Burnham tells GB News small boats could run for years as he pushes migrant housing onto wealthy areas

The Prime Minister has told GB News that Labour can't commit to stopping the small boats crisis by the end of this Parliament. Andy Burnham also said that "all parts of the country" - including wealthy areas - must house asylum seekers, after a leafy village revolted over plans for large-scale accommodation.

GB News reports Burnham's admission on the timeline, and his separate call for the middle classes to "shoulder their share" of the migrant crisis. The Express carries fury from unnamed sources that crossings "could continue for years", calling the situation "chaos". The same paper reports that Burnham is under pressure over "constant U-turns" and that he "could scrap" a policy introduced by his predecessor Rachel Reeves, though the detail of that policy isn't specified across the cluster.

The framing is revealing. Burnham is attempting to shift the argument from numbers to distribution - if the arrivals can't be stopped quickly, the political question becomes who houses them and where. Pushing accommodation into areas that voted Conservative is both practically necessary (the capacity has to go somewhere) and a tactical dispersal of the backlash. The risk is that it turns a coastal problem into a national one, and gives every constituency a reason to be angry at once.

What to watch: whether the by-election results in formerly safe Conservative seats show any movement on this question, and whether Burnham names a date by which he expects the crossings to fall materially. Without a date, "years" can mean anything.