Ministers on the hunt for camp sites to stop migrants’ luxury hotels stays
MINISTERS are hunting for migrant camp sites to end the lure of “luxurious” hotel stays for new arrivals.
High-end accommodation will be ditched in favour of simple living quarters to help reduce the £6.8million daily bill housing asylum seekers and Channel crossers.
Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick told the Commons yesterday that “deterrence” must be part of the approach , indicating exorbitant priced hotels are acting as a “pull factor”.
He said: “The hotels are not a sustainable answer, we want to ensure we exit the hotels as quickly as possible and to do that we will need to disperse individuals to other forms of accommodation.
“We may need to take some larger sites to provide decent but basic accommodation and of course we will need to get through the backlog so that we can get more people out of the system.”
He added it was “not appropriate that we are putting up asylum seekers in luxurious hotels”.
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He said the reduction would come by returning them to their home nation or granting asylum so they can start contributing to the UK.
Home Office-hired hotels include the four-star Great Hallingbury Manor, near Bishop’s Stortford, Essex, and the 67-bedroom Dolphin Inn beside the picturesque River Ouse, in St Ives, Cambs.
Mr Jenrick said there had been a “significant reduction” in the number of people at the Manston migrant processing centre, Kent, with below the maximum 1,600 currently there - after 2,300 had been moved out.
Business Secretary Grant Shapps yesterday told how Manston site was “tipping into becoming an unofficial detention centre” during his short time in the Home Office.
