Urgent review ordered into asylum seeker taxi costs

The Interior Minister ordered an urgent examination of the use and cost of taxis to transfer asylum seekers from hotels to appointments.

Shabana Mahmood’s movement Following the BBC investigation This found that some immigrants should travel over long distances on their journeys for hundreds of pounds.

An asylum seeker told BBC that he was making a 250 -mile journey to visit a GP, and the driver told him that his cost to his home office was £ 600.

Asylum seekers are given by a bus card for a return journey once a week, but taxis are called for other necessary travels such as doctors’ appointment.

The BBC asked the government how much he had spent a taxi trip for asylum seekers with the request of Freedom of Information, but the Ministry of the Interior said he did not keep these figures.

The four investigation files reported that asylum seekers should show the evidence of an upcoming appointment in which a taxi was reserved in an automatic system at the reception table of hotels. Public transport or walking is not offered as an option.

This can cause unusual long journeys and others that are unusual.

For example, when immigrants move between hotels, they sometimes hold the same NHS doctors – especially for GP routing.

Pat McFadden, Secretary of Labor and Pension, said the BBC Radio 4 accepted to the Today program about how the system should be an investigation.

“I’m not surprised that this is a feature that caught people’s eyes,” he said.

On Tuesday, Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook told his program today that asylum seekers should take such long taxi trips “suspicious” and said the government would “look at these cases”.

Authority, asylum seekers “only the ordinary citizens who jump to the bus” he added.

“For immigrants, every 600 £ taxi journey for immigrants, British patients to see the GPs or the ambulances to pay for the money to arrive on time. So people think that the system is fraudulent against them.

He continued: “The worker, while the services for hardworking families are stretched, the labor is writing an empty check for illegal migration.”

As a part of the investigation, the four hotels went to housing asylum seekers, which revealed cramped living conditions, illegal working and plastic bags covered with plastic bags, because the inhabitants secretly cooked on electric quarries in the bathrooms.

BBC found:

• Smoke alarms covered with plastic bags while cooking the inhabitants used electric quarries in the bathrooms
• A 12 -year -old girl living in a hotel that spends three quarters of her life in the shelter system. He said, “When we settled somewhere, then they move us”
• Some asylum seekers say that people have no choice but to work illegally for less than £ 20 a day to pay debt to smugglers.