Steve Reed endured a GB News grilling after claiming that migrants are to be put up in “low-cost modular homes” to be constructed on former military bases.
Speaking to the People’s Channel, the Housing Secretary took aim at the previous Government for “atrocious” deals with contractors that saw “excessive” totals being paid out.
Revealing that his solution to the migrant hotel crisis is to build “modular homes on disused army bases or military bases”, host Ellie Costello hit back, asking: “Is that the best you’ve got?”
Ellie pressed Mr Reed: “Do you think that British people want migrants on military bases in their local area? Is that really the silver bullet? Is that the really the best you’ve got?”
Ellie Costello grilled Steve Reed on housing migrants as he blamed the ‘previous Government’ for hotel contracts
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GB NEWS
The Housing Secretary responded: “The British people want people who have no right to be here removed quickly. And the point of increasing the number of caseworkers and then doing a one-in, one-out deal with France is so that we can identify those individuals and then remove them.
“We’re already removing a record number, 35,000 since the election, but we know we need to go further. But because of the backlog that we inherited, we need to put those people somewhere. Well, let’s cut the costs, and let’s look at military bases temporarily for housing people, rather than hotels, which cost much more money.”
Delivering his verdict on a new report which found that billions are being wasted on hotels for migrants, he said: “These contracts are atrocious. They’re wasting money, and they’re piling up people in hotels for years, and we’ve seen some of the social consequences of that, as well as the consequences for those individual people.
“We inherited those from the previous Government, and we know we need to change the system. So what the Government is looking to do is, how can we build cheaper accommodation? Say modular homes on disused army bases or military bases, and get asylum seekers into that accommodation, which is far lower cost, and save the taxpayer money.”
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GETTYLaying blame on the Tories for the number of migrants in asylum hotels, Mr Reed explained: “We’ve already saved a billion by changes we’ve made, but we know we need to save more, but then we also need to process the applications faster. The previous Government chose not to process them at all, that’s why there are so many people in the hotels.
“We put hundreds of new caseworkers in to process the applications faster, and then you can remove those people who have no right to be in our country. And we’ve already removed 35,000 since the election, which is a record.”
He added: “So that’s work in progress, it’s not job done. We’ve saved a billion, but we know we need to end the use of asylum hotels, and we will do it well within the lifetime of this Parliament. We’re looking at military bases as a means to get that done more quickly.”
Detailing the work of the Home Secretary in investigating the excessive Government spending, the Housing Secretary said: “I know that the Home Secretary is looking at that already, she’s already ordered a rapid review into the use of taxi companies to get people to a GP appointment or a dentist appointment where they could have taken public transport or they could have walked.
Mr Reed told GB News that Labour wants to end the use of migrant hotels ‘by the end of this Parliament’
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GB NEWS
“So she’s looking at that already. But in the long term, and I don’t mean very long term, within the lifetime of this Parliament, we want to end the use of hotels. They’re costing far too much money.”
When quizzed on the mistaken release of Epping hotel migrant Hadush Kebatu, Mr Reed concluded: “It’s unbelievable, first of all, unbelievable that this could have happened. I was as shocked as everyone else when I saw the alert come up on my phone over the weekend. Hard to believe this could have happened.
“And yet we know we’ve got a broken justice system. I hear what you say, the Conservatives have said, but they broke the criminal justice system.
“Remember, they ran out of prison places, so there was nowhere to put people that got a custodial sentence. They sacked a third of the people working in that service. And when you break a system, then problems happen, like the one we’ve seen.”
