Two hotels in Basingstoke are currently out of commission because they are being paid to be hostel accommodation for asylum seekers. Basingstoke has long endured a shortage of hotel accommodation for businesses, with new hotels given planning consent for that reason. Maria Miller, local MP, is calling on the hotel operators to stop signing contracts to provide hostel accommodation for asylum seekers and to get back to being hotels.
Maria said, ‘’Basingstoke wants its hotels to get back to their core business of being hotels, not hostels for asylum seekers. Basingstoke businesses and families need our local hotels to provide the services they were designed for and given planning consent for, as places for local families and businesses can use. The huge increase in asylum seekers has meant hotels in high cost areas have been needed to cope with the demand but hotel chains can’t continue to put their hotels out of action. They are needed for their original use.”
Evidence received by the Home Affairs Select Committee showed that the spending on hotels for asylum seekers has ballooned to over £4.8 million a day. The government acknowledges that these arrangements are in no one's interests and the use of hotels in high cost areas should reduced.
Basingstoke is an economic hub which has seen sustained growth in high-value sectors. We are the most productive district in Hampshire, contributing £6.7 billion to the economy in 2020, and have been ranked the 4th best place to invest in tech. Between 2015-2018 we attracted £425 million of investment in the tech sector alone - the same amount as Prague and Strasbourg.
Hotels clearly play an important role in supporting this growth by providing lodging to clients and investors. 90% of our town’s businesses employ fewer than 9 people, but many of them trade internationally, making hotel accommodation especially important. For years, hotel space has been in relatively short supply in Basingstoke and the use of asylum hotels has only served to put an unsustainable demand on our hospitality industry.
Another important point is that these hotels are not cheap. Partly due to our enviable geographical location, but is also the local demand for rooms and the quality of the hotels, an average room cost almost double that of other parts of the country. The UK public deserves good value for money and it cannot be a sustainable model to continue housing asylum seekers in an expensive part of the country which already has a deficit of hotel space which is needed to sustain its rapid growth.
As the asylum backlog is reduced, the need for temporary asylum accommodation is decreasing. Government expects to be moving out of hotels, allowing them to return to their original commercial usage.
Maria said, “Given the acute need for hotel space in Basingstoke I am urging the Government to strongly consider making our two hotels some of the first to be decommissioned. It is so important that the Government, the local authority and residents get value for money. Against this backdrop, it is clearly not in anyone’s interest to keep asylum hotels operating in Basingstoke.’’