Row as French buy 62 budget hotels to house migrants

Budget hotels will be used to try to solve France’s growing migrant crisis.

Thousands of asylum seekers – including many hoping to get to Britain – will be put up in 62 hotels of the F1 chain, which have been bought up by the government for at least £100million.

The move to use the hotels, which are dotted throughout the country’s motorway network, has caused outrage with the country’s far-Right National Front party saying a ‘red carpet’ was being rolled out for people with no official status.

However president Emmanuel Macron said the ‘worthy accommodation’ was being set aside for ‘whose who are persecuted, for freedom fighters’. He added that the cost would work out far less than the £230million currently spent every year in putting up the homeless in private hotels.

Those set to move into the 9,000 emergency places include thousands displaced by the closure of the Calais Jungle refugee camp last October.

Mr Macron wants them all off the street, although he insisted that everything would be done to prevent economic migrants taking advantage of the accommodation. Rooms at F1 hotels cost as little as £17 a night, and the chain is used by some seven million people a year, according to owner Accor.

The French government will convert the centres at a cost of more than £30million. While there will also be places for battered wives and homeless French nationals, the majority of occupants will be migrants.

Locals in the town of Semeac, near Tarbes, south-western France, built an 8ft wall in front of their designated F1 last week in an attempt to stop migrants moving in.

Meanwhile a police union spokesman in Bailleul, northern France, has described the plan to fill a former FI on the motorway leading to Calais as ‘pure madness’.

National Front vice- president Jean-Lin Lacapelle last month said: ‘ French justice can now evict French compatriots because they no longer have the means to pay their rent, while we put out a red carpet in ... hotels for migrants who aren’t meant to be here.’