The Labour Party in the United Kingdom has announced a new plan to speed up the asylum process for about 90,000 migrants. These migrants were originally set to be sent to Rwanda under the previous government’s plan. This big change comes after Sir Keir Starmer became the new Prime Minister.
The new plan aims to process asylum claims faster. The Refugee Council, a group that helps refugees, thinks that about 60,000 of these 90,000 people will probably get asylum. This is because of where they come from. The government will look first at people from countries that are thought to be safe, like Vietnam, Albania, Egypt, and India. These countries make up about 30% of all the people waiting.
Right now, about 36,000 of these migrants are living in hotels. This costs the UK government a lot of money – about £2.9 million every day. Yvette Cooper, the new Home Secretary, wants to stop using hotels for migrants within a year. She says this will save money right away.
The Labour Party says they can move these people into the regular asylum system without changing the law that the last government made. In his first big speech as Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer said he wants to fix the broken asylum system. He plans to do this by dealing with all the waiting asylum cases, quickly sending back migrants to safe countries, and getting rid of the Rwanda plan, which he says costs too much.
The new government has some other ideas too. They want to make a new law called the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. This law would give more power to the people who work at the borders. They could use special powers, like the ones used to fight terrorism, to catch and stop the gangs that smuggle people into the country.
Labour also wants to create something called the Border Security Command. They say they can pay for this by not using the Rwanda plan anymore. This will save £100 million that would have been paid in the future, plus tens of millions more that would have been spent on moving migrants. The Rwanda plan, which was started by Boris Johnson, has already cost £290 million, but only four people were ever sent there.
Sir Keir Starmer wrote in The Sun newspaper that making sure UK borders are safe is very important to his government. He said he would ask other European leaders to work with Britain to stop the criminal gangs that make money from illegal migration. These gangs, he said, don’t care if people die trying to cross the English Channel.
The new Prime Minister criticized the last government, saying they only talked about the problem but didn’t really fix it. He explained his plan, saying, “We will watch our waters. We will make our borders stronger. We will work hard to make decisions faster about who can stay.” He thinks this is really important because if the gangs know people can stay in hotels in the UK without a decision being made, they’ll keep trying to bring more people.
David Lammy, the new Foreign Secretary, said the government will use money meant for helping other countries to try and convince people to stay in their home countries instead of trying to come to the UK illegally. He said it’s right to work with other European countries on this problem. The UK can’t do it alone, he explained. They want to use money to create jobs and opportunities in the countries where people are leaving from, especially in the Horn of Africa.
This new plan shows a big change in how the UK wants to deal with migrants and asylum seekers. It focuses on processing claims faster, stopping criminal gangs, and working with other countries. The Labour Party hopes this will be a better and fairer way to handle immigration, but it’s sure to be a topic that many people will talk about in the coming months.