Private firms profiting from asylum hotels, BBC learns
BBC News
The government has never publicly confirmed the number of hotels involved, but a government source told BBC News it is now using 395 to accommodate more than 51,000 asylum seekers, at a cost of more than £6m a day.It means Northern Ireland and England have far more hotels housing asylum seekers per head of population than Scotland and Wales.
The BBC has been told existing bookings at some hotels, including business conferences and weddings, have been cancelled at short notice.Hotel owners are approached to hand over their properties to outsourced companies, which run the business on behalf of the Home Office.One, Serco, provides some 109 hotels in England, according to a High Court judgement from December 2022, mostly in the Midlands, East and North West.
Home Office sources suggested this work related principally to finding bridging hotels for Afghan refugees who arrived following the Taliban takeover in 2021. At the Wiltshire Leisure Village, a retirement complex near Royal Wootton Bassett, asylum seekers have been housed at a nearby hotel and fences erected, meaning residents of the leisure village do not have access to the golf course.Fredricka Reynolds, a florist, lost her regular work for a hotel in Kegworth, Leicestershire, when asylum seekers moved in last month.
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