Exclusive: Ministers facing growing anger from Tory backbenchers over use of hotels in their constituencies
The Home Office is planning to use disused cruise ships to house asylum seekers amid growing anger from Conservative backbenchers over the use of hotels in their constituencies.
Ministers are looking at possible vessels including a former cruise ship from Indonesia, which would be moored in south-west England, the Guardian understands.
Continue reading...Ministers announce refugees in hotels will be offered move to a home on condition they accept first offer
People who fled the Taliban in Afghanistan are at risk of homelessness in the UK, humanitarian groups have warned, after ministers announced plans to move the refugees out of hotels and into homes on the condition they accept the first offer made to them.
Afghans living in “temporary bridging accommodation” in the UK under the UK’s two resettlement schemes would be given additional support to find settled accommodation after 18 months in hotels, the Home Office said.
Continue reading...Video footage shows Matt Hancock and Kwasi Kwarteng discussing pay rates after being duped by campaigners
The former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and former health secretary, Matt Hancock, agreed to work for £10,000 a day to further the interests of a fake South Korean firm after apparently being duped by the campaign group Led by Donkeys.
Kwarteng attended a preliminary meeting at his parliamentary office and agreed in principle to be paid the daily rate after saying he did not require a “king’s ransom”. When Hancock was asked his daily rate, he responded: “It’s 10,000 sterling.”
Continue reading...Refugee Council figures reveal potential human and economic cost of government’s illegal migration bill
Nearly 200,000 people, including more than 40,000 children, could be locked up or forced into destitution if the government’s controversial illegal migration bill becomes law, according to new analysis by the Refugee Council.
The charity has used government data and the numbers of asylum seekers the Home Office said it hopes to deport from the UK, to project how many people are likely to either be forcibly removed or left in limbo in the first three years of the new legislation if it becomes law, at a cost to the taxpayer of around £9bn. Home Office officials say they do not recognise these figures.
Continue reading...Ten people from conflict zones threatened with removal to Africa claim there has been a failure to consider risks of deportation
A court of appeal judge has ruled that a group of asylum seekers can bring a legal challenge against the Home Office for what they claim has been a failure to consider the dangers and risks of deporting them to Rwanda.
Lord Justice Underhill, the vice-president of the court of appeal’s civil division, has granted permission for the group to appeal against the government’s controversial policy on some grounds.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Home secretary’s ‘racist’ immigration plans condemned by former Tory campaigner
Suella Braverman should consider her position for putting forward “cruel and heartless” immigration policies that discriminate against war refugees of colour, a former Home Office adviser has said.
Nimco Ali, a one-time Conservative campaigner who in December left her job as an adviser on violence against women, said the home secretary was “the wrong person not just for the Conservative party but for the country”.
Continue reading...Home secretary struggles to clarify if Olympian would have been deported as soon as he turned 18 under proposals
Suella Braverman has denied the government is breaking the law with controversial measures in which asylum seekers arriving in the UK via small boats will be detained and deported, despite telling Conservatives there was a more than 50% chance the plans may be incompatible with the European convention on human rights.
The home secretary on Wednesday struggled to clarify if the Olympian Sir Mo Farah would have been deported as soon as he turned 18 years old under the proposed regulations, or why he would not have been deported, as he was trafficked to the UK aged nine.
Continue reading...Proposed law, criticised as cruel and unworkable, could be made to apply retrospectively from Tuesday
Refugees who cross the Channel in small boats from Tuesday could face detention and deportation under a new migration law that Labour and charities have called “unworkable” and “cruel”.
In an acknowledgment that the law will prompt a fresh rush of refugees across the Channel, the Home Office is seeking to make the illegal migration bill apply retrospectively from the day it is introduced to parliament, the Guardian has been told.
Continue reading...Press members living under the Taliban, and living uncertain lives in Pakistan, must be given clarity say campaign groups
Hundreds of Afghan journalists remain stranded in increasingly “dire” circumstances as frustration mounts over the UK government’s refusal to share the latest entry criteria for its flagship resettlement programme.
This weekend, a coalition of press freedom and free expression organisations, including Index on Censorship, the National Union of Journalists, PEN International and English PEN, have written to home secretary Suella Braverman asking why details of the next phase of the Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme (ACRS) have yet to be revealed.
Continue reading...Home Office data shows 566 people were categorised as missing between 2020 and 2022
Hundreds of trafficking victims in the UK have gone missing after being referred to the government’s scheme to protect them, the Guardian has learned.
The news comes after the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, admitted in January that since 2021 about 200 child asylum seekers had gone missing from hotels where they had been in the care of the Home Office and its contractors.
Continue reading...Effects of ‘devastating and punishing’ Home Office system introduced in 2012 now being felt, experts say
More than half the people trying to secure permanent residency in the UK through the Home Office’s “devastating and punishing” 10-year route struggle to afford food and pay bills, a survey has indicated.
The 10-year route to settling permanently in the UK was one of a series of deliberately tough measures introduced in 2012 by Theresa May when she was home secretary, as part of drive to cut net migration. Researchers say the full effects of the policy are only now starting to be felt.
Continue reading...Past supreme court ruling meant Siac judges found themselves unable to contradict home secretary
Almost exactly four years after she was stripped of her citizenship, Shamima Begum’s hopes of returning to the UK have been dealt a bitter blow, with the special immigration appeals commission (Siac) upholding the decision.
It is the latest development – and unlikely to be the last – in a legal fight that Begum’s family began in March 2019, one month after the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, took his controversial decision, shortly after she was found in a refugee camp in north-east Syria.
Continue reading...William Shawcross analysed just six Channel cases before calling for more focus on Islamist extremism, say critics
The author of a controversial review into Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy has been accused of failing to do his job properly because he attended only a handful of the thousands of meetings of its key deradicalisation programme.
William Shawcross was appointed to review Prevent, the government’s counter-extremism programme, in January 2021. Last week his controversial conclusion that the programme had concentrated too much on the far right and not enough on Islamist extremism was met with widespread condemnation.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Nadiia Luba is one of 9,700 Ukrainians still waiting on visa decision under Homes for Ukraine scheme
Nadiia Luba was sheltering in a basement in central Ukraine earlier this month when she learned that her family’s chances of escaping to Britain had been dashed.
After nearly eight months of waiting for visas for her and her two sons, she got a text to say that the British host who had been so ready to welcome them had died suddenly. “I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “My brain didn’t want to accept it.”
Continue reading...Government evaluation of the legislation is the first official review of the policies that led to the Windrush scandal
The Home Office’s hostile environment policies appear to have had a disproportionately negative impact on people of colour, a government evaluation of the legislation has shown.
The long-awaited impact assessment of the package of hostile environment measures which were introduced when David Cameron was prime minister, and later rebranded as “compliant environment” policies, reveals for the first time the government’s own assessment of the legislation’s potential risks.
Continue reading...Some of the over 1,450 people brought by AG Recruitment owed thousands to unlicensed brokers
A British recruitment agency that brought Indonesian farmworkers to the UK who had debts of thousands of pounds to foreign brokers has lost its licence as a seasonal worker sponsor.
More than 1,450 Indonesians were brought to Britain last year by AG Recruitment to pick berries and other fruits to supply British supermarkets.
Continue reading...Zimbabwean worker whose visa relies on job says government disclosed confidential details of interview to employer
A victim of suspected labour abuse who confidentially disclosed details of exploitation to government investigators says she has been subjected to threats and intimidation after she was outed to her employer.
The Zimbabwean national, 25, was interviewed by Home Office compliance officers for an investigation into illegal recruitment practices and told them she had paid a fee of about £1,500 to an agent who arranged for a care home in Surrey to sponsor her visa.
Continue reading...Forty families brought to UK after fleeing Taliban given only weeks to move to West Yorkshire
Hundreds of Afghan refugees who settled in London after fleeing the Taliban 18 months ago have been told they have only weeks to uproot and move 200 miles away, the Guardian can reveal.
The Home Office has told 40 families with 150 children who have lived for more than a year in Kensington, west London, that they must leave the capital for another hotel in Wetherby, on the outskirts of Leeds.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Letter to home secretary says bill echoes ‘dangerously broad laws’ that result in jailing of protesters
Hongkongers in Britain have called on Suella Braverman to reconsider controversial measures in her public order bill, which they likened to the repressive measures used to crack down on democratic opposition in their home city.
In a letter to the UK home secretary, aspects of the bill were described as “repressive measures that threaten to paralyse entire social movement” and posed a threat to their right to protest in Britain, including against Chinese communist repression in Hong Kong.
Continue reading...Whistleblower tells of threats and illegal detention in fresh revelations about failures that drove children into hands of criminals
Children seeking asylum in the UK were threatened and subjected to racist abuse by staff at a Home Office-run hotel, a whistleblower has claimed as pressure grows on the government to act over the growing crisis in the system.
The source, who worked in the Brighton hotel for more than a year, said that in such an environment of “emotional abuse”, scores of children, who had arrived in the UK without parents or a carer, were driven on to the streets and into the hands of criminals.
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