More asylum hotels have opened up since July, Dame Angela Eagle says as she pledges to end use
The border security minister has said more hotels for asylum seekers have opened since Labour came into government, but she pledged to end their use.
Dame Angela Eagle told parliament there are currently 220 hotels in use for asylum seekers, with seven having shut since July – but 14 more have opened.
Labour promised to close asylum hotels in their manifesto, but she said they did not commit “to close all asylum hotels within four months”.
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The border security and asylum minister said the reason was the situation left by the Conservatives, with 116,000 asylum seekers “stuck in a backlog” of more than two years when Labour came into power in July.
She said the system “ground to a standstill” because the Tories were busy pursuing the Rwanda policy “which was doomed to failure”.
“We inherited an unholy mess from the party opposite,” she said.
The Rwanda policy aimed to send those entering the UK illegally from a safe country to Rwanda to have their asylum claims processed there, rather than in the UK.
However, just one person was sent to the African country, voluntarily, and Labour scrapped the policy as soon as they won the election.
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‘We don’t know anything about them’
Dame Angela said while they deal with the backlog the government still has a legal obligation to provide accommodation for asylum seekers.
“We remain absolutely committed to ending the use of hotels for asylum seekers,” she said.
The minister added asylum decisions have gone from less than 1,000 a month to 10,000, which Labour MP Jo White said was 1,000 more than last week.
Dame Angela added the government has returned nearly 10,000 people to the countries they came from since July, which she said “is nearly a 20% increase”.
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Conservative former minister Gavin Williamson accused Labour of not having an alternative deterrent to the Rwanda policy. Pic: PA
The minister was answering an urgent question from Gavin Williamson, a Tory minister for much of the last administration, who has written to the home secretary about his “utter shock and dismay” a hotel in his constituency is once again being used to house asylum seekers.
He accused the Labour government of lacking a “credible deterrent” after scrapping the Rwanda scheme.
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Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
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The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
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Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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