Home Secretary Priti Patel

 

To allow all towns to share refugees and asylum seekers

Home Secretary Priti Patel is to strip local authorities of a veto allowing them to avoid housing asylum seekers. Instead of being able to block the Government or private contractors acting on its behalf from purchasing or acquiring rental property in their area to receive migrants, town halls will be able to lodge objections only over specific streets or neighbourhoods, not towns. The move is part of efforts to reduce the number of asylum seekers being placed in hotels and to halt the expansion of the use of some areas and towns while protecting others in aspic.

This change of policy and the halting of Patels concentration camp developments through public outcry, may initially lead to higher numbers of homes of multiple occupancy in areas not normally associated with those types of development in rural counties like Northumberland and Somerset for example where single towns have to take the strain, but will widen the ‘trade’ in the Home Office system and allow landed estates, housing associations in more protected locations, Co-operative and trust housing companies to join in and ensure safe housing projects only get licensed and are opened up by well established housing providers outside of the landlords desperate to profit from the ending of the Government’s highly criticized Hotel dumping policy. 

The retraction by Patel will rapidly lead to cost shifting from her department and place the onus and huge cost factor of housing refugees and asylum seekers onto the Homes and Communities sector. The advantage will be that it will allow living conditions and the safety of refugees and asylum seekers to be monitored by the correct authorities helping them gain access to health and education in communities where services aren’t stretched to the limit due to over population and the effect of long term austerity on poorer towns.

The freeing up of hotels may also assist in the emergency housing for the six million people experts say will lose their homes this winter through the Government's failure to tackle run-away inflation and the enduring long term recession.

Sounds like a Priti awful savings plan from the Home Office but at least it should halt the disgraceful number of runaway children as Hotel setups are impossible to police correctly.