The Home Office has been scolded for their latest attempt to remove asylum seekers from hotels, after plans to house them in student flats were revealed.
Speaking to GB News, ex-Immigration Minister Kevin Foster hit out at the proposal, declaring it a “hotel by another name”.
Home Office officials have attempted to put through a planning application to transform a 247-bed block of flats in Leeds into a place for asylum seekers.
The application for Mary Morris House in Headingley, which currently houses students, was submitted a month ago and is due to be decided in October.
Kevin Foster has declared the Home Office’s plan to move illegal migrants into student accommodation is simply ‘hotels by another name’
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Delivering his verdict on the plans, Mr Foster told GB News: “This literally is a hotel by another name, and that’s partly the problem.
“When you listen to the Government coming out with ‘we’re going to end asylum hotels by the end of this parliament’, and people then say ‘what are you going to use instead’, it’s things like student accommodation and HMOs in communities.”
Highlighting the scale of asylum seekers being housed in hotels across the UK, he added: “You’ve got about 100,000 people in asylum accommodation across the country, about 32,000 of them in hotels.
“And pretty much any of us taking a look at the UK’s housing situation is going to know there’s not a whole load of empty houses, despite what someone like Angela Rayner might have said when she was still in office, waiting for 32,000 people to come out of a hotel. So this is the type of stuff we’ll see.”
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The Home Office is aiming to house asylum seekers in the Mary Morris House | GOOGLE MAPSRecalling the idea being raised by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Mr Foster explained that the plan wasn’t pursued as it was “equally as unattractive” as asylum hotels.
He said: “Being honest, this is something that I can remember being raised under Rishi Sunak, but not pursued.
“Because if you don’t like having asylum hotels near your town, the idea of dropping off quite a lot of single young men in the middle of a student campus or very next close to a student campus, which is where student accommodation is, is going to be equally unattractive.”
Warning of potential “lawfare” from local councils in blocking the use of student accommodation, the former Immigration Minister predicted that local authorities will take action against such plans in the same way they are with asylum hotels.
Mr Foster told GB News that the move could spark even more ‘lawfare’ from local councils
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Mr Foster concluded: “The Home Office is not going to want to be shouting about every option it is considering, and I think also they don’t want people to be really pushing this.
“Because they originally ruled out large scale accommodation centres, they now apparently want to bring that back.
“And if you’ve still got the inflow coming in and you haven’t really got much of a plan about how to get rid of people, particularly from key countries that arrive in small boats, well, you need to accommodate them somewhere.
“What will be interesting now to see is whether councils start trying to enforce on planning against student accommodation as well being effectively turned into longer term accommodation, in the same way as we’ve seen the planning argument for hotels.
“And it’s the local authority and shall we say more right-wing version of lawfare that we perhaps see around human rights laws from the left.
In a statement, Leeds City Council said: “The Home Office has advised the council that the submission is part of wider central government efforts to reduce the reliance on hotel use for those seeking asylum.”
The Home Office said: “Decisions about accommodation are made with careful consideration alongside local authorities, as part of our strategy to reduce dependence on expensive hotel provision and to create a more sustainable and cost-effective asylum system.”
