The former Director General of UK Border Force has taken aim at Labour's "unrealistic" asylum hotels target, warning Sir Keir Starmer's "biggest political error" in tackling the migrant crisis.

Labour's pledge to end the use of asylums hotels by 2029 has been dismissed as "unrealistic" by the country's very own borders watchdog.

David Bolt, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, told peers he "wasn’t convinced smashing the gangs was the right way of thinking about things".

Speaking to GB News, ex-Director General of UK Border Force Tony Smith said that Starmer's decision to scrap the Rwanda deportation scheme was the "biggest political error of our time".

Tony Smith hit out at Labour's 'unrealistic' target of removing asylum seeker hotels by 2029

Smith said of Labour's current asylum hotel target: "It's important to recognise that David Bolt is allowed to come out and say what he thinks, and I think he's come out and said exactly what you and I have been saying for a while.

"It is unrealistic to be able to expect us to wipe out the backlog of people in hotels by 2029. And equally, smashing the gangs alone is not going to stop the boats."

Highlighting the sheer scale of asylum seekers and illegal migrants Britain is currently trying to process, Smith added: "We've had a record number, over 108,000 asylum applications over the last year, and they've not really made any dent in the numbers of hotels.

"We had a report just last month, which said that actually we're going to end up spending three times more than we thought we would in 2019 on asylum hotels, because we simply haven't got anywhere to put the migrants. Where are they going to go?"

According to official Government data, 50,976 asylum appeals remain unresolved as of March this year

Warning that the costs of housing migrants will shift from the Home Office to "local authorities" once hotels are closed, Smith cautioned: "They can't really grant their way out of this, because if they don't grant their way out of this and let everybody stay, they've still got to live somewhere.

"And that will simply shift the cost of housing them from the Home Office budget onto local authorities that are already struggling to find housing for their own indigenous communities, which in turn, leads to community unrest and housing of multiple occupancy."

Criticising Labour's efforts to tackle Britain's migrant crisis, Smith argued that there is "no evidence about how they're going to do this".

Smith told GB News: "We may have some collaborative agreements with some European countries, but smashing the gangs on its own is not going to be working. We've been trying to do that for a long time. Believe me, the NCA, Border Force, we've been on this for a long, long time. We've been trying to do that, we know it doesn't work.

Smith told GB News that Border Force have been trying to 'smash the gangs' for a 'long time'

"The only thing that really works, which is the Australian model of stopping the boats, was a removals deterrent. And we had that, didn't we, with Rwanda."

Defending the Rwanda plan further, Smith concluded: "We were there or thereabouts with Rwanda, and I think the abolition of the Rwanda plan for what were essentially politically ideological reasons rather than any common sense reasons, to just scrap it without giving it an opportunity to run. We'll never know now if that would have had the effect.

"I thought that was a very bold attempt to say, 'no, you can't come in here, you can't claim asylum, we're not having you'. You wouldn't have to put people in hotels, they wouldn't even be here. You wouldn't have to detain them, they'd be in Rwanda.

"And I think once that message got out, maybe, just maybe, that might have a very significant impact. I think scrapping that has been one of the biggest political errors of our time."