内容摘要："Almost half of our towns are at risk of depopulation," he said in autumn 2024. "We have elderly people who need a caregiver, companies looking for programmers, technicians and bricklayers... The key to migration is in managing it well."

"Almost half of our towns are at risk of depopulation," he said in autumn 2024. "We have elderly people who need a caregiver, companies looking for programmers, technicians and bricklayers... The key to migration is in managing it well."

The figures were published on the Home Office website with no accompanying notification to media.Foreign aid is supposed to be spent alleviating poverty by providing humanitarian and development assistance overseas.

But under international rules, governments can spend some of their foreign aid budgets at home to support asylum seekers during the first year after their arrival.According to the most recent Home Office figures, there are about 32,000 asylum seekers in hotels in the UK.Labour promised in its manifesto to "end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds".

Contracts signed by the Conservative government in 2019 were expected to see £4.5bn of public cash paid to three companies to accommodate asylum seekers over a 10-year period.On June 3, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told the Home Affairs Committee she was "concerned about the level of money" being spent on asylum seekers' accommodation and added: "We need to end asylum hotels altogether."

The Home Office said it was trying to bear down on the numbers by reducing the time asylum seekers can appeal against decisions. It is also planning to introduce tighter financial eligibility checks to ensure only those without means are housed.

But Whitehall officials and international charities have said the Home Office has no incentive to reduce ODA spending because the money does not come out of its budgets.Of course, any chance of a really positive outcome disappeared years ago. Closure now would mean either finding Madeleine McCann's body, or finding her living with another family, unable to remember her parents or her younger twin siblings.

But, frustrated as residents are when the world's media return to Praia da Luz - year after year at the same time that purple flowers appear on the jacaranda trees - they do understand the unbearable pain that Kate and Gerry McCann must feel.How that shock of realisation that Madeleine was not in her bed turned into minutes, then hours, and then days of panic. Then tortuous, unending months and years of uncertainty.

For 13 years there was no single theory as to what happened to Madeleine McCann. Did she wake up in the middle of an opportunistic burglary and have to be silenced? Was she abducted on behalf of a couple desperate for a child of their own? Had her own parents covered up her accidental death? (A theory given sufficient weight by Portuguese prosecutors that for a while Kate and Gerry McCann were officially under suspicion.)The initial Portuguese investigation failed to preserve the scene adequately, so the opportunity to gather forensic evidence from Madeline McCann's room at the Ocean Club was lost. Long-term residents remember joining in uncoordinated and ad-hoc searches of the town.