CUMBRIA’S ASYLUM RENT PUZZLE

CUMBRIA: 28/04/2025: EXCLUSIVE. *UPDATED: 9.11pm.

WITH property rental prices in Cumbria often sky-high and affordable flats in the Lake District a thing of the past, all of Cumbria’s MPs should this week be going out of their way to clarify the rabid speculation here that the Government ‘plans’ to offer local landlords FIVE YEARS rent upfront to accommodate more of our, er, sea-faring chums from overseas.

Since the end of last week, you’ll probably have seen Cumbria featured on a list and map.

It’s alleged that the list and map shows those parts of the country where Serco – Government provider of board and lodgings for our next generation of, er, doctors, astronauts & engineers – is seeking more properties and landlords to come forward.

Former Council areas of Cumbria were featured – Barrow, Carlisle, Eden, Allerdale, Copeland and South Lakeland.

As well as five years’ rent upfront, another incentive for landlords, according to The Guardian, is that agreements for asylum accommodation include all flat repairs and property maintenance costs being paid for by the Bank of Taxpayer!

Meanwhile, lucky tenants awaiting their asylum claim will be handsomely rewarded for er, doing nothing, by having their rent paid, their Council Tax, and their utility bills, reports letting agency magazine, The Negotiator.

(Somebody get me a Hello Kitty lilo while I cut up my passport.)

The story has been very widely reported, not least in The Telegraph and GB News – two outlets well-known for their calm, objective and reasoned analysis.

Reacting to these claims, the Government has since rushed out an official statement to insist that the map and list are not what they have been reported to be.

Has the media and social media gone off half-cocked about the map in the run-up to this week’s important local elections?

Was it a vicious rumour, politically motivated?

If so, Hu Flung Dung?

Whitehaven and Workington Labour MP Josh MacAlister today blamed the Tories and Reform.

To his credit, the greatest living politician in the world ever, was at least, one of the few local Labour MPs here to speak out and directly communicate with the public.

Yet on Saturday, Mark Jenkinson, former Tory MP for Workington, said this:

“Labour’s plan to hoover up rented houses in every Cumbrian borough to house asylum seekers through Serco….Will our new Labour MPs stand up and fight it?…they said they’d ‘Smash the Gangs’, instead they’re providing them with free accommodation.”

Then on Monday night, he added:

From a Government perspective, the list doing the rounds is: “Not a Home Office list of existing or future asylum accommodation,” it said.

Instead, what the list shows, says the Government, are those areas of the country where asylum seekers were previously dispersed under the last Tory Government.

This has a ring of truth about it because Cumbria’s former councils did accept hundreds of asylum seekers as part of a nationwide Government ‘dispersal’ policy.

(Former Council boundaries that no longer exist were also clearly identified on the map.)

The page on Serco’s website, entitled: “Calling All Landlords” which contained the original list and map has since been deleted.

The Negotiator reckoned it had been online for five years, rather than being a fresh call out to landlords.

Meanwhile, visitors arriving at Serco’s webpage are told: “This page is no longer available”.

What has arrested some people’s eye is that just two weeks ago, Westmorland and Lonsdale Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron apparently posed a number of asylum-based questions to Labour’s Yvette Cooper MP, Home Secretary.

Saint Timothy’s questions – matters very close to the heart of all his voters – were as follows:

Q1: “To ask the Secretary of State what steps she is taking to support local authorities to provide housing for people seeking asylum.

Q2: To ask the Secretary of State what assessment she has made of the potential merits of local authorities providing housing for people seeking asylum.

Tim did not mention specific Councils in Cumbria but he, of course, represents a particular corner of this county.

Was he asking on behalf of Wokemoreland and Farcical Council, or councils everywhere?

(If there is such a thing as the milk of human kindness, Rev’d Timothy is the cow.)

It’s on occasions like this, amid a whirl of counter-claim and misinformation, that all of Cumbria’s MPs and our newspapers could do the public a real service by clarifying what the frig is going on before the natives start reaching for the pitchforks...

Isn’t that what their Press Officers are paid for?

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