NURSES PAYING PRICE OF MIGRANT CRISIS
As Suella signs £63m deal with France to fight Channel mayhem, here’s why it MUST deliver...
HOSPITAL nurses are being forced out of hotel rooms to make way for asylum seekers, it emerged last night.
The Home Office has given foreign nurses studying for UK qualifications – to help ease NHS staffing pressures – less than a month to move out of their accommodation.
The move threatens to deepen the staffing crisis at the trust affected, with a senior executive warning it will put its hospitals in a ‘very vulnerable’ position.
It comes as Home Secretary Suella Braverman yesterday signed a £63million deal with France in the latest attempt to tackle the Channel migrant crisis. The
settlement will see the British taxpayer foot the bill for anti-people trafficking measures on the French coast, including officers from the UK Border Force being deployed alongside gendarmes for the first time as well as in French control centres.
The number of gendarmes on beach patrols will increase by 40 per cent over the next five months and the British cash will pay for more helicopters, drones and CCTV to spot migrants and facilitate interception.
Writing in the Mail, Mrs Braverman today warns the surge of migrants is putting ‘intolerable pressure’ on UK accommodation and public services.
And in a stark illustration of the Home Secretary’s warning, officials scouring the country for places to put up thousands of migrants have block-booked two hotels in York used for foreign nurses while they prepare for exams.
York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been forced to recruit from abroad due to a critical shortage of British nurses, and pays for their accommodation while they take the exams. There are currently 82 foreign nurses in one York hotel and 17 more due next month.
In September, the trust, which runs two general hospitals, had 130 nursing vacancies and bosses hoped to reduce the figure to around 50 by December.
But hospital management were stunned to discover their plan to plug a staffing gap could be derailed by asylum seekers arriving in boats from France.
It comes after the Mail this month revealed RNLI volunteers, training to save people from the seas, had to leave a hotel on the Wirral part-way through their stay to make way for asylum seekers.
Lee Anderson, Tory MP for Ashfield and Eastwood, said: ‘Our Government and the whole of Parliament should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen. Not only do we have lifeboat volunteers kicked out, now it’s the turn of our NHS workers. Where will this stop?’
Polly McMeekin, from the York and Scarborough trust, told a board meeting that the trust had been given four weeks to vacate two hotels because the Home Office wanted to use them for ‘the next couple of years’.
She said the trust objected and it was then given until December to vacate the rooms. ‘York has a dearth of accommodation,’ she said. ‘[This] leaves us with no other accommodation – we’ve explored the military, we’ve explored universities.’
The move would leave the hospital in a ‘very vulnerable’ position, she added. ‘This is a vulnerability in our international recruitment pipeline.’
The city’s Labour MP Rachael Maskell said last night up to 450 asylum seekers are expected to be housed in York from next month. Commenting on news nurses were being forced out of hotels, she said: ‘The whole situation is completely broken, that is evident.’ The Home Office was contacted for comment last night.
Mrs Braverman was in Paris early yesterday morning to sign the new deal with her French counterpart Gerald Darmanin.
The pact was given a cautious welcome by Tory MPs last night, as the Home Secretary described it as a ‘big step forward’.
However, Downing Street confirmed the deal does not include any performance targets for the French, such as stopping a higher proportion of migrant boats.
Britain has already paid £175million to France to police the Channel border since 2018, with the latest sum taking it to more than £230million.
As Mrs Braverman signed the agreement, it emerged more than 1,800 migrants arrived in the UK at the weekend, bringing the total since the start of the year to 41,729, up from 28,526 arrivals last year.
In the Commons yesterday Sir Roger Gale, Tory MP for North Thanet, said the settlement was a ‘modest step towards solving the much greater problem’.
And Conservative Tim Loughton questioned whether the Home Office was ‘throwing good money after bad’.
The Home Office has previously failed to secure an agreement for migrant boats to be turned back towards France.
Yesterday’s deal did not change this, but the issue could be reopened in the future.
Rishi Sunak said the new deal was ‘just a start’, adding: ‘I’m confident we can get the numbers down, but I also want to be honest with people that it isn’t a single thing that will magically solve this.’