A billion is a big number. Like, really big. You could count out loud to a million by next Thursday. Count up to a billion and you’d finish in the year 2057. Your kids would be grandparents, we’d be living on the Moon, hovvering around on jet-packs, that sort of thing. And we’d have successfully sent back, ohhhh, about 27 illegal migrants to France.

That’s how big a number a billion is. So you can’t have failed to have been shocked, no, that’s not a huge enough word, banjaxed, dumbfounded, your flabber well and truly gasted, at the news the Home Office has ‘squandered’ BILLIONS of pounds on asylum hotels.

That’s billions of pounds which you have gone out to earn, day in day out, peeling yourself out of bed in the morning, working your butt off all day, and coming home knackered at night – to pay for people arriving via a criminal network, most of whom have no right to be here.

It goes without saying none of them, not a single one, has paid a penny into the system supporting them.

You have.

Do-gooders, and that means you too because you’re a Brit and doing good is largely what we do – refuse to countenance the numbers or the cost.

But we really need to, because whatever your moral or political take on the small boats issue, a nation currently holding a one-way ticket to bankruptcy just can’t afford it.

Everything currently making you tear your hair out about this country is right there in today’s new report on the Home Office isn’t it?

The weakness and witlessness of our politicians, the incompetence, arrogance and laziness of what passes for our Civil Service, those grasping businesses lining their pockets at our expense, and that age-old pastime of the public sector.. throwing your money around with neither professionalism nor accountability because, hey, there’s plenty more where that came from.

(A message Rachel Reeves will be hammering home in a few days time when she demands even more money from you.)

According to what was today described as “one of the most damning reports ever published into Britain’s dysfunctional Home Office”, the UK – that means you – will spend almost £16BILLION on housing illegal migrants over the next few years. That is SO much money it parallels the cost of a major Government department like, say, Culture Media and Sport.

And, let’s be honest, you can see it coming down the tracks can’t you.. the Department of Illegal Migration.

You can read the report into the Home Office for yourselves elsewhere but let me give you a flavour: “incompetence”, “failed, chaotic and expensive”, “manifest failure”, “excessive profits”, “not up to this challenge”, “inexplicable and unacceptable failure of accountability”.

You’ll be getting the idea by now.

A truly breath-taking betrayal of the people of Britain.

Committee chairwoman the Tory MP Dame Karen Bradley said: “The Home Office has presided over a failing asylum accommodation system that has cost taxpayers billions of pounds.

“Its response to increasing demand has been rushed and chaotic, and the department has neglected the day-to-day management of these contracts.

“The Government needs to get a grip on the asylum accommodation system in order to bring costs down and hold providers to account for poor performance. Urgent action is needed.”

And she’s right. But it’s just more words isn’t it? And don’t think the irony that it was largely a Conservative Government which presided over most of this mess is lost on us.

We’ve had 20 years of words.. and the boats keep coming in ever greater numbers.

It’s probably time for action. And if that means breaking that most nebulous of things “international law” then it is time to sit down and change international law. And if that causes a bunch of international lawyers to clutch their pearls, so be it.

The tail has wagged the dog for too long.