00:00Here we are again, it's Groundhog Day. David Bolt, the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration,
00:06said we can't end the use of asylum hotels, we don't have enough houses, and we can't smash the
00:12gangs because it's simply too lucrative. Tony Smith, you and I could have told him this ages
00:18ago, finally reality bites. Yeah, it's important to recognise that David, of course, he is the
00:25independent Chief Inspector or Auditor, if you like, of the Border Force, of the Home Office,
00:30Immigration Functions, and so he is allowed, actually, Martin, to come out and say what he
00:34thinks, and I think he's come out and said exactly what you and I have been saying for a while,
00:38really. It is unrealistic to be able to expect us to be able to wipe out the backlog of people in
00:44hotels by, you know, 2029, and equally, you know, smashing the gangs alone is not going to stop the
00:50boats, is it? We've had a record number, over 108,000 asylum applications over the last year,
00:57they've not really made any dent in the numbers of hotels, and we had an NAO report, didn't we,
01:03just last month, which said that actually we're going to end up spending three times more than
01:09we thought we would in 2019 on asylum hotels, because we simply haven't got anywhere to put the
01:15migrants, Martin, where are they going to go? You know, they can't really grant their way out of
01:22this, because if they don't grant their way out of this and let everybody stay, well, they've still
01:25got to live somewhere, and that will simply shift the cost of housing them from the Home Office budget
01:31onto local authorities who are already struggling, I think, many of them on their own, to find housing
01:36for their own Indigenous communities, which in turn, as we know, leads to community unrest and
01:42housing of multiple occupancies. So, I mean, it's all very well to come out and say these targets,
01:47but I think they really need to say, well, how are they going to deliver them? And I think what
01:52David is challenging is, well, I don't actually see any evidence about how you're going to do this.
01:56You're exactly right. If you move this problem around the country into a housing accommodation
02:01unit near you, on a street near you, I think the people won't stand for it anymore, Tony Smith.
02:07It's simply too late. The genie is out of the bottle. Back to the second point about,
02:12it's simply too lucrative to smash the gangs because it's like a game of whack-a-mole.
02:17You smash one gang, another one pops up. We can't win the war on drugs. We can't win,
02:22I put it to you, the war on people smuggling until we have a proper deterrent and a threat
02:27of deportation.
02:29Yeah, crime does pay, Martin, and in this area, it pays very, very well, actually, very handsomely
02:35to human smugglers who are beyond the reach of us, I'm afraid. They are trying to take new powers
02:39under the new Border Security Bill to give us more authorities. But in my experience,
02:44you need the cooperation of the countries. Most of these are operating overseas, not in the UK.
02:49Probably make it easier to catch people who are operating in the UK. But outside of that,
02:53we know from the French beaches, we're not allowed to send officers over there. They won't let us.
02:57It's their beach. It's their land. And it's the same with investigations. We may have some
03:01collaborative agreements with some European countries, but smashing the gangs on its own
03:05is not going to be working. We've been trying to do that for a long time, Martin. Believe me,
03:09the NCA Border Force, we've been on this for a long, long time. We've been trying to do that.
03:13We know it doesn't work. The only thing that really works, which is the Australian model
03:16of stopping the boats, was, as you say, a removals deterrent. And we had that, didn't we,
03:20with Rwanda. I mean, we were there or thereabouts with Rwanda. And I think the abolition of the
03:26Rwanda plan, for what were essentially politically ideological reasons, rather than any common
03:32sense reasons, to just scrap it without giving it an opportunity to run. We'll never know now
03:38if that would have had to. But I thought that was a very bold attempt to say, no, you can't
03:42come in here. You can't claim asylum. We're not having you. You wouldn't have to put people
03:46in hotels. You wouldn't have to put them in hotels. They wouldn't even be here. You wouldn't
03:48have to detain them. They'd be in Rwanda. And I think once that message got out, maybe,
03:52just maybe that might have a very significant impact. I think scrapping that has been one
03:57of the biggest political errors of our time.
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