£3.5bn to be spent on asylum system by April as Suella Braverman considers using disused cruise ships

Fareham MP Suella Braverman is continuing with to send migrants to Rwanda, and added that plans to house migrants on disused cruise ships were being considered.

In the lords justice and home affairs committee last Wednesday, she also confirmed that £2.3bn of the total bill for 2022/23 will go towards paying for hotels.

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Ms Braverman said: ‘We are accommodating 117,000 people overall who are in our asylum process, so there is a huge amount of money that is going into accommodating a very large number of asylum seekers. We want to end the use of hotels as quickly as possible because it’s an unacceptable cost to the taxpayer, it’s over £5m a day on hotel use alone.

‘We will bring forward a range of alternative sites, they will include disused holiday parks, former student halls – I should say we are looking at those sites – I wouldn’t say anything is confirmed yet.

‘But we need to bring forward thousands of places, and when you talk about vessels all I can say is – because we are in discussion with a wide variety of providers – that everything is still on the table and nothing is excluded.’

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During the session, Ms Braverman also suggested she has yet to find a new airline to deport migrants to Rwanda, after Privilege Style pulled out in October amid pressure from campaigners.

Alistair Carmichael, home affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, branded the asylum costs ‘astronomical’ and warned that the proposals to house asylum seekers on cruise ships would be ‘ineffective and incredibly expensive’.

Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director, added: ‘Suella Braverman’s talk of housing people seeking asylum in old cruise ships, disused holiday camps and student halls is just more distraction from the urgent task of reforming an asylum system that she and her predecessor have effectively broken.’

‘We are returning people almost every week to various countries around the world,’ Ms Braverman added.

‘We do that through scheduled flights, we charter flights – so we’re in a variety of discussions with several airlines for lots of different destinations.’