Mears, a private contractor using public money to find HMOs on the open market, went on a spending spree across the north-east of England in 2023 and early 2024 buying 221 properties for more than £20m. Serco, that ubiquitous snuffler of public money, has 1,000 leased properties for asylum accommodation. Unfortunate local residents complain of “intimidation and confrontations in the street” living next to HMOs. Largely helpless local councils are forced to concede through gritted teeth that an “over-concentration” can have a “negative” impact on communities.
Hotels might also enable a more active, think-out-of-the-box government to implement some sort of make-work scheme. There is no good case for allowing thousands of able-bodied men to sit around idly at public expense, with some pestering passers-by. Letting them work in the open labour market would only add to Britain’s pull factor and win them allies among employers and some unions. But they could do work which doesn’t normally get done: litter, graffiti, cleaning beaches and road verges. Such tasks could be compensated modestly, perhaps below the national minimum wage, as with prison labour, or through small stipends and incentives. Better than just handing them pocket money for nothing as we currently do.
Many hard-working Britons of the kind Labour claims to love take issue with the Channel boats not least when they read about incidents like Monday’s alleged triple stabbing by an originally illegal arrival from Afghanistan. It’s that, while their tax burden keeps rising thanks to Rachel Reeves’s creative arithmetic, they see migrants, often in the prime of life, doing nothing at all for months or years on end. Why shouldn’t they contribute? And why wouldn’t genuine asylum seekers, fleeing war and persecution, want to give something back to the society involuntarily hosting them?
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