Petition to stop 'financial and other support for asylum seekers' surges to 100k signatures

"This petition is to urge the Government to discontinue these support measures and payments," it adds.

Though the petition has been active since the start of the year, it had gained tens of thousands of signatures in the last day alone - and reached the 100,000 mark on Tuesday evening.

That brought it into the top 10 petitions currently running on the Government's website, a few thousand below a landmark poll to protect Northern Ireland veterans from prosecutions.

Now, it is slated to be considered for debate among MPs.

Reacting to the petition crossing the 100,000 mark, Reform UK's Lee Anderson blasted: "They're not asylum seekers. They're illegal migrants."

According to the Home Office, aid spending on refugees in the UK - which the department calls "in-donor refugee costs" - sat at over £2billion in 2024, down from a peak of £4.2billion the year before.

But the petition follows a string of reports which have exposed just where that money is going.

MORE ON BRITAIN'S MIGRANT CRISIS:

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• WATCH: ‘We don’t know who they are!’ Mark White warns of threat as illegal Channel crossings spike

Earlier this year, councils across Britain were found to have spent £141million of taxpayers' money since 2022 providing asylum seekers with PlayStations, DJ lessons and football match tickets.

An audit by The Telegraph of 110 local authorities found that migrants in hotels were given game consoles and yoga classes paid for by the public purse.

The petition's warning about aid serving as an "incentive" for asylum seekers to cross the Channel also follows Labour's repealing of the former Tory Government's Rwanda scheme - which the Conservatives said would have served as a functional deterrent.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said the move to cancel the Rwanda scheme was a "catastrophic mistake".

"Common sense tells us that illegal migrants would not want to come to the UK if they faced the prospect of being removed to Rwanda," he added.

The petition, and Philp's scathing attacks on the canning of the Rwanda plan, followed the arrival of some 1,195 small boat migrants over the weekend.

On Saturday, British and French lifeboats had to be called in to help border patrol vessels on both sides of the Channel deal with the huge numbers crossing.

The latest arrivals smashed the record daily total for 2025, as people smugglers pushed out multiple migrant boats from a huge stretch of French coastline.