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Make it make sense: Labour’s new migration clampdown quietly hands private corporations the tools to track, monitor and report “irregular migrants” — all while suggesting there’s “lots of housing” for them.

The government has begun sharing the locations of asylum seeker hotels with food delivery platforms, including Deliveroo, Just Eat, and Uber Eats, in a move more at home in a Home Office surveillance memo than a Labour manifesto.

The stated goal is to help these firms identify “suspicious activity” — such as app accounts spending too much time near accommodation sites — in order to uncover “illegal working” by asylum seekers who are not legally allowed to take employment while their status is undecided.

This signals a dangerous shift.

Labour is outsourcing enforcement to tech companies, instead of tackling the root causes of the UK’s migration and asylum challenges.

The government is turning asylum seekers into suspects, and delivery drivers into potential informants – all of it cloaked in the language of “loopholes” and “illegal working.”

It really amounts to a corporate-backed surveillance dragnet — one that disproportionately targets the people Labour once claimed to stand for: the vulnerable, the displaced, and the working class.

When surveillance replaces policy

The data-sharing deal is a sign of a government with no clear, humane plan for asylum.

Banning work for asylum seekers, cramming people into hotels, and then watching them struggle to survive — it’s a vicious cycle. It isn’t immigration policy – it’s containment.

While the government insists this is about stopping “illegal working,” the facts remain: seeking asylum is not illegal.

That’s why ministers and spokespeople prefer terms like “irregular migration” — not because it’s more accurate, but because it hides the legal rights of the people being targeted.

Labour knows it can’t call these migrants “illegal” — so it criminalises them in practice instead, through data, restrictions, and suspicion.

A gaffe that cuts through the spin

While this surveillance scheme was being rolled out, Starmer made another unforced error — one that reveals the full disconnect between rhetoric and reality.

Speaking before the Liaison Committee, the Prime Minister breezily claimed there was “lots of housing available” for the rising numbers of asylum seekers and homeless people.

This wasn’t just a clumsy choice of words.

It was a demonstrable untruth — one that landed with a thud among millions of people facing unaffordable rents, housing insecurity, and years-long waiting lists.

Even Labour’s usual critics didn’t have to dig deep: the Tories jumped on the quote, with new shadow housing secretary Sir James Cleverly accusing Starmer of “amplifying public frustration.”

But for many, the insult landed long before the political fallout — especially among communities already dealing with social housing shortages and resentment about the use of hotels to house migrants.

The real message

The real message behind this policy isn’t about border security.

It’s about optics.

Starmer wants to be seen as “tough” — on migration, on enforcement, on “illegal working.”

But what he’s actually building is a new arm of the surveillance state, with corporations deputised to monitor the movements of people who haven’t committed any crime.

And when challenged on how the country will house those it refuses to support, Starmer shrugs and says there’s plenty of space.

There isn’t – for him, his policies, or his mistakes.

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