Shabana Mahmood is a really horrible person whose policies are cruel. She’s one of the worst people in the Labour administration and should be fired immediately.
Asylum seekers in the UK are generally not allowed to work while they are waiting on a decision on their claim. If they have been waiting for more than a year, then they can apply for permission to work.
As a result, they are reliant on the Home Office for housing and support as they cannot work to pay for accommodation.
Marley Morris, associate director at the IPPR, said there are “better ways of bring down” costs of asylum such as “speeding up asylum processing and appeals, reforming the existing asylum contracts”.
Are they going to provide 10k in support then?
Given what they’re paying for the hotels, probably. That shit ain’t cheap and was a racket from the start.
Personally I’m all for giving them an NI number ASAP and letting them work. They didn’t trek halfway across Europe to sit in 2 star hotels in shithole towns getting exploited by traffickers on Deliveroo… They want to work. Some of them are working regardless, just illegally and for far less than minimum wage.
They’re already getting accommodation and financial support. I’m not entirely sure what the point of this is, on the grand scheme of things I can’t imagine these costs making a big dent in the finances of the country, and we’d probably spend a good chunk of money administrating and trying to recover this money.
Maybe it’s more about trying to discourage asylum seekers from coming here in the first place, or filtering out those who are genuinely in need.
It’s 100% about reinforcing the culture of fear and discouraging asylum - if they wanted to filter those in need they’d be spending the money to effectively administer asylum claims instead of leaving them in years of limbo.
To fill you in on the financial situation. Last year supporting asylum seekers cost the UK taxpayer £4.3 billion (office of national statistics).
So in the grand scheme of things £12m a day is a lot of money even at a national level. The income tax contribution from the lowest 10% of workers isn’t quite enough to cover this cost (HMRC 2026 tax bulletin).
…so in simple terms all of the income tax paid by millions of workers in part time jobs is spent supporting asylum seekers.
Obviously this year’s figures aren’t out yet but they are expected to be a little bit below last year’s because Labour have not renewed the hotel contracts the Tories set up, have increased the speed of processing a lot, reduced the evidence needed for a successful claim, have worked with french authorities to reduce people trafficking and are returning people with no legitimate asylum claim (whereas the Tories did nothing).
The cost could be reduced to about half by providing larger more specialised facilities for single, male asylum seekers but that’s seen as a bad thing.