Suella Braverman has brought Home Office ‘into disrepute’, say Priti Patel allies
Suella Braverman has been accused of bringing the Home Office into disrepute by allies of Priti Patel as the row over the Manston migrant crisis grew.
The Home Secretary was due to face MPs on Monday afternoon amid claims that she failed to sign off hotels to ease chronic overcrowding at the main asylum processing centre for Channel migrants at the disused Manston airfield in Kent.
Some 4,000 migrants had to be housed overnight at Manston in a potential breach of asylum laws that require they should spend only 24 hours at the centre. The centre is designed for around 1,600, with some migrants having had to stay up to four weeks.
“Priti kept signing hotels off over summer no matter how unpalatable it was because it was the right thing to do to keep in line with statutory duties and make sure that people were not sleeping in awful conditions,” said an ally of the former home secretary.
Another source who worked with Ms Patel in the Home Office said she was “saddened to see this great office of state being brought into such disrepute on multiple levels”.
The source said the Home Office was breaking the law by failing to put asylum seekers in hotel rooms because the Asylum Act 1999 requires the home secretary to house migrants within 24 hours and Manston is not an accommodation centre, it is a processing centre.
Mrs Braverman is expected to pledge in the Commons to at least halve the number of migrants at Manston within the next fortnight, through booking hotels and other accommodation.
Ministers accept conditions in Manston are “austere” but believe that it can operate at an “acceptable level” if numbers are reduced to around 1,500.
A source close to the Home Secretary said: “There has been an unprecedented surge in migrants crossing the Channel this year, particularly from Albania, which has placed a significant strain on accommodation and processing centres.
“The Home Secretary is working flat out to reduce the numbers in Manston and the suggestion she has blocked any hotel bookings is categorically untrue.”
Government sources said Mrs Braverman had been caught between two competing legal duties. “First, we don’t want to have people in Manston for too long. Secondly, we have a legal duty not to make people destitute. You cannot have thousands of people sent away with no plan to safely accommodate them,” they said.
So far this year nearly 40,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats, compared with 28,500 for the whole of last year. Of these, more than a quarter – 12,000 – are Albanians.
Sir Roger Gale, a Conservative MP whose constituency covers the Manston site, said the situation at the camp was a “breach of humane conditions”.”There are simply far too many people and this situation should never have been allowed to develop, and I’m not sure that it hasn’t almost been developed deliberately,” he said.
The Home Office is struggling to find hotel accommodation, he said, adding that he now understands that this is a policy issue and a decision was taken not to book additional hotel space. “That’s like driving a car down a motorway, seeing the motorway clear ahead, then there’s a car crash, and then suddenly there’s a five-mile tailback. The car crash was the decision not to book more hotel space,” he said.
Sir David Normington, former Home Office permanent secretary, said if Mrs Braverman had deliberately decided not to book hotels to address overcrowding at Manston it could be another breach of the ministerial code.
Sir David, who was the department’s permanent secretary from 2005 to 2011, told BBC Radio 4’s World at One that he hoped Mrs Braverman would give a full account of the situation. “If it was deliberate, it’s a very serious matter,” he said.
“It’s potentially another breach of the ministerial code because home secretaries, ministers, have to obey the law. They mustn’t knowingly disobey or break the law. It’s a serious matter but we don’t know the facts and we will hear from the Home Secretary this afternoon.”
One Home Office insider said it was “hard to dispute that there were insufficient hotels booked” though this had now been reversed in the past two weeks. They added: “The reasons for that were that the hotels were extremely expensive. People were concerned for taxpayers’ money and not to add another pull factor to the UK. Getting them straight through Manston and then into a three-star hotel makes a further pull factor.”
Ministers are expected to propose streamlining asylum applications by tripling the numbers processed every week, simplifying complex guidance for officials and fast-tracking cases where there is a known 95 per cent chance they will be granted leave to remain.
