Labour’s Security Minister Dan Jarvis found himself on the end of a grilling by GB News’s Tom Harwood after the Government announced it will be scrapping plans to house migrants at the RAF Scampton base.
The former airbase in Lincolnshire, once home to the Dambusters squadron, was a key part of the former government’s plans to accommodate migrants arriving in the UK by small boats and other unauthorised means.
Discussing Labour’s plans to tackle the migrant crisis, Tom said: “You’ve closed down the Bibby Stockholm barge, you’re closing down RAF Scampton.
“You want to close down the hotels as well. If migrants can’t go on barges, they can’t go in disused RAF bases and they can’t go in hotels. Where are these people going?”
Tom Harwood grilled Jarvis on where he plans to house migrants
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Jarvis said: “None of these things that you’ve mentioned represented good value for taxpayers’ money.
“We’ve inherited a situation where we’ve got a cohort of 100,000 people who haven’t properly been processed by the previous government.
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“The previous government effectively stopped the processing of those who’ve made asylum claims, and that meant we had this permanent backlog of 100,000 people”, he said.
Asked by Tom where one asylum seeker would be housed, he said: “Arrangements will have to be made to accommodate people who successfully are processed through the asylum arrangements.
“The bigger point is, there were no processing arrangements.”
Yvette Cooper has declined to say where asylum seekers would be housed now the Government has abandoned plans to use RAF Scampton as accommodation.
Labour have scrapped plans to use RAF Scampton to accomodate migrantsPA“They didn’t focus on processing the asylum returns and instead, all the eggs went into the Rwanda basket, which was ultimately a kind of failed process. So what we’ve done is reinvest that resource more effectively.
“We’re in the process of getting a thousand more caseworkers so that we can process those who’ve made claims for asylum. Where those claims are successful, we’ll be providing accommodation for those people in the normal way, but where they are not, they will be returned.”
Tom chimed in: “Minister, you spoke through those words pretty quickly. ‘You will be providing for these people in the normal way’, you’re going to be putting them in council houses.”
Jarvis refused to elaborate, and instead pointed to the issues left over by the previous government.
Dan Jarvis joined Tom Harwood on GB News
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Asked where they would live, the Home Secretary told broadcasters: “We have seen this really shameful increase in the asylum backlog under the Conservatives that we inherited.
“We also saw much lower returns, way lower returns, than under the last Labour government.
“So, the action that we have immediately taken is to significantly increase the number of returns since the general election and we are also working now to close the backlog so that we can end these very costly asylum hotels, and also, in the case of Scampton, that was incredibly costly for this single site that was also strongly opposed in the local community as well.”