Mansfield's MP says the most common thing that people in the town contact him about is asylum seekers and that the "fairness" of housing them in hotels needs to be addressed. The Home Office placed 34 people into a Mansfield hotel in early November amid an unprecedented backlog in asylum claims.
Ben Bradley said that three people had left the hotel to make way for the asylum seekers, all three of whom then presented as being homeless. A Mansfield District Council report confirmed that the three did not meet the criteria to be classed as homeless, but Mr Bradley says there are still several problems with using hotels for asylum seekers.
Research from Migration Watch UK in late September claimed that tens of thousands of asylum seekers were staying in approximately 200 hotels around the country. The Home Office has previously confirmed that more than 37,000 asylum seekers are staying in hotels at a cost of £5.6 million a day, stressing that this was a "short-term solution."
