Beyond the paywall …

5. Who books the taxis?
Who chooses the route?
Who profits from dead runs and long hauls?

Contractors.

Who gets blamed on the BBC? Asylum seekers.

This framing is a moral failure. The facts point in one direction, and the government points at the people with the least power.

4. The Home Secretary is milking inflated taxi journeys to score racist points. Cutting medical transport won’t stop contractor waste. It will only block access to healthcare. This isn’t cost-saving. It’s punishment dressed up as reform, built on a story that misidentifies the culprit.

3. £15.8m isn’t an “asylum problem”. It’s the price of the government’s choice to use the most expensive, least efficient accommodation model. Move people into communities, let them work, end profiteering contracts, and the taxi “issue” disappears.

2. The real cause is the Home Office isolating thousands in hotels far from GPs and dentists, giving them one bus pass a week, and outsourcing transport to firms incentivised to maximise mileage. Create dependence, engineer inefficiency, then blame the people trapped in it. Classic scapegoating.

Robina Qureshi is the CEO of Positive Action in Housing, an anti-racist refugee and migrant homelessness and human rights charity based in Glasgow. She has more than 30 years’ frontline experience of the impact of UK asylum and immigration policy on refugees, asylum seekers and migrant communities.

34. Best just call this what it is, this Home Secretary is just another “child of immigrants” capitulating to racism and bigotry to win her spurs.

33. Remember Rwanda? It cost hundreds millions and no-one even got on a plane in the end. The detention estate costs more millions. Of course, the contractors turn a profit for every night they keep people locked up. When people get “lost” in the system, the corporate giants still make money.

32. These latest proposals should be scrapped. They are nothing more than performative cruelty which will continue to cost this country billions to implement in the long term.

31. The real work needed to build a strong cohesive society takes time. Asylum policy is meant to provide sanctuary, not stop all routes so that people end up taking dangerous journeys and risking their lives. Immigration policy is meant to be managed so that the country gets the labour it needs.

30. These acts of “self-harm” are committed to appease racism, win votes. It means a lurch further to the far right. In order to beat the far right, adopt more of a far-right approach. Appeasing the mob becomes more important than doing the hard work of fixing past and present political failures.

29. Where are immigrant families meant to go when asylum and immigration legislation virtually guarantees that they will end up destitute because there is plans for a zero safety net and 100% punitive measures. Of course, blame the victim. Who cares if Cathy doesn’t have a home to go to?