You can be forgiven for having missed that the Home Secretary James Cleverly visited Crawley last Thursday – he certainly didn’t bother telling the council.  This is genuinely shameful because Crawley Borough Council has actively written to Government Ministers including him about the housing emergency facing this Borough.

Ostensibly Mr Cleverly (a misnomer if ever there was one) came to Crawley in connection to the Clear, Hold, Build crime fighting project with the Police. Ironically I gather Crawley was picked as we’re the only one of the areas with this in place to have received a ‘green’ rating, which is in part attributable to the Council’s successful engagement in the project alongside wider partners.

It would have benefited everyone if the council could have discussed with him why the Home Office put four asylum contingency hotels within the Borough and recently intensified the use of two of them.

We could also have discussed why the Home Office has started kicking those out of the hotels given leave to remain without any managed settlement arrangements, in many cases leaving the local taxpayers to house them in temporary accommodation.

He did have enough time to promote the Tory candidates for Police and Crime Commissioner and the General Election though!  That one of the Conservatives responsible visit and don’t have the courtesy to meet us, but instead choose to prioritise their own electoral needs really speaks for itself.

The Tory failure to control and manage the asylum system is genuinely appalling. Home Office decisions collapsed after 2015 and the asylum backlog soared to a record high nationwide, with 56,000 in asylum hotels costing the taxpayer £8m a day. Rishi Sunak promised to clear the asylum backlog, but he has completely failed to meet his promise to end hotel use – instead hotel use has remained static.

This is incredibly frustrating for those of us trying to address many of the other problems the Tories have presided over.  This is not a serious Government and they don’t know what they’re doing.  We need a Labour Government to take over and get this country back on track.

Cllr Michael Jones

Leader, Crawley Borough Council