Amid the surge in migrants to the UK, private firms are enjoying impressive dividends from arranging hotel accommodation for asylum seekers, according to a UK report.
One booking agency contracted by the Home Office to find contingency housing for the arrivals saw its pre-tax profits soar threefold, from £2.1Mln to £6.3Mln.
An estimated 395 hotels are being used to provide accommodation for more than 51,000 asylum seekers: 363 in England, 20 in Northern Ireland, 10 in Scotland and two in Wales. The British government is forking out more than £6Mln ($7.3Mln) a day to accommodate the asylum seekers, a source was cited as saying.
As the surge in small boat arrivals across the Channel persists resulting in a backlog of asylum cases now reportedly amounting to around 166,000 people, the use of hotels by the Home Office has grown tenfold since 2020. An estimated 2,577 asylum seekers were housed in hotels in March 2020 but that figure rose to 37,142 in September 2022, according to government data released this February. Hotel bookings for everything ranging from conferences to weddings are often reportedly cancelled at short notice.
The UK Home Office is said to have outsourced accommodation to three large firms that now have contracts to run the hotels in question: Serco Group is responsible for servicing 109 hotels in England - mostly in the Midlands, East and North-West - and Mears Group, according to cited court documents, operates 80 hotels in north-east England, Scotland and Northern Ireland and its annual revenues are said to have been boosted by 22 percent in 2021. According to its annual report, profits were "largely driven" by finding hotel accommodation for asylum seekers.
Leeds-based Calder Conferences got £97Mln in 2022 for its hotel operations - a substantial increase from the £20.6Mln it made in 2021. Consequently, the annual remuneration for company director, Debbie Hoban, rocketed to £2.2Mln from £230,000 a year before.
Earlier in the year, more than 100 UK charities signed an open letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak urging him to endorse an independent probe into how scores of asylum-seeking children had gone missing from Home Office hotels. The letter, also signed by children's rights organization ECPAT UK and the Refugee Council, condemned the Government's "failures to protect vulnerable children from harm".
Amid criticism over the physical conditions in hotels and the welfare of child asylum seekers, the UK authorities have so far failed to hammer out plans to provide alternative accommodation.
A Home Office spokesman said the Government was "committed to making every effort to reduce hotel use and limit the burden on the taxpayer".
Earlier this year, according to data released by the British Government, a record 45,700 people crossed the English Channel in small boats in 2022, up more than 60 percent on the 2021 figure. The Illegal migrants embark upon the perilous journey to reach the UK, lured by the prospect of social welfare, the possibility of obtaining refugee status and financial support. However, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has recently stated that a "tough" but "necessary" small boats crackdown is needed, referring to the proposed Illegal Migration Bill.
The illegal arrival of asylum seekers in the UK "will result in their detention and swift removal" within weeks "either to their own country or to a safe third country such as Rwanda," the Prime Minister said.