More than seven in 10 voters think Sir Keir Starmer is failing to get a grip on asylum hotels as Labour comes under increasing pressure over the small boats crisis.
A YouGov poll found that 71 per per cent of voters believe the Prime Minister, who is on holiday in Europe this week, is handling the asylum hotel issue badly.
This included more than half (56 per cent) of Labour supporters, while 37 per cent of all voters said immigration and asylum was the most important issue facing the UK.
This compared with 25 per cent who said it was the economy and seven per cent who said it was the NHS.
Sir Keir was dealt a blow after the High Court last week granted an injunction to stop the Home Office from using the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, to house asylum seekers.
The ruling is threatening to throw Labour’s asylum policy into chaos and has piled pressure on the PM to fulfil his pledge to end the use of migrant hotels by 2029.
Since the Epping injunction was granted, a slew of other councils have begun investigating whether they might also pursue legal challenges against asylum hotels.
Meanwhile, protests at sites housing asylum seekers continued over the weekend.
Under Labour a record 28,076 people have crossed the English Channel in small boats so far this year, 46 per cent more than in the same period in 2024.
Lord Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, said the Government needed to take more ‘radical’ action and suggested ministers were failing to ‘grip’ the issue.
He told The Times: ‘I think that the individual measures the Government has taken are extremely helpful in their own right but don’t add up either to a comprehensive answer or an understandable narrative.
‘At the moment the issue is so toxic and beginning to get out of the Government’s grip to the point it is very hard to bring it back.
‘A further package of actions is absolutely vital to start controlling both the public narrative and the delivery.
‘If this slips out of our hands, it’s incredibly difficult to pull it back. Once people have got it in their heads that the Government haven’t a grip and that this is an intractable problem, they will turn on you.
‘That is meat and drink. It’s the old cry, ‘For God’s sake, do something’.’
Lord Blunkett wants the PM to temporarily suspend elements of the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Refugee Convention to deal with the crisis, as well as bring in a digital national identity scheme.
Official figures released earlier this month showed a total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The record level of applications comes as the backlog of people waiting for an initial decision on their claims dropped to 90,812 at the end of June.
There were 32,059 asylum seekers in UK hotels by the end of the same month.
Labour has promised to end the use of the sites by 2029.
The YouGov poll of 2,153 people, carried out on August 20-21, found that Reform UK was seen as the party that would handle asylum and immigration ‘best’.
Nearly a third of voters (31 per cent) said Reform was best-placed, including 16 per cent of those who backed Labour at the last election.
Just 9 per cent said Labour would handle the immigration issue best and 6 per cent favoured the Tories.
Reform leader Nigel Farage will use a press conference on Tuesday to publish his plans for mass deportations of asylum seekers who come to the UK on small boats.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said ‘completely unacceptable’ delays in the appeals process left failed asylum seekers in the system for years.
The Government has put forward its own plans for a new system where a panel of independent adjudicators, rather than tribunal judges, deals with appeals over asylum decisions.
There are about 51,000 asylum appeals waiting to be heard, taking on average more than a year to reach a decision, with the backlog now thought to be the biggest cause of pressure in the asylum accommodation system.
The Home Secretary said the overhaul would result in a system which is ‘swift, fair and independent, with high standards in place’.
Border security minister Dame Angela Eagle said Labour was ‘clearing up the mess of the previous government’.
She wrote in the Daily Mirror: ‘Our reforms will resolve appeals faster, get people out of hotels and cut costs to taxpayers.
‘No gimmicks, no games, this real work is all part of our system-wide approach to delivering necessary, lasting change.’
However, the Refugee Council’s Imran Hussain said: ‘The fastest way to speed up asylum appeals is to get decisions right first time.
‘But at the moment, nearly half of appeals are successful, meaning that the initial decision was wrong.’