A few days ago, I rang to book a room at the Mercure Hotel in central Leeds for a weekend next January.
The answer was a firm no. ‘We’re not taking bookings from the public,’ said the female receptionist.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘We are not allowed to reveal that information,’ she replied sternly.
The Home Office has ordered the receptionist to keep quiet, causing outrage among the British public. The Mercure, along with 219 other hotels across the nation, is currently accommodating illegal migrants due to the overwhelmed asylum system.
The undisclosed use of hotels for housing controversial guests has sparked anger among the public, adding to the already significant social and economic costs of the crisis.
A group of males outside one of the 220 hotels currently housing migrants, in November
An investigation by the Mail has exposed the widespread use of migrant hotels in every region of England, including Cornwall, Northumbria, Lincolnshire, and the Welsh borders.
Office Christmas parties and wedding receptions booked for next year have been abruptly cancelled. Locals who used the swimming pools, gyms or cocktail bars find they are barred from entering the premises by guards wearing hi-vis jackets, who often speak little English themselves – again on the Government payroll.
Migrant numbers in the hotels are staggering. The properties are currently housing at least 36,000 (a jump of 21 percent since the July election) at a cost of several billion pounds a year to the taxpayer, according to figures released by the Government under pressure from MPs last month.
Labour promised in its manifesto to ‘end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds’. But the numbers have only gone up on their watch.
In most hotels, the guests are men, typically of fighting age, who have often left their wives and children at home back in the Middle East, South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa.
The majority have come on smugglers’ boats across the Channel, often throwing their passports or identity cards into the sea before reaching Britain. In countless cases, we don’t know who they are – and they don’t want us to.
On the South East coast, I have watched men disembarking, joyfully kissing the sand and giving the victory sign before being welcomed on to British soil.
When you or I come back into Britain from our summer holidays, we undergo extensive security checks at the airport. Yet these men are typically patted down by immigration officers for guns or knives, then given an identity number on a personal wristband before being invited in. Often their names are not even taken until much later.
I have seen boat arrivals ushered on to coaches to a processing centre in Manston, Kent, for so-called ‘background checks’, which often involve no more than the Border Force staff asking tick-box questions about their age, country of origin and name. Answers have to be taken at face value since many of the strangers offer no real proof of their identity. I know of cases where Iraqis say they are Iranians fleeing real oppression to up their chances of getting a hotel room and, later, asylum.
Today, these men are being sprinkled around the country to hotels, some near primary schools and many in university towns full of young women.
A video posted online shows two signs in one hotel’s lobby warning migrants not to ‘touch children without permission of their parents’.
One English village school, I am told, has got police involved over concerns about men from a nearby migrants’ hotel hanging around the grounds. The headteacher acted after worried parents threatened to withdraw their children in protest.
The hotels housing migrants are ferociously protected by the Home Office to safeguard the non-paying visitors from interacting with any Britons anxious to discover what on earth is happening on their patch
The hotels are ferociously protected by the Home Office. Not, as you might imagine, for the safety of the public – but to safeguard the non-paying visitors from interacting with any Britons anxious to discover what on earth is happening on their patch.
Walk up to the migrant hotels and expect to be greeted with hostility. ‘You can’t come in,’ I was told at the door of one in Kent by a guard with poor English this summer, when I tried to book a room in person. ‘We’re not answering any questions, either,’ he added as he pointed me out of the grounds.
Videos posted on social media reveal my treatment was mild. Locals filming hotel arrivals from the public road have been screamed at by security guards, chased away by police and, in one case, threatened by a migrant who was carrying a toddler in his arms.
Earlier this month, at the Madeley Court Hotel, a 16th century manor in Shropshire with lake views, Home Office guards called police, who arrived in six cars, to stop a social media film crew – so-called citizen journalists – capturing footage of the property which has housed Afghan, Iranian and Iraqi migrants over the past three years.
There are also fears that the hotels may become hotspots of criminal behaviour. A request to the Home Office for an independent review of the impact of migrant crime on the UK’s women and girls was made last week by Rupert Lowe, the Reform MP for Great Yarmouth.
He acted after asking the public to send him their experiences of living near the hotels and has said he is ‘astounded’ by the result. ‘Some of the communications I have received are heartbreaking. Are you comfortable with these unchecked foreign young males being free to roam the streets with British women and girls? Many are from cultures that do not respect women at all. This must be investigated by the Home Office which . . . is fearful of offending. That is wrong,’ he has posted on X/Twitter.
A worried group gather in Manchester to protest against asylum seekers being housed locally
Mr Lowe told how a parent in the Midlands had contacted him, saying: ’We’ve had issues at our local primary school. Children now need to be escorted to the gates by parents as men from a nearby migrant hotel keep trying to talk to the girls in particular. Should we tolerate this?’
When the Mail recently probed crimes committed by asylum seekers, we uncovered some disturbing cases within the hotels.
Musha Missa, 22, from Niger, was jailed for three months in October last year for starting a fire at his Home Office hotel in the seaside resort of Skegness, Lincolnshire, and assaulting a member of staff. He was frustrated over the slow progress of his two-year-old asylum claim.
Asylum seeker Ablolum Okbazge, 27, from a migrants’ hotel, was sentenced to nine years for the rape of a woman in Wigan town centre in 2021.
An Afghan ‘teenage’ migrant was convicted last year of sexually touching a 12-year-old boy in the bedroom of his Home Office hotel in Waltham Forest, east London. The predator was not named in court because he claimed to be a child and no one could prove otherwise as no age-tests had been conducted when he came into this country.
In another case, migrant-hotel resident Aymon Adam, 23, stalked a nightclub lavatory in November last year and tried to rape a woman and sexually assault a man. He had arrived on a Channel boat after ‘passing through several European countries’ and was living in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the court was told before he was convicted.
Alarming, too, was the bogus Afghan asylum seeker Rasuili Zubaidullah, who entered Britain on a smugglers’ boat to escape an Austrian murder investigation and was duly settled – with few questions about his background being asked – by the Home Office at a migrants’ hotel in Whitechapel, London.
A request to the Home Office for an independent review of the impact of migrant crime on the UK’s women and girls was made last week by Rupert Lowe, the Reform MP for Great Yarmouth
Sir Gavin Williamson, a former Tory Government minister and MP, asked the Government to regularly update the public how many hotels have been ‘repurposed’ to house asylum seekers since the election
Zubaidullah, 22, had drugged, raped and then killed a 13-year-old girl in Vienna only a few weeks before. He had used a fake name to dupe British immigration officials in Kent. It was only by luck that the Austrian authorities traced his illegal arrival here. They demanded his deportation and he was convicted.
These cases are only a snapshot because of the obsessive secrecy surrounding the hotels and their migrant residents. I have been told, and been given examples, of violent incidents being hushed up by the Home Office, with the perpetrator simply being moved on quietly to a hotel in another part of Britain.
Last week annual figures for crimes committed by Norway’s migrant population, similar in profile to our own, were published.
In the capital Oslo, Somali men aged 15-24 are charged with 2,120 crimes for every 1,000 individuals – that equates to 2.1 offences each every year. For young Iranian males there are 1,741 charges per 1,000 and for Ethiopians it is 1,439 per 1,000. By comparison, young Norwegian men are charged with just 210 crimes per 1,000 individuals.
As for the migrants themselves, they don’t seem happy either. One Sudanese 23-year-old called Omer who came in from France on a smugglers’ Channel boat on general election day five months ago was sent to a Hull hotel, via Manston processing centre, within three days of arriving illegally.
Peterborough’s Labour MP and councillors have told Dame Angela Eagle, the new minster responsible for border security and asylum, that local hotels are not a suitable migrant base because local services, such as doctors’ surgeries, will be overstretched by the numbers
Once there, he messaged me to say the food at the hotel was good, but Hull didn’t suit him. He wanted to move to Liverpool where his Sudanese friends – who had sailed over on the same boat – had been put in a hotel.
Omer and I kept in touch. He spells Hull as ‘Haul’ on text messages. He may be deserving (he has never told me why he came here) but has no inkling of Britain or British culture beyond what this country can provide for him. He has dreams of being given a house, an education and generous benefits.
‘When I get residency (asylum), I will move to another city,’ he confidently told me the other day. He already has an immigration lawyer paid for by the British taxpayer and hired a lawyer to advise him on his claim.
Earlier this month Sir Gavin Williamson, a former Tory Government minister and MP, asked the Government to regularly update the public how many hotels have been ‘repurposed’ to house asylum seekers since the election.
He told Parliament during a debate on the issue: ‘My constituents have had the devastating news that the Roman Way hotel (in his constituency of Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge in the West Midlands) is to be stood up to house asylum seekers after being closed for that purpose last year.’
Sir Gavin accused the Government of busily – and secretly – bringing hotels back into use for migrants that were closed by the Tories. ‘There is no consultation with local councils about these hotels. They receive a diktat from the Home Office.’
That is just what happened at Peterborough’s 70-bedroom Dragonfly Hotel, which stands near a school and nursery. One of the first signs that, instead of paying guests, it was to take in 146 migrants came a few weeks ago. The newcomers were filmed emerging, with their belongings, from a people carrier outside the hotel, shepherded along by Home Office staff.
The video makers said they were making their film for social media’s X, so locals knew what was happening. The police were called by the hotel’s guards during a stand-off that became increasingly heated until the crew were chased off the grounds.
Peterborough’s Labour MP and councillors have told Dame Angela Eagle, the new minster responsible for border security and asylum, that the Dragonfly is not a suitable migrant base because local services, such as doctors’ surgeries, will be overstretched by the numbers. They pointed out this situation would not help the migrants settle in happily either.
Whatever the truth about who exactly is in the hotels, we are facing an escalating crisis which is now causing increasing disquiet in all corners of the nation.
