Illegal immigrants are not entitled to luxury hotels

All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we must confront it as it is.

As one of the safest and richest countries in the world, the UK has an obligation to provide sanctuary to some of the many who flee war and persecution.

We have a proud history of fulfilling this duty, with the late 20th century punctuated by the arrivals of Hungarians fleeing Soviet oppression during the winter of 1956, Czechs escaping the Soviet invasion of 1968, and the expelled Ugandan Asians seeking refuge in the 1970s.

My own children are the great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Time and again, the UK has opened its doors to those facing their darkest hour.

In response to the latest geopolitical upheaval the British public have, without hesitation, opened their arms to those in desperately bleak situations.

I have seen this up close-first when I coordinated the Afghan resettlement scheme in my role as communities secretary, and more recently as my inbox flooded with messages from my neighbours offering to support the Ukrainian family I, like thousands of others, hosted earlier this year through the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

However, this generosity is being abused by migrants skipping the queue in small boat crossings and seriously overwhelming our immigration system.

Last week, I travelled to Dover to hear the damage that hundreds of daily arrivals are having on communities on the south coast.

Their stories of strained public services and community tensions will be familiar to many. I heard how gangs will often look to exploit migrants , first of all by facilitating highly dangerous Channel crossings, but then also pushing them towards the criminal or grey economy – a concern not just based on anecdote, but in the intelligence amassed by the National Crime Agency.

For too long, these communities’ cries for help have been left unanswered by politicians and dismissed outright by self-righteous liberals blissfully unaffected by it all. Try speaking to the resident in Dover who was threatened in their own home, and tell them their concerns are unfounded.

Successive years of record numbers crossing the Channel have pushed our immigration system to breaking point and beyond. Last week, the Manston processing centre, created temporarily to support those we had saved at sea, surged in numbers-and calm weather in the days and weeks ahead will likely trigger yet more crossings.

Almost every one of these individuals has had their life saved by British authorities like Border Force and the Royal Navy or groups like the RNLI, and all have been clothed, fed and given medical treatment.

Staff continue to work flat out to keep people moving through the system as swiftly as possible, and to make sure the appropriate preparations remain in place to manage periods where we anticipate extra pressures.

Accommodating these record numbers is extremely challenging, and a chronic shortage of acceptable accommodation has forced the government to procure expensive, and frequently unsuitable, hotels at an unacceptable cost to the taxpayer.

Human decency has to be accompanied by hard-headed common sense: illegal immigrants are not entitled to luxury hotels. Conditions in the UK are almost always better than in neighbouring countries, which helps explain why the UK is a destination of choice for economic migrants on the continent “asylum shopping”.

“Hotel Britain” must end , and be replaced with simple, functional accommodation that does not create an additional pull factor.

Ultimately, the focus of the debate needs to shift from managing the symptoms of the problems-procuring hotels-to the cure: stopping economic migrants from making the perilous journey at every possible juncture. Robust deterrence towards those attempting to cheat the process, and compassion towards those who need our help the most, must be the criteria against which our immigration system is assessed.

This starts by continuing to invest in our relationship with France -and the Prime Minister has made that a key priority in his first conversations with Emmanuel Macron, the French president.

Our joint work with France currently results in nearly half the boats being intercepted, but we must now harness our collective expertise and ratchet up our ambition.

With greater coordination between our respective security and law enforcement agencies, we can dismantle the evil criminal gangs masterminding these crossings and bring greater order both to our shores and to Northern France.

A significant achievement of Priti Patel, the former home secretary, was the landmark Rwanda partnership.

We will continue to work to deliver it and explore similar agreements with other countries to break the business model of the smuggling gangs and deter those coming to the UK illegally. Those coming from safe countries such as Albania – whose citizens account for 30 per cent of illegal crossings this year-must see that crossing the Channel in small boats is not a path to a life here.

The record number of arrivals, and the prospect of further increases, require us to overhaul the system to ensure our laws are appropriate. Globalisation and elastic legal interpretations have progressively diminished the fundamental ability of the state to assert its own borders.

We need to ensure that our modern slavery laws are fit for purpose and cannot be exploited by illegitimate claimants. The number of people claiming to be a victim of modern slavery is at an all-time high and the UK attracts more than 10 times the number of modern slavery claims compared with France and Germany.

Last-minute modern slavery claims clog the system and of those who apply, 90 per cent are approved. We are committed to protecting victims and bringing more perpetrators to justice, but we must also be able to tackle the abuses of our system which are detracting from our ability to provide refuge to those in genuine need. We will be compassionate, but not naive.

Justice must be dispensed quickly if we are to break the business model of the smugglers. Currently, those with illegitimate claims know that if they can make it to Britain and claim asylum, they are unlikely ever to be removed.

Laws, without the realistic prospect of enforcement, are futile-and that is why we are taking a range of measures to restore deterrence across our system. We will bust the backlog of asylum claims by cutting red tape and rolling out the innovative pilot pursued at the Home Office’s Leeds office that doubled the productivity of officials.

We are determined to make the UK a significantly less attractive destination for illegal immigration by clamping down on those operating in the black economy, stepping by immigration enforcement activities and working closely with all aspects of our security services. This will require toughness and relentless focus.

We are expediting the removal of individuals with no right to be here by agreeing tailored bilateral returns agreements with partners like Albania, elevating it to a key priority for our foreign policy.

This country’s finite resources and the consistent mandates from the British people to reduce overall immigration necessitates that we prioritise the most vulnerable. We saw the benefits of this in 2015 with the Syria resettlement scheme, which bypassed the traffickers to reach the most vulnerable, and through community sponsorship schemes such as Homes for Ukraine, which also ensured the state did not bear the entire burden.

Controlling our borders is a first order priority of any government, but particularly a Conservative government that believes in the nation state, security and sovereignty. The British public rightly demand that their Government immediately grips the illegal immigration crisis with actions and not words-and that is what the Home Secretary and I are determined to deliver.