Asylum seekers should be forced to pay back the cost of housing them in hotels with ‘student loan-style scheme’, Tories say

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14488101/asylum-seekers-pay-cost-housing-tories.html

by 1-randomonium

45 comments

  1. >The loans would not be interest-free, with the Government deciding which rate of inflation to peg them to, such as RPI or CPI.

    >If their asylum claim is successful they would begin paying back the money spent on their accommodation once finding a job.

    That is… creative, I suppose.

    The article goes on to mention that only a little over half of asylum claims get accepted. Also, I suspect that the job market isn’t going to be kind even to those who do get accepted, given that whatever qualifications and work experience they may have may not be accepted by British employers.

    The performative cruelty is probably the point, but this is an unworkable proposal and the government would never be able to recover the money from the majority of debtors.

  2. What I’m taking from this is that the Tories think student loan type arrangements are a punishment. Cool stuff.

  3. I wonder how many would prefer to work for their keep rather than being kept, told to stay indoors then complained about.

  4. Local council elections are just round the corner. I expect a plethora of ridiculous, headline grabbing proposals like this.
    Remember the Rwanda scheme started life as a halfwit publicity stunt for local council elections. 

  5. Wait, the Tories who allowed such a huge backlog of asylum claims to build up that they had to start housing asylum seekers in hotels?

  6. Asylum seekers should not be housed in hotels in the first place when private companies use this as a blatant opportunity to fleece the state and profiteer. So many crumbling hotels which would struggle to charge visitors £20 a night instead charge the state *thousands of pounds* a month per asylum seeker they house.

    Many of these properties are operated by individuals with close connections to their local councils or national political parties. This is brazen corruption practised by national/local politicians, the same sort of corruption we see around the provisions of social housing, homeless shelters, and plenty of other properties rented by the state. Yet right-wing press and politicians instead blame this farce on asylum seekers themselves. It’s the perfect racket.

    The government could incredibly easily implement compulsory purchase orders for these buildings (because, due to neglect, they’re all falling apart anyway) and run them for a fraction of the cost. But that would remove the opportunity for widespread corruption and political patronage to go on, so they’ll just continue allowing asylum seekers to take the blame for this farce.

  7. Oh I’m sure they’ll be a rush to keep up with those repayments.

    Why do they even bother to come up with this tosh

  8. If they cant work/dont find work/refuse to work, then they fall in to the benefits system. Where we give them money for fuck all.

    Like what are we trying to do with the asylum system, bring people from poverty to bring them into another system where they’re in poverty and as such can never integrate with society?

    How long are we gonna keep fucking asylum cases up? until we finally realize we need to shut it down, re-think it for a year or two and then open it up again?

  9. When they reach a certain pay grade they start paying it back? So they just don’t work or do cash in hand jobs..

    Stop with this waste of time effort.

  10. Cool – so if successful, instead of pursuing legal work and paying tax, they would be encouraged to ACTUALLY “scrounge” like they always get accused of

    Because why the fuck bother working a low paid job just to get taxed into oblivion and be made to pay on top in a spiral of ever growing taxation?

    Most would likely end up being caught in modern day slavery on the promise of cash in hand

    Sounds precisely like a Tory policy to me

  11. If only they had enough time in power to implement something like this.

  12. As a very right wing, anti-immigration type of guy, this is extremely stupid. It’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from the Tories – silly, convoluted non-solutions so that they can posture as being anti- mass immigration when in fact they are the party that has been by far the most pro-immigration in British history and with the exception of Germany and perhaps Sweden the most pro-immigration in European history.

    There is an extremely obvious and effective solution to mass immigration, which is to enforce a normative interpretation of the law. The absurd situation we have had over the past few years where we have had, for example, Albanians, who have no conceivable reason to need asylum anywhere, and Pakistanis, who are from a country on the other side of the world that is not at war with anybody but itself (and arguably the Afghan Taliban their government once supported), claiming asylum in a country which has no connection with them whatsoever is a patent abuse of the Refugee Conventions and the spirit in which they were written. The same goes for student visas.

  13. Maybe there should be a student loan style scheme for the tories to pay back all the money they squandered when they were in power, PPE for example. I am sure there would be plenty of support for it.

  14. This won’t work, they will still come and will just not pay off their loans, like how most students will never pay off their debt either.

    We should **only** be taking in vetted refugees direct from refugee camps in active warzones, that way we know exactly who we’re giving asylum to, and that they are genuine refugees. It also means we can prioritise those who are most vulnerable e.g. women and children.

    We need an introduction of zero tolerance for all illegal channel migrants, until we have this approach the economic migrants will continue to arrive in large numbers, because there are huge incentives to reach the UK.

  15. Tories were the ones insistent on not processing them and therefore keeping them in these (tory donor owned) hotels.

  16. Nope just deport every single one and their families please.

  17. Oh yes. I can imagine the debts will be repaid no bother

  18. Capitalising on people’s misery is back to BAU for the conservatives.

  19. Just stop them coming in just!

    Close the border, send them back and if they do get through put them tented camps on the Isle of white or Guernsey…

  20. How is that gonna work, a significant portion of them don’t ever get well paid jobs and have few or no skills. Those that do have skills and education are generally the ones with the most legit claim- they wouldn’t have left their homes otherwise. The issue is the economic migrants playing the system which is frankly a joke and most of them lack the skills, the knowledge, the training or how to speak English properly.

  21. Yes, once they’re granted asylum after being housed for an extended length of time of our own creation, they should pay up. They are second class citizens after all

  22. A complete waste of civil service time unlikely to yield a net benefit, an apt summary of the last 14 years.

    How many Vietnamese or Albanian workers being targeted by traffickers is this going to deter? Absolutely none. “You currently live on £5k a year, but if you come here and earn £26k, we will take a small % on anything above it!”

    How does it help anyone who’s genuinely got a reasonable claim to set up a life here? Also none.

  23. Getting money from people who have literally nothing is just nonsensical.

  24. 14 years in power and this is only now the “solution” now. It’s bollocks that won’t work but it will play well to a certain voter.

  25. They should be housed in tents in fenced off locations patrolled by the army and the UNHCR can feed and care for them until they are deported, which they will be because entering the country without a valid visa is a criminal offence.

  26. If they have the money to get hear they can pay a bit extra the stay

  27. Sounds good. Why didn’t they implement this when they were in power?

  28. Remember when we built loads of temporary hospitals for Covid? I’m sure it’s not this simple but perhaps we could create some temporary basic accommodation like that on unused land using our military resources and host people there while their claims are being processed. I don’t get why extortionate hotel rooms in city centres are being used. I would much rather those hotel rooms go to the massive waiting lists of British citizens who are currently homeless or on the verge of it. In normal circumstances, sure, we would want to give people proper accommodation but if the numbers arriving on boats etc are true this is a bizarre situation on a scale we are not equipped for and so special measures seem acceptable.

    Also I genuinely believe there needs to be a serious investigation into the appeal/role of Uber, Deliveroo and Just East driving this because it seems to me that the volume of people arriving and the rise of those services (with their lack of vigilance when checking eligibility) booming in tandem is no coincidence.

  29. What about their legal fees? It’s ordinary struggling people paying for those too and for what?

  30. it’s basically a cat d prison with hostel-style bunk beds. do people genuinely think they’re getting a hotel room? this entire hotel scheme was artificially manufactured by the tories anyway so it’s kind of irrelevant since labour will have closed them all by the time they’re next up for election

  31. Oh yeah, because asylum seekers famously have a lot of money

  32. They should be housed in barracks and all ECHR routes to complain should be cut off.

  33. Agree, good idea, could also peg it to their descendants if they don’t manage to pay it off in the first lifetime

  34. Have these people got no clue how much it costs to get a person to an adult working age? It’s somewhere along the lines of £200k. If you help someone get on their feet and then they go out and work, it’s a far quicker and cheaper return on investment.

    The issue of immigration is not a financial one, it’s ideological. This is just more bullshit because people have no idea how an economy works.

  35. No, they should be processed quickly and, if they are declined, should be removed from the country. So there wouldn’t be any cost to pay back because they wouldn’t be here for long enough for it to matter.

  36. At first glance I thought there may be some merit to this proposal, why not ask to recoup some of the costs incurred if those who’ve had asylum granted and can afford to pay it? Unfortunately I’m fairly sure the cost to implement & maintain this proposal would far out weigh any money recovered, so it immediately becomes pointless as a proposal itself. I’m (fairly?) sure the Conservatives are clever enough to realise that? So what is the point…

    Let’s look at another part of the population with “free board” shall we? Why aren’t the conservatives proposing we do this with prisoners? On one hand we have murderers, paedophiles and everything else being housed free at his majesty’s pleasure. They’ve put themselves there through their own actions, why aren’t we asking them to pay?

    Compare that to someone whose only crime was simply being born in a war zone and fled to the UK, it would make far more sense to target prisoners with this proposal right? And let’s not confuse economic immigrants or foreign criminals with legitimate asylum seekers, they Shouldn’t (big S) be accepted through the asylum system anyway, so wouldn’t even be in the country to make repayments.

    The only logical explanation for this policy that I can see is yet more culture wars and vote hunting from the part of the electorate who don’t see past the headlines.

  37. Actually some refugees are quite wealthy. Recently I saw a message from a Ukrainian asylum seeker who had £30k cash and was asking for advice on how to buy a shared ownership property.

  38. Thanks for the input after 15 years of racking up hotel debts on us, I hope you enjoy reform taking over your party.

  39. Find the very poorest people you can find and “tax” them….

  40. Daft because it’ll only affect those who are genuine and will be completely avoided by anyone who comes here just to exploit the asylum process.

  41. Student style loans aye? So they don’t pay it if they never earn enough? So essentially change nothing but pay lots to set up a system so it looks like we’re changing something?

  42. Laughs in *Publicly Funded Further Education/Higher Education*

  43. Student loan is a tax on poor people trying to better themselves.

    How’s this Tory masterstroke going to work. Tories didn’t let them work while claiming asylum, so they earn no money. Then they deport them (where is yet to be disclosed) and charge them for the hotels.

    Yeah of course this is enforceable. Are they sending bailiffs over to Rwanda or christ knows where.

    Or are Tories admitting that these people are staying, in which case they could get the money back.

    Tories and Reform the kings of fantasy making reality up as they go.

    More cutting edge journalism from the paper that supported Hitler

  44. Put a massive tax on the remittances they send home. Even the ones who do eventually get jobs just send the money abroad instead of reinvesting in our economy.

Comments are closed.