This week in the House of Commons chamber, Windsor MP Jack Rankin questioned the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper after she delivered a ministerial statement on net migration and border security.
It came two weeks after Border Security Minister Angela Eagle flatly refused to answer Jack’s question when pressed for details on the length of time up to 85 “single adult male” migrants could be housed at The Manor Hotel in Datchet, following twenty-four hours’ notice from the Home Office.
Today, Prime Minister Keir Starmer set out his six milestones which failed to include bringing down migration, or closing hotels the government is using as part of the asylum and immigration system.
In his question to the Home Secretary, Jack said:
“Villages such as Datchet in my constituency are bearing the brunt of the fact that 6,000 more illegal economic migrants are staying in asylum hotels since this Government came into office.
These single adult males represent something like 2% of the village’s population, so what assessment has the Home Secretary made of the extra pressures on vital local services, particularly GPs and dentists?
What assurances can she give my constituents that they will not miss out on vital appointments as a result of the sudden demographic change?”
The Home Secretary replied:
“We think that using asylum hotels is the wrong way to respond to the system that we have, which is why the increase in the backlog as a result of the previous Conservative Government’s collapse in decision making has been so damaging.
That is why we now have additional caseworkers in place and asylum decisions back at the levels that they were previously, so that we can clear the backlog and make sure that we do not need to use asylum hotels.
The previous Government showing 400 asylum hotels and quadrupled the cost of the asylum accommodation system. That has a shocking impact on the taxpayer, and we are already saving money by bringing the costs down.”
The Home Secretary did not comment on the impact of the migrants on local health services, replying in the context of the Labour government increasing the number of hotels used and reopening The Manor Hotel in Datchet, which was closed to migrants by the previous Conservative government earlier this year.
Jack met with Home Office officials later in the week where it was confirmed that the migrants housed in Datchet were accessing local NHS services. They reasserted that the accommodation was being used “temporarily”, yet there remains no concrete timeframe.
Jack has been invited to visit the hotel in due course, and will report back to residents following this with further details.
