Britain's asylum crisis: Housing migrants at a daily cost of £6.8 million to taxpayers

Cities, towns and villages from London to rural Lincolnshire, Wales’s Snowdonia to Devon seaside resorts, are providing emergency rooms, at up to £150 a night per person, for thousands of arrivals needing a roof over their heads in the growing immigration crisis.

It is thought at least 200 hotels have now been taken over by the Government, housing some 37,000 migrants. Approximately a third are marked on this map, including a cluster of 20 in the West Midlands, housing hundreds of migrant guests.

The Mail has discovered that some state-requisitioned hotels, now closed to the visiting public, have given sanctuary to young men earmarked for deportation after slipping into the UK on traffickers’ Channel boats within the past few weeks.

We have interviewed a young Albanian who paid £4,500 for the clandestine journey to Dover from France, and was then sent to Manston processing centre in Kent for initial identity checks.

He was placed on immigration bail — meaning he was liable to be dispatched back to Albania — yet was still given a room at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Basingstoke, Hampshire, where he was free to come and go.

He has since walked out of the hotel and is in hiding somewhere in the UK (from where he gave us an interview) despite being a suspected illegal immigrant.

He told us: ‘I arrived on October 25 in Dover. I was sent to a place called Manston processing centre and put with 300 other Albanians in one building.

‘They took my fingerprints. We were surrounded by guards. Thanks to the big scandal about this centre being overcrowded, I was let out without asking anything more about who I was. I was put on a bus with black-tinted windows in the middle of the night and brought to a hotel with other Albanians.

‘If you do not return to the hotel, you are listed as a missing person. That is all. I am no longer there. I am with my relatives in the UK.’

But the lack of security regarding hotel ‘guests’ — as Border Force staff are instructed to call migrants — is not the only issue. In other hotels, some have protested over conditions.

At the Holiday Inn, Colchester, two visitors staged a roof-top protest last week which was recorded on video and went viral online. The men shouted their demands in Urdu — the language of Pakistan — and were brought down to safety by police.

Meanwhile, hotels in the most picturesque parts of the country now have migrant ‘guests’ as MPs complain of a lack of consultation by the Government over the take-overs.

At Snowdonia’s Hilton Garden Inn, which overlooks an ornamental lake, a staff member on the reception desk told the Mail: ‘All reservations and events have been cancelled while we take in refugees. We will open again next February, maybe March.’

Local MP Robin Millar said this week: ‘I am concerned about the impact on local communities and the suitability of this property, in this location, for this purpose. It is a hotel, not a detention centre’.

In Blackpool, where the Illuminations season is bringing thousands of visitors to the Lancashire seaside resort, MP Paul Maynard spoke out in Parliament about the famous Metropole Hotel being requisitioned. He said the promenade site was unsuitable for them or the community as it stood in an area which already had social problems.

Difficulties of a similar kind have emerged in Essex where the four-star Great Hallingbury Manor has been taken over to house 50 male migrants aged under 40 from North Africa, with two staff looking after them, according to locals.

The Tudor-style property has 44 double rooms, 20 in chalets in its wooded grounds near a lake, a picnic area, and barbecue site. A sign on the door states clearly: ‘Our hotel is closed to the public. Apologies for any inconvenience.’

A member of staff reportedly told a visiting journalist: ‘They have the run of the hotel, the bedrooms are very comfortable. There are three meals a day, but some have complained about what is served. They spend their days walking about or playing football.’

Another Home Office-requisitioned hotel causing controversy — at least among disgruntled locals — is The Dolphin Hotel beside the Great Ouse river in St Ives, Cambridgeshire.

It has glorious views of a 15th-century bridge, and there are big-screen TVs for the migrant visitors to enjoy. However, one local — who asked not to be named — said: ‘People used to spend a fortune to stay here or live nearby overlooking the river. It is more like a student halls of residence now.’ Meanwhile, people living near the Holiday Inn Express, Rotherham, have complained about the noise. They say that men housed at the hotel play ‘really loud music all night long’.

Local MP John Healey said the hotel is ‘unsuited’ as accommodation for 130 refugees. He said this is because the area is far from the town centre and there is already a shortage of NHS capacity, adding that using hotels in this way was the result of a failing and unfair asylum system.

Joe Theaker, an HGV driver who lives nearby, called for a curfew as his children cannot sleep.

In Bristol, a group of migrants living at the Holiday Inn near the airport have said they are ‘cut off from shops, people, and asylum seekers’ services’. The 100 young men from Sudan, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Somalia, have to take buses into the city for medical or legal appointments.

Living in finer style near Grantham in Lincolnshire are migrants at another four-star hotel, Stoke Rochford Hall. Advertised as a luxury Victorian country mansion, set within formal landscaped gardens, the establishment has been criticised for cancelling weddings while migrants have been given residence. During a parliamentary debate this week after the ‘Downton Abbey-style’ hotel’s use was highlighted by The Mail on Sunday, Edward Leigh, a Conservative MP in the county, said the hotel normally charged £400 a night. He described it as a ‘farce’ compounded by the swift way migrants found themselves in hotel accommodation after arrival.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11418641/The-map-shows-scale-asylum-crisis-number-hotels-used-house-migrants.html

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