When people think of hotels, they tend to think of them as a positive thing. Hotels are, after all, something we associate with treats: holidays, Christmas lunches, wedding receptions.
The actual experience of staying in one these days sometimes struggles to live up to this idea, but nonetheless, it might explain some share of the poison currently sloshing around Britain’s asylum debate and the housing of asylum seekers in hotels. It is assumed by some that the Government are putting up people, for free, in places which they imagine to be nice.
Alas, we are doing no such thing.
The latest twist in this particular saga arrived on Monday morning, in the form of a damning report from the Home Affairs Committee. A combination of “flawed contracts” and “incompetent delivery”, the committee thundered, had led to the “squandering” of literally billions of taxpayer money.
And at the heart of all this is the aforementioned hotels. Such places were only ever intended as a sort of overflow: the vast majority of asylum seekers were expected to be housed in “Dispersal Accommodation”. In the event, though, arrival numbers have been higher than expected, and of the 103,000 asylum seekers currently accommodated by the government, 32,000 – nearly a third – are living in 210 hotels.
All this has meant a tripling of costs to the taxpayer, to an eye-watering £15.3bn over 10 years (which is bad), and higher than expected and badly accounted for profits for the contractors providing the homes (which is unlikely to help).
There’s another issue, though, which is less likely to be dominating the headlines in quite the same way: much of those billions have been spent on something absolutely horrible.
Investigations by journalists or charities have revealed stories of people housed in windowless rooms smaller than prison cells, or sleeping on dirty mattresses in rooms shared with multiple strangers. Others report inedible food containing no fruit, vegetables or protein and which manage, despite consisting mainly of heavy carbs, to be past their sell-by dates. Some residents claim to have developed diabetes.
Others still report the rationing of sanitary products and toilet paper – a single roll was supposed to last four people a week – or spending entire days in their underwear while they waited for their only outfit to be washed.
square IMMIGRATION 'I'm an asylum seeker - my hotel is closing but I don't know where I'm going'
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“The accommodation asylum seekers are housed in should be adequate,” notes the Committee, “and it is unacceptable that significant amounts of taxpayers’ money is being used to house often vulnerable people in sub-standard accommodation.” We are not merely spending a fortune on housing asylum seekers. We are spending it on making them live like animals.
The defining feature of the modern British state is its unerring ability to do things in a manner that serves almost literally no one. Sure, a few private investors might be happy – such as, to take just one example, Graham King, billionaire founder of accommodation provider Clearsprings Ready Homes, of bad food and limited loo paper fame, who ranked 154th in the latest Sunday Times Rich List. But the asylum system isn’t working for the people paying for it, or the communities hosting it, or even the politicians presiding over it.
Worst of all, given that they are vulnerable people in our country as guests, it absolutely does not work for the people who are reliant on it. And yet, they continue to come. Still, they risk life and limb to get here, even though what awaits them is this.
Perhaps that should tell us something about what they’re leaving behind.
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