they could not walk because they had spent 30 hours at sea. A Home Affairs Committee report found in 2022 that smugglers deceive migrants and downplay the risks and danger. More could be made of that.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (in the Chair)]

Order. I have not imposed a time limit, but the hon. Gentleman has been going on considerably longer than other colleagues. He may wish to reflect on that.

[Richard Foord]

Thank you, Dr Murrison; I will conclude.

Legal migration builds our economy, and it staffs our hospitals and care homes. Crossings by people who do not have a visa are damaging trust in Government. A builder put it quite simply to me in recent months when he said that the last Government promised to stop the boats, but the opposite happened, and he had lost faith in Government as a result. We need to stop these dangerous crossings and restore order to a broken asylum system. That means investing in safe and legal routes and working with our European allies and partners on shared solutions, communicating the truth about the dangers of crossing the channel to those who would try to do so. If we do that, we can protect our borders and values, while upholding the compassionate and common-sense country that we are.

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[Richard Foord]

I think the Minister is either misunderstanding or mischaracterising my contribution, but will he please comment on the potential return hubs for failed asylum seekers?

[Alex Norris]

I would certainly never seek to mischaracterise the hon. Gentleman. I cannot commit to never misunderstanding him, but I certainly would never mischaracterise him. I understood that he had asked why there is so much focus on this cohort within the wider migration figures. If I am wrong, I apologise without reservation. On return hubs, he will have seen what the Prime Minister said, and that is the Government’s position on that matter.

Any system that involves multiple tens of thousands of people entering the channel and making an incredibly dangerous journey, any system in which tens of thousands of people are living in hotels, any system that leads net migration in this country to reach 900,000, any system in which people must wait and wait for a letter about their future—I have had conversations with people in that situation, and they are often people who have left the most desperate situations—is a broken system. Of course the Government of the day, whether in the borders Bill or the immigration White Paper, will seek to tackle those things. We must not defend a status quo that works for neither the British people nor the individuals who are reliant on it for sanctuary and safety.

This has been a robust and very important debate. I hope that those who signed the petitions in considerable numbers will have had the chance to watch the debate and seen that Parliament has taken their views seriously and had a thoughtful and constructive debate on them. This is a hugely important issue for the Government of the day. We have been working in overdrive since the general election to fix the chronic problems that we inherited. We will keep doing so, and along the way we will end the use of hotels once and for all.