Asylum seekers will have to pay back hotel accommodation costs

Migrants are set to have to pay back £10,000 towards their food and hotel costs before being eligible to settle in the UK.

Sweeping new laws due to be laid before Parliament on Tuesday mean asylum seekers will have to reimburse public money spent on their accommodation and other support before they can apply for settlement.

Ministers are exploring a flat rate of around £10,000, which would be paid in monthly instalments either directly to the Home Office or via the tax and benefits system.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the cost of accommodation to the taxpayer is “too high” and that it is “right that we ask those who can contribute to do so”.

It comes following anti-asylum protests outside migrant hotels, with thousands of people demonstrating outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, last summer after a migrant living there was arrested and later jailed for sexual offences.

Labour has promised to phase out the use of hotels as a costly form of migrant accommodation, instead using military bases across the country.

The plans to recoup money from migrants for accommodation – which will be introduced under the new Immigration and Asylum Bill – would be means-tested for adults, meaning only those with sufficient funds will pay. Children who have received support from the asylum system would be exempt.

It would apply prospectively only, meaning only those receiving support once the new legislation comes into effect would be liable to pay.

Under the scheme, migrants must pay off the full amount before being eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), which grants the permanent right to live, work and study in the UK without any time limits. Anyone who leaves the UK will have to make their payments if they wish to return in the future.

“Receiving asylum support is a right, but it is also a responsibility,” said Mahmood, introducing the reforms. “Once people can contribute and repay the generosity of the British people, we expect them to do so.”

In separate planned reforms, ministers are considering doubling the time it takes to qualify for ILR from five to 10 years for most migrant workers.

These proposals would apply retrospectively for claimants already in the UK, but have prompted backlash from more than 100 Labour MPs, including former housing secretary Angela Rayner, who branded them “unfair” and “un-British”.

Currently, the UK spends £4bn a year across accommodation and support for asylum seekers, which is heavily driven by the Home Office’s reliance on expensive hotel accommodation, according to the Public Accounts Committee’s analysis.

Last year, border security minister Angela Eagle said that at the peak under the previous Conservative government, there were 400 hotels in use across the country at a cost of £9m a day.

Labour claims to have cut asylum costs by £1bn since coming into office and is phasing out the use of migrant hotels, with 31 closed since April and hundreds of asylum seekers moving into ex-military sites.

The new legislation is set to include a host of immigration reforms, including controversial proposals to increase the forced removal of people refused asylum and to introduce age checks for people claiming to be children using AI.

It is also expected to limit applications for asylum under human rights laws by directing how Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to family life – is applied in immigration and deportation cases.

Mahmood has previously claimed that the right to family life has, in some cases, been used to block removals and undermine public confidence in the system.