It is a Labour pledge to empty all hotels of asylum seekers by the next general election. So how are they going to do it?

I sincerely hope not by expanding sites like Wethersfield where, as the Helen Bamber Foundation has said that accommodating people at the base causes harm to their physical and mental health and “Housing people, including survivors of torture and trafficking, in an isolated, overcrowded camp reminiscent of an open-air prison, with inadequate healthcare and legal services, is an inhumane way to treat those seeking protection.”.

There are Liberal Democrat alternatives, other than “I wouldn’t have started from here.”. All the following is established Lib Dem policy.

We start from the premise that there needs to be radical reform, independent of central Government, to speed up decision making. Such should be taken out of political control completely and move towards a caseworker-model of support for applicants, to seek just outcomes that are right first time. It is no use moving policy-making to different departments if the Home Office retains control of the process of administering and assessing applications. It isn’t just a quicker decision that is needed but one that is right first time. 75% of decisions are appealed and 33% of those are allowed first time. If the cost of appeals were to be transferred from the Ministry of Justice to the Home Office that in itself would make a difference. It is easy to refuse and then hope a person did not appeal. Sometimes the Home Office do not even bother turning up at an appeal hearing. If they had to pay for it, they would do a better job.

It is because decisions on whether to allow and asylum applications are taking so long that there are so many living in Home Office procured accommodation in the community awaiting decisions. It is taking years, in some cases very many years such as ten, instead of six months to make those decisions. If they moved on, those in hotels could move into that accommodation.

Instead of the starting point being a culture of disbelief, and a determination to refuse people, it should be based on basic measures of fairness and justice. We should actively promote a change of culture, away from the current unfriendly, poor-quality approach towards a more normal customer-friendly model, where staff see themselves as caseworkers, there to help people navigate the system and provide appropriate support, whatever the outcome of their application. This would be alongside changes in departmental responsibilities for migration policy.

Much better training for staff is needed for those who deal directly with more vulnerable groups. A new focus should be on how the rules affect victims of torture or trafficking, mentally ill people, pregnant women, children, LGBT+ people and those who fled because of their religious or non-religious beliefs, or who are at risk if returned because they have since converted to another faith or belief. We need to ensure that caseworkers making these decisions have the appropriate training and skill set to understand the key issues and to question sensitively.

Also ensure that better interpretation and translation services are available at each stage of the process, with safeguards in place to ensure that interpreters and translators dealing with each case have the language knowledge required. This would ensure a common understanding of the issues and enable the correct decision to be arrived at more quickly and cost-effectively.

In addition to better decision making, we need Humanitarian Visas. An LDV article in 2021 outlined how this would work. It would stop people from making the dangerous crossings that they are having to do in the first place. It really is worth reading this article; the principles remain the same.

All of this is difficult to condense into some sound bites, but I hope that this reminder of good Liberal Democrat policy can be used by Lib Dems in promoting solutions that can take effect long before the next general election.

* Suzanne Fletcher was a councillor for nearly 30 years and a voluntary advice worker with the CAB for 40 years. Now retired, she is active as a campaigner in the community both as a Lib Dem and with local organisations and author of "Bold as Brass?", the story of Brass Crosby.