Councils have urged ministers to extend a deadline for Afghan nationals who worked with the UK military and embassy to be evicted from hotels, saying the plan is chaotic, full of gaps and risks leaving many people homeless and traumatised.
A number of senior councillors told the Guardian that Johnny Mercer, the veterans’ minister, was met with near-unanimous opposition when he outlined the plan to local authorities in a conference call on Thursday.
A feed of text messages from those on the call, seen by the Guardian, shows people repeatedly stressing the lack of available housing for Afghan nationals, who have been told they must leave hotels next month.
One message suggested that Operation Warm Welcome, the government’s name for the scheme to resettle Afghans who worked with UK forces or officials after the Taliban re-took the country in 2021, should be re-named “Operation Cold Shoulder”.
While Mercer stressed the desire for resettled Afghans to be moved to more permanent accommodation, the Guardian has been told that many of the hotel rooms would be kept as a “buffer” for any increase in numbers of people arriving by small boats this summer and autumn.
Peter Marland, the Labour leader of Milton Keynes council, called the plan “a bit of a kick in the teeth”.
He said: “We already have 800 local families in temporary accommodation and not nearly enough homes to meet demand. We have also had 50 Afghan nationals present as homeless in the last few months alone, some of whom found places to live but were then evicted.
“Rents are rising, some landlords are selling homes because of rising mortgages, and the money from central government might get us a handful of extra properties at most. The situation is really difficult and I can’t see any clear solution.”
One councillor on the call said Mercer had few answers to questions about how the scheme would operate in practice, and seemed to have “no real perception of the housing crisis” facing the UK.
While councils have been given extra funding to pay rent for Afghan nationals moving into homes, this is temporary, with no apparent plan for how to make up the shortfall when it ends.
One attendee said even basic questions about whose responsibility it was to remove Afghan nationals from hotels remained a puzzle. They said: “It seems to be up to the hotels, but are they really going to call the police on a bunch of Afghan families and kids?”
Joanna Midgley, the deputy leader of the Labour-run Manchester city council, said the authority had moved 40% of Afghan nationals out of hotels since May, when the notice to leave was first given, but was struggling to find bigger homes for families.
”Our staff have put in so much work to do the best for Afghan people here, and this arbitrary deadline, and the threat of eviction, threatens to undo it,” she said. “There needs to be more flexibility and more time – and that was the message I got from pretty much everyone on the call.
“It’s not that we don’t want to get Afghan people out of hotels – since May we’ve rehoused 40% of them. It’s just that we can’t suddenly find housing that doesn’t exist, or will be unaffordable when the extra funding to top up rents runs out.”
The uncertainty is placing significant stress on those in the hotels. Masood – who asked for his real name not to be used – said that since they were given notice in May, people in his hotel in Cardiff were “spending 90% of their time looking for accommodation”.
Masood, who spent 18 years working with the British and others in Afghanistan, said: “In the hotel lobby everyone is sitting together looking at Zoopla, Rightmove and other [property] sites on their smartphones trying to find somewhere.”
While he and other Afghan nationals wanted to move out – “living in a hotel is for one week a luxury, when it’s more than a week it becomes a prison” – Masood said the lack of jobs and permanent addresses made renting very difficult.
“If the government was unable to find housing for us all over the course of more than a year, with all its financial, human and technical resources, how can families who are unfamiliar with the system and the location be expected to find places in such a short notice time?” he said.
A Home Office spokesperson said hotels were “never designed to be long-term accommodation” for resettled Afghans.
“That is why we have announced a plan, backed by £285m of new funding, to speed up the resettlement of Afghan nationals into long-term homes. Extensive government support is available and we will continue to do all we can to help Afghan families as they rebuild their lives here.”
