Braverman hints at plans to house asylum seekers in disused cruise ships as £3.5bn to be spent on migrant crisis
22 December 2022, 04:27 | Updated: 22 December 2022, 04:30
Disused cruise ships could be used to house asylum seekers under plans being considered by the Home Office.
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Home Secretary Suella Braverman confirmed her department is looking at the idea and suggested officials were in talks with ship companies.
She told peers in the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday "everything is still on the table and nothing is excluded".
The Home Secretary also confirmed that the Government will spend £3.5 billion on the asylum system in a year.
Of the total bill, £2.3 billion will go towards paying for hotels, she said.
Ms Braverman discussed the "incredibly difficult" challenge of hitting the ambition of getting 100,000 asylum seekers in local authority accommodation - as opposed to resorting to hotels - with that figure currently at 57,000.
Addressing hotel costs, she said: "We are accommodating 117,000 people overall who are in our asylum process.
"So there is a huge amount of money that is going into accommodating a very large number of asylum seekers."
"You then asked about cruise ships, we want to end the use of hotels as quickly as possible because it's an unacceptable cost to the taxpayer, it's over £5 million a day on hotel use alone," she said.
"We will bring forward a range of alternative sites, they will include disused holiday parks, former student halls - I should say we are looking at those sites - I wouldn't say anything is confirmed yet.
"But we need to bring forward thousands of places, and when you talk about vessels all I can say is - because we are in discussion with a wide variety of providers - that everything is still on the table and nothing is excluded."
It comes after it was revealed that hundreds of asylum seekers were understood to have been illegally detained at immigration removal centres.
Overcrowding at the Manston migrant processing centre in Kent saw between 450 and 500 people moved to and held in detention centres in November - something described at the time as "no longer legal", according to Home Office emails obtained by the BBC.
The emails show Home Office permanent secretaries were aware of overcrowding concerns at the time.
"Their detention is no longer legal as they can only be detained whilst their identity is locked down and then only for a maximum of 5 days," one email said.
"Most have been there for a number of weeks, longer than some Manston cases. We need to move them to hotels ASAP..."
The Home Office said unprecedented numbers of Channel crossings had put "huge pressure" on the asylum system, adding that it had a legal duty to house asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute.
