Share a hotel room, asylum seekers are ordered

THOUSANDS of asylum seekers are to be forced to share hotel rooms as part of efforts to drive down costs.

Ministers will roll out the policy nationally after asylum seekers staged a pavement protest in central London after being forced to give up single en suite hotel rooms in which they had lived for up to two years.

Ministers aim to save the taxpayer more than £250million this year alone.

It comes as a new survey highlighted concern over immigration. Savanta found 60 per cent of Conservative voters say the Government is handling immigration “badly”, and 36 per cent said Rishi Sunak’s team is handling the issue “very badly”.

The 40 migrants abandoned their protest after being warned by the Home Office that they would lose their right to public funding for housing, food or money if they refused to share four to a room with two bunk beds. They returned to the Comfort Inn in Pimlico on Friday after the three-day protest during which the migrants from countries including Iraq, Iran, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia barricaded the hotel entrance with their baggage.

Operation Maximise was thought up by Robert Jenrick, the Immigration Minister, to cut the £6million daily cost of housing some 50,000 asylum seekers in hotels across the UK. Groups of two, three or four single adult males will share a single room rather than have individual rooms.

Ministers believe that it will not only save the taxpayer millions but will also act as a deterrent as people smugglers promote hotels and UK tourist sights to persuade migrants to make the dangerous Channel crossing in small boats.

A Government source said: “The aim is to reduce the need for hotels – by maximising the ones we have – saving the taxpayer money and reducing the pull factor to the UK of accommodating economic migrants in hotels which are more luxurious than our European counterparts.”

The move comes on top of plans to house 10,000 migrants in disused RAF airfields at Scampton in Lincolnshire and Wethersfield in Essex, a former prison in Bexhill, East Sussex, Catterick barracks in North Yorkshire, a barge moored off Dorset, and other locations.

The barge – Bibby Stockholm – is to be towed within days from a refit to Portland where it will house 500 single male migrants. Scampton and Wethersfield are the subject of high court legal challenges by their local councils but ministers hope to open them by August to house Channel migrants transferred

from the processing centre at Manston, Dover. Ministers have set up a unit of 400 caseworkers to clear 17,000 Albanian asylum applicants, most of whom are expected to be rejected as coming from a “safe” country.

It is part of an effort to remove all Albanians who entered the UK illegally after a record 12,000 crossed the Channel last year. Ministers believe the threat of removal is the single biggest deterrent to small boat crossings, with Albanians accounting for just two per cent of the 7,610 so far this year.

Ministers are likely to face a legal challenge over Operation Maximise, as anyone who refused an offer could face destitution without public funds. There is, however, a recognised counter to that if a person makes themselves “intentionally homeless”.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “This is the hostile environment writ large with the Government viewing those who have escaped tyrannical rule in countries such as Iran and Afghanistan or bombs and bullets in countries such as Syria as undeserving of being treated with basic human decency.

“There would be no need to use hotels if years of mismanagement hadn’t led to an asylum backlog of 170,000 with initial decisions taking more than an average of 18 months.”

One of the Pimlico asylum seekers, a teacher aged 50 from Syria said he paid traffickers £20,000 to bring him across the Channel from France in a dinghy with 25 others. He was rescued by the Royal Navy when the dinghy sank and he had to swim towards the ship.

The father of three said: “We gave up our protest at midnight because we were told we would be made homeless if we didn’t return to our hotel room. We were too frightened to carry on. The rooms are too small for four men but we are being treated well and are given food, wi-fi and £8 a week.”

A Savanta survey of 2,271 UK adults found just one in five of Conservative voters believe the Government is handling immigration well. More than half of all voters said the Government was handling it badly – regardless of their political leanings. According to the polling, 39 per cent of people now believe that Labour are best-placed to handle the issue, compared to 26 per cent who opted for the Conservatives.