Mark White reveals Labour’s broken promise on migration that’s coming back to bite – analysis

Sir Keir Starmer and his now Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper spoke regularly of the wasteful use of hotels, which has cost the nation as much as £8 million a day.

But the revelation the new Government is actively negotiating with hotel chains once again, to secure more bed space for asylum seekers, is proof, if any were needed, that there are no quick fixes to the small boats crisis.

A summer surge in arrivals across the Channel has passed a grim milestone, with more migrants having made the illegal journey in the three-and-a-half months since Labour came to power than under the previous six months under the Conservatives.

Robust rhetoric around ending asylum hotels is one thing, but when more than 13,700 migrants cross from France in just a few short months, they have to be housed somewhere.

Yvette Cooper has bet the house on a much faster asylum processing system to reduce the backlog, and help bring down the reliance on hotel accommodation.

But, human rights groups and the ‘lefty lawyers’, as they were dubbed under the Tories, have become experts at ensuring the majority of asylum seekers eventually get leave to remain in the UK, even if that means a lengthy appeals process.

The other main plank of the current Government’s small boats strategy is “smashing the gangs”, beefing up law enforcement efforts at home and abroad, to go after the people smugglers.

But any efforts to dismantle highly organised criminal networks won’t be achieved quickly, if ever.

And so for now, Labour – just like the Conservatives before them – are faced with working out how best to deal with the continuing flow of small boat migrants into the UK.

The previous government made some inroads into reducing their reliance on hotel accommodation.

From a high of 56,000 hotel beds in 2023, the Conservatives freed up 20,000 beds and returned around 150 hotels back to community use.

But Labour is learning the hard way, that headline grabbing promises to end hotel use, and to scrap the migrant accommodation centres at former RAF bases and on the Bibby Stockholm barge, can come back to bite them.

The plan to send small boat asylum seekers to Rwanda was a costly and controversial policy of the previous government, but one they were convinced would prove to be a major deterrent to those planning to cross the Channel illegally.

We’ll never know how effective that plan could have been, as it was scrapped by Sir Keir Starmer on his first day in office.

Ironically, European Union countries are now giving serious consideration to adopting the model of processing asylum claims in countries outside the EU.

It follows the arrival of the first group of asylum seekers in Albania, under a £560 million five year deal between the government in Tirana and the government of Giorgia Meloni in Italy.

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On a visit to Rome last month, Sir Keir is reported to have expressed interest in the Italian model.

Even if the UK doesn’t adopt such an approach, this country could still end up benefitting from the scheme, if it’s adopted more widely across Europe.

Any moves further upstream that prove to be a deterrence to the huge numbers of migrants arriving illegally in Europe will inevitably impact the numbers heading up to northern Europe.

She might have been demonised by many in the EU for her uncompromising stance on illegal migration, but Georgia Meloni might just end up gifting the Labour Government a spinoff benefit of fewer migrants heading north through Europe and attempting to cross to the UK.