Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer is facing growing criticism over his claim this week that there is “lots of housing available” to accommodate asylum seekers and Britons currently in temporary accommodation.

Specifically, he said: “Oh, there is lots of housing and many local authorities that can be used. We’re identifying where it can be used.”

At the House of Commons liaison committee this week he was challenged to give an example of where the surplus housing was available but he failed to do so, saying instead he would write to the committee chair – Dame Meg Hillier – with a response. 

Hillier, a senior Labour backbench MP, told him: “I have to say, in a number of our local authorities there isn’t a lot of spare housing available. If there were, then councils would be able to be dealing with it by now.”

The Liaison Committee – made up of MPs who chair various Commons select committees – put it to Starmer that local councils looking to house homeless families were competing with the Home Office, which is seeking to house asylum seekers.

Leading Tories have blasted the Prime Minister. Robert Jenrick says: “There are 1.3 m people on social housing waiting lists in England alone. But Keir Starmer believes there’s ‘lots of housing’ spare. That’s madness.”

And the new shadow housing secretary, Sir James Cleverly, comments: “I was furious, I genuinely couldn’t believe he said this, when the Prime Minister was at the liaison committee and blithely said, ‘Oh there are plenty of houses around the UK for asylum seekers’. When there are people telling us and telling him that they’re struggling to get on the housing ladder and he dismisses their concerns in one line and once again demonstrates he is more interested in finding accommodation for asylum seekers than for hard-working young people here in the UK and that is toxic.”

Separately, in an interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Cleverly said: “We’ve got a government that made big promises when it came to housebuilding and is spectacularly failing to deliver on those promises and that is generating a lot of frustration, particularly with young people waiting to get on the housing ladder.”

He said that was “amplified by the Prime Minister sitting at the liaison committee claiming there are plenty of spare houses for asylum seekers, while people are struggling to get on the housing ladder”.