A coalition of hundreds of pro-refugee organisations has estimated the astronomical costs of five Home Office policies to block refugees, which are due to become law in a matter of months.
The campaign coalition Together With Refugees, which is made up of about 360 community groups, refugee organisations, trades unions and faith groups, is publishing a report on Monday. It attempts to calculate the cost of policies such as offshoring refugees – with the bill running into the billions. The Home Office is yet to publish this information itself.
Taxpayers could face an extra £2.7bn a year cost to fund the schemes, according to the paper – named A Bill at What Price? It is being published before the first vote in the House of Lords on the government’s controversial nationality and borders bill.
The Home Office dismissed the calculations as “pure speculation”, but the SNP MP Stuart McDonald said the research “shows in stark terms what many MPs have long feared about the huge cost to the taxpayer”.
The MP for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East added: “I and others have continually pressed the government to set out their own assessment of these costs, via the impact assessment they are required to produce for such legislation – and which they have repeatedly promised, but failed, to provide to the public and parliament.”
Using open source data, the report calculated the extra spending that will be needed to pay for five key measures proposed in the bill. These projects include:
New large, out-of-town accommodation centres to house up to 8,000 people seeking refugee protection – £717.6m a year.
An offshore processing system to send people seeking refugee protection to another country to be detained while they wait for a decision on their claim, based on Australian government costings, which the Home Office said it is modelling its plans on – £1.44bn a year.
Imprisoning people seeking refugee protection who arrive via irregular routes, such as in a small boat across the Channel – £432m a year.
Removing people seeking refugee protection from the UK to another country if the government said they should claim asylum elsewhere – £117.4m a year.
Extra processing costs for additional assessments of people allocated a new temporary protection status, who have already passed a rigorous assessment recognising them as a refugee, every two and a half years – £1.5m a year.
Sabir Zazai, a spokesperson for Together With Refugees, said: “This is an astonishing amount of additional public money for the unworkable and cruel proposals in the bill – enough to pay for more than 80,000 NHS nurses a year.
“Having fled their homes in fear and struggled to find safety, these measures would leave women, children and men facing further hardship in prison, isolated in another country indefinitely, separated from family and facing insecurity and indecision.”
Together With Refugees is calling for an end to the proposal in the bill to treat people differently based on how they arrive here, rather than the dangers they face in their home countries. It is also calling for more safe routes for people to reach protection, asking the government to agree a target to resettle 10,000 of the world’s most vulnerable refugees a year.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “These figures are pure speculation. While lives are being lost in the Channel we will look at all options available to us. Our broken asylum system is costing the taxpayer an unacceptable £4.7m a day on hotels, which is why urgent reform is needed.
“Our New Plan for Immigration will fix the broken asylum system so that we spend less time and money on those abusing the system, enabling us to focus on helping those in genuine need.”