IN four weeks’ time Chancellor Rachel Reeves will stand up in the Commons and tell us we all have to pay more in tax.
Sorry, public services are stretched to the limit, we will be told, and we can’t possibly have a return to ‘austerity’.
The only option is for the Government to dip even further into our pockets.
How illegal migrants will be laughing in their plush hotel rooms — along with the hotel owners who have been raking in a fortune from renting out their establishments to the Home Office.
Just when you thought the scandal of asylum hotels couldn’t get any worse, the Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs has just published a damning report on the farce.
Contracts which were expected to cost taxpayers £4.5billion over ten years will end up costing £15.3billion, due to poor cost control.
The Home Office failed to collect £46million it was supposed to claim back under a clause restricting excess profits.
Even more outrageously, it turns out that some of the money will be going to companies which have been linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
How can we have ended up paying £145 per person per night to house asylum-seekers in hotels?
I have just been on Airbnb and been offered several opportunities for bed and breakfast in and around Epping, site of the infamous Bell Hotel, for under £50 a night
The Conservative Party, which now tells us it would tackle illegal migration for good, is up to its eyeballs in the scandal.
It was the previous government which signed many of these contracts and allowed the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels to swell to 56,000 in 2023.
But the Labour Party can hardly criticise.
Remember how in opposition it feigned outrage when migrants were sent to live on the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland Harbour, Dorset, backing protesters who called it ‘cruel and inhumane’ — in spite of the fact that generations of oil workers had lived on the barge without anyone bleating about their human rights?
Under Labour, the number of asylum-seekers housed in hotels is on the rise again, up eight percent since June 2024
Not that the barge was much cheaper, at £120 per night. It is all too typical of the failure of government ministers and civil servants to negotiate even a half-decent deal for the taxpayer.
“They behave like confused and helpless octogenarians being robbed of their life savings by cold-calling scammers.
Under Labour, the number of asylum-seekers housed in hotels is on the rise again, up eight percent since June 2024.
And there is, of course, another wave of migrants coming, thanks to the failure of Keir Starmer’s government to do anything to stop the boats.
Over-taxed
The number of illegal migrants arriving this year has already exceeded the number who came in 2024.
There was a surge after Keir Starmer abandoned the Rwanda scheme, which was never implemented but did at least seem to be acting as a deterrent to judge by the numbers of illegal migrants who decided to flee to Ireland instead.
Where are the latest arrivals going to live? Not in the 1.5million homes which Labour promised to build over the next five years but which are not getting built by over-taxed housebuilders.
If transferred out of hotels they will end up living in ordinary homes which will not then be available for hard-working UK residents desperately in need of accommodation.
The Labour Party loves to blame private landlords and second home-owners for the housing crisis, yet ignores the far larger part played by poorly-controlled migration.
The Prime Minister promised to tackle the ‘people-trafficking gangs’, implying that illegal migrants were somehow being forced into boats and sent to Britain against their will.
The migrants know full well what they are doing and the risks involved. But they have made the calculation that it is worth paying the people traffickers because the rewards of getting to Britain are sufficient to justify them.
If Starmer really wanted to stop illegal migrants coming he would be tackling the human rights laws which seem to make it impossible to deport people who have no right to be here, even in cases where they have committed criminal and terrorist offences.
In the Budget we face higher rates of income tax, rising fuel duty, higher taxes on holidays, and a huge rise in betting tax which could force the closure of hundreds of high street bookies
The asylum hotels scandal exposes a wider problem than just the failure to tackle illegal migration.
That is the utter failure to take care of public money — and the attempt to resolve chronic overspending through taxing us ever more rather than making cuts and efficiency savings.
In the Budget we face higher rates of income tax, rising fuel duty, higher taxes on holidays, and a huge rise in betting tax which could force the closure of hundreds of high street bookies, depriving people of what for most of them is a harmless bit of fun.
All this because Labour cannot seem to contemplate addressing the extraordinary profligacy which seems to affect all corners of government, from HS2 to public sector pay rises.
The asylum hotels scandal has just made it even harder for Rachel Reeves to sell her tax-raising Budget to a public whose finances are already stretched by last year’s raid.
