Boats crisis costs £3.5bn that could help the homeless

THE ONGOING small-boats emergency on the English South Coast is a national crisis which is not only incredibly costly to the British taxpayer, but also threatens to undermine social cohesion in local communities across the country.

- Brandon Lewis

A new report by Policy Exchange estimates that the one-year cost of the small-boats crisis is in region of £3.5billion. This includes an estimated £2.2billion on the housing migrants in hotels. As well as being three and a half times higher than the 2022-23 government budget to tackle homelessness in the UK, it is larger than the £2.1billion pot for Round 2 of the Levelling Up Fund.

We the Conservative Party won an election pledging to levelup one of the most regionally unequal countries in the industrialised world. But as a country we are now spending more on hotels for illegal migrants than on homelessness. It is unsustainable.

Along with the ever-mounting public costs, there are grave injustices when it comes to our dysfunctional asylum system and the way asylum seekers are dispersed across the UK while they wait for their claims to be processed.

The line between illegal migrants and refugees, as well as legal migrants, has also been blurred. They are not one and the same and we must be clear about that.