A border control expert has lashed out at Labour over its “outrageous abuse of British people” after councils have started to eye up a new Home Office scheme to prioritise migrants over Britons.

Last week, the People’s Channel exclusively revealed around 20 local councils have expressed an interest in a Home Office scheme which plans to house asylum seekers in newly revamped council homes.

The plan, which comes at the eye-watering pricetag of £500million, will fund building new homes and refurbishing derelict sites as the Home Office attempts to close all 198 remaining asylum hotels.

Brighton & Hove, Hackney, Peterborough, Thanet and Powys all expressed an interest at the end of last year.

GB News has now been told 17 local authorities registered interest or have requested further information about taking part in the pilot scheme.

But ex-Ukip leader Henry Bolton lashed out at the plan, adding it was an inevitability of Labour’s bid to end the use of asylum hotels.

He told host Dawn Neesom: “The Government was always going to go down this route of using rented accommodation and social housing to accommodate the people they’ve moved out of hotels.

“That was always going to be the case. And I tried to warn of that. But, you know, here we are.

“It’s not a surprise, is it? It’s an outrageous abuse of the facilities that we’ve got here in the United Kingdom that were built and, and sort of the whole sort of mechanism of social housing was created to look after British people.

“It’s been paid for by British people, by British taxpayers. And here we are actually handing it over to others.”

Instead, Mr Bolton urged Labour to establish a detention facility and moving asylum seekers into secure accommodation until they would be deported or remove them – or they choose to leave.

He explained: “Now that that actually would cost us less than the hotels or the social housing by about two thirds so it’s a no brainer.

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“But we’re not going to go down that route because no Government so far has had the decisiveness to come up with a really strategic solution here.

“They’re all cowardly. They don’t want it. They’re afraid of upsetting different communities. They’re cowardly. They’re looking to manage the problem, not solve it.

“And therein lies the difficulty. No leadership.”

He called on the Government to axe the demand to come to Britain, creating an effective deterrant by making the nation as unappealing as possible to asylum seekers.

He raged: “We continue to make the United Kingdom an attractive destination. And this just adds to that whole thing and they’ll be laughing at us.

“This will be used as a marketing tool by the criminal people and smugglers. Yeah, there’s no question of that. On every level, this is a total failure, Dawn. It’s another capitulation.”

So far, Barnet, Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole, Cheltenham, East Riding of Yorkshire, East Suffolk, Folkestone & Hythe, Medway, Moray, North Devon, Oxford, the Highlands, and West Oxfordshire have all explored participation.

GB News has reached out to the Home Office for a response, but they have yet to reply.

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