My Lords, I strongly welcome my noble friend’s initiative in building and setting up reception centres of this kind. I appreciate that the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and others, are, in effect, probing amendments to find out more about the Government’s exact intentions. I fully understand that. It is perfectly reasonable.
I do not think that the noble Baroness objected to the principle of reception centres of this kind. At the moment, first of all, people are visited on local authorities, which are asked to accommodate them. Inevitably, these are not local authorities in London and the south-east, where accommodation costs are very high, but in areas such as the Midlands, the north-west and the north-east. I come from the north-west, so I know it particularly well. Here there is the largest concentration of people of this kind in council flats and so forth. They are, in effect, in competition with local people on the council waiting list, who may be rather resentful if they find they are asked to wait rather longer because of the need to accommodate people who have just come across the channel on a boat. This is not conducive to good community relations, as well as being quite unfair on people who have long been resident in this country.
Secondly, if they cannot be accommodated by local authorities—indeed, it is increasingly difficult to find appropriate council accommodation because of the shortage of housing, even in areas such as the north-east and north-west—they are sent to local hotels. I know this particularly well because I happened to spend part of my youth in Southport. Southport has a splendid main street called Lord Street. The Committee may not know it, but it was visited by Louis Napoleon, the Emperor of France, when he was in exile in this country before he became the emperor. On the basis of Lord Street, he created the Champs-Élysées in Paris. In Southport we always think of the Champs-Élysées as being the French Lord Street.
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In the middle of Lord Street, which is a delightful main street beautifully planted with trees, there are several hotels which wish to have tourist trade. Some of those have been occupied—I am unsure of the present situation—by illegal immigrants. I am sure it is good business from the point of view of the local hotels, but none the less, they are not available to people who want to go to stay in Southport and have a holiday. Equally, there are people in hotels in Doncaster at the moment. These are places which may otherwise be occupied by commercial travellers and others, so it is affecting the economy of these areas as well as the difficulties of council housing.
We need an additional facility to add to the capacity to deal with these people, who are coming here as we speak—there are more and more people coming here across the channel—in an emergency way. We need
extra capacity of this kind. While I understand clearly that it should be proper accommodation and that proper standards should be adhered to—no one would want people to go into vermin-infested places, it has to be appropriate—it should be used sensibly and flexibly. It is no use having accommodation of this kind if the Government cannot use it in a flexible way to cope with a temporary situation which can fluctuate from week to week. Obviously, the Government must have some flexibility in these circumstances to vary the length of time a person stays there and the sort of situation they stay in, provided, of course, that it is accommodation we would all accept as reasonable.
This is a welcome addition to the facilities which the Government have in this area. It will be welcomed very much by the people who Michael Gove was talking about yesterday—those who badly need levelling up in their areas. Some of the strains and stresses of dealing with this thing are disproportionately settled on their heads. This is a welcome thing from my noble friend, and I hope it will be approved in principle, although, I accept that it is quite reasonable for the noble Baroness to press the Government on exactly what their intentions are in some detail.