For years, cutting immigration and
stopping small boat crossings has been a
promise every government has made, and
none have managed to properly keep. The
inability to do so, and the anger that
has erupted is fast becoming a defining
feature of our politics. The latest
figures show small boat crossings
rising, but the asylum backlog going
down. Sam Gitsky fled Pakistan fearing
persecution, but waited 12 years for an
answer to his claim. It's very much
living in a state where you are either
in fear or you waiting for the home
officers
giving you status. Most asylum seekers
don't actually have the right to work,
which most people don't know about, but
that limits your means to actually
engaging with society.
>> New figures show 91,000 asylum seekers
are waiting for an initial decision,
which is down 18% from last year. Small
boat crossings are up. There was 43,000
arrivals this year. That was from 31,500
the year before. There's currently
around 32,000 asylum seekers in hotel
accommodation. That's more than in 2024
when there was 29,500,
but significantly less than the 50,500
the year before that. The Bell Hotel in
Eping has become the flash point for
protests in recent weeks, and now the
local council has won an interim
injunction to block asylum seekers from
being housed there. Councils across the
country, including some run by Labor,
are currently weighing up whether to try
and follow suit.
>> We're going to get some people to look
at the judgment, which seems to be under
some very uh narrow um lines really that
the judge has made this decision, but if
there's something in that decision that
we can use to bring pressure on the home
office, u then that's something we'd be
willing to investigate.
>> It's not just councils. ITV News has
spoken to Labour MPs who are concerned
about future government policy,
including one who has written to the
Home Office asking where asylum seekers
will go if hotels are closed.
>> I absolutely understand the concerns
that local communities have and they
they want sort of clarity about the
situation. Unfortunately, we have
inherited a significant challenge, a
real mess in the immigration system. We
are working hard to sort it out, but it
is going to take some time.
The government insists it will end the
use of asylum hotels by 2029, saying the
issue will take time to fix, but the
pressure to act sooner is mounting.
Well, to try and gauge the scale of this
issue, ITV News has contacted all 317
councils in England. 30 told us they are
considering their options, including
legal action, after the court judgment
closing the hotel in Eping on Tuesday.
Nine of them are labor controlled, nine
others are reformled councils and four
are conservative. Among them is
Staffordshire where the reformrun
council said that the ongoing use of
hotels is unacceptable and poses a
serious risk to local communities and
also Tamworth Council where the Labour
leader said the prolonged use of hotel
accommodation may not represent the best
approach for the community or for the
asylum seekers. Well, Shehab is here
now, as you can see, to discuss all of
this. And Shehab, look, we've had days
and days of kind of a political blame
game around all of this. I suppose now
we've got some cold hard statistics. Are
we able to sort of assess how well the
government is or isn't doing on this?
>> Yeah, the figures aren't particularly
great. The, as you saw in that report,
there's plenty of things they won't be
happy about, but there are some glimmers
of hope there. In particular, the fact
that the asylum backlog has gone down by
roughly about 20% or so. Speaking to
those in the home office, they say part
of the reason for that is because when
Labour came into government, one of the
first things they did was to get rid of
the Rwanda policy that the previous Tory
government had, which coincidentally is
why the Tories think that small boat
crossings haven't come down because the
deterrent has gone. But they said what
they did is they moved resources away
from that to dealing with the backlog.
That's why it's come down. And speaking
to officials, they say that they think
and they're pretty confident actually
that that backlog will continue to fall.
But the big challenge amongst other
things, not only small boat crossings,
but it's those asylum seekers in hotels.
The target remains to no longer have
hotel use by the end of this parliament.
So 2029,
that's going to be a challenge in
itself. If you've got councils
potentially launching legal action, it
makes that even more difficult. Speaking
to those in the home office, they say
they're looking at a range of different
forms of accommodation, empty tower
blocks, student accommodation. They're
not ruling anything out. They're
assessing all the options, but that
doesn't solve the problem immediately.
They keep saying there's no silver
bullet to this, and it's going to take a
while before they can get a grip on it.