Did Robert Jenrick really ‘boast’ about opening hotels for asylum seekers?

A row has broken out between the Tories and Reform about previous comments on migrant hotels, so who said what and when?

At the centre of the argument is an interview Robert Jenrick did with Sky News back in November 2022, one week after he was appointed immigration minister in Rishi Sunak’s government.

His appearance came amid a crisis at an asylum seeker processing centre in Kent, which had become severely overcrowded – with migrants sleeping on the floor and families being housed in marquees.

Politics latest: Councils plan legal challenges to migrant hotels

The home secretary at the time, Suella Braverman, had also been accused of allowing the situation to develop by failing to procure sufficient alternative accommodation – such as hotels – for migrants to be taken to.

Asked about this by Sky News in 2022, Robert Jenrick said: “More hotels have been coming online almost every month throughout the whole of this year.

“So, Suella Braverman and her predecessor, Priti Patel, were procuring more hotels. What I have done in my short tenure is ramp that up and procure even more because November, historically, has been one of the highest months of the year for migrants illegally crossing the Channel.”

Fast-forward almost three years, and this clip has been seized on by Reform UK as evidence that Mr Jenrick “boasted” about how many migrant hotels he had opened.

That’s a potentially damaging accusation, given the now shadow justice secretary recently joined protests outside a migrant hotel in Essex.

Mr Jenrick responded by accusing Reform of posting a “selectively clipped” video that didn’t include the context about the Kent processing centre.

To an extent, he has a point.

At the time, the government was fighting accusations that they were risking an expensive court action from migrants claiming they were being detained unlawfully.

The minister’s response was to point out that they were sourcing alternative options to make sure this didn’t happen and to prevent order breaking down in Kent.

Mr Jenrick has also pointed to other comments he made at the time saying, “it is essential we exit the hotels altogether” and describing the expensive hotel bill as “disgraceful”.

But that’s not to say Robert Jenrick hasn’t undergone quite a pronounced shift in both language and substance when it comes to migration.

For instance, in the same Sky News interview in 2022, he said: “I would never demonise people coming to this country in pursuit of a better life. And I understand and appreciate our obligation to refugees.”

At the time, this wasn’t a surprising view from a minister commonly considered to be in the centre of the Tory party.

But Mr Jenrick’s time as immigration minister saw him move further to the right.

As he has since said himself: “I could see the breakdown of the British state was doing immense damage. It angered me, and it motivated me to do absolutely everything to fix the problem.”

The following months saw Mr Jenrick significantly harden his position, to the point that he resigned over the government’s approach.

But the bigger contradiction Reform is trying to get at by picking this fight is around the Tory record.

It is a fact that the use of hotels to house asylum seekers peaked at just over 55,000 while the Conservatives were in power.

Similarly, it’s a fact that legal migration reached record levels on the Tories watch.

Mr Jenrick can fairly claim that – in the final year of his front-bench career – he did go further than most to try to change this.

But he can’t change the data from the time.

Reform knows that – just as it also knows the Tory record on migration is one of the big pull factors bringing their voters over to them.

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