More than 50 refugee organisations have written to the home secretary calling for urgent protections to be put in place for asylum seekers living in hotels who may be at risk from further far-right attacks.
Several asylum seeker hotels were targeted by violent mobs, including those in Hull and Tamworth, earlier this month. A Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham was the site of a particularly violent and sustained attack, during which fires were started and parts of the building trashed.
The letter to Yvette Cooper, shared exclusively with the Guardian, was coordinated by the organisation Conversation Over Borders and has 54 signatories, a mix of large national non-governmental organisations, such as Care4Calais and Asylum Matters, along with smaller local and regional organisations.
It calls on the Home Office to ensure clear hotel evacuation protocols are communicated to staff to protect asylum seekers from attacks, and adds that hotel use should be ended, with asylum seekers accommodated in communities instead.
Questions have been asked about why asylum seekers were not better protected at the Rotherham hotel. It had previously been targeted by the far right on 18 February 2023, a week after riots in Knowsley outside the Suites hotel.
Before this year’s attacks, far-right activists openly advertised on social media that they were going to meet in the Rotherham hotel’s car park to stage the protest, including a post from one of the organisers, Connor McAllister, as reported by Doncaster Free Press.
The Guardian understands that hotel staff, managed by the Home Office accommodation contractor Mears, had been evacuated from the building several hours before the asylum seekers.
A spokesperson for Mears said: “Our safety and security protocols for accommodation sites include escalation to the police where appropriate ... The police made the decision that only essential staff should remain on site, in order to minimise the number of people they had to protect, and other staff were required to leave. A team of seven staff remained in the hotel throughout to support service users and coordinate with the police.”
Some of the asylum seekers in the hotel were age-disputed children and others have disabilities or are particularly vulnerable owing to known trauma-related diagnoses, but there appeared to be no plan to prioritise their evacuation from the hotel.
Two asylum seekers said they had to put out some of the fires themselves. When they were finally evacuated they said they had to sit in a coach on the hard shoulder of the motorway for several hours in the middle of the night until the Home Office decided where to send them.
An 18-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan said what he witnessed in the hotel was “horrifying”. “I have never encountered anything like this since I came to the UK,” he said.
An asylum seeker from Afghanistan said: “After the attack started, we didn’t see any of the hotel staff. We were confused. We were told to lock ourselves in our rooms and stay away from the windows, but we saw what was happening outside from reflections in a large mirror in our bedroom. We saw far-right people beating the police and we thought they were going to kill us.”
Colette Batten-Turner, the chief executive of Conversation Over Borders, said: “We are deeply concerned about the use of hotels as initial accommodation for asylum seekers. The far-right violence targeting hotels during the riots has retraumatised many people who are accommodated there and shown that these hotels are not fit for purpose.
“The anti-immigration and racist rhetoric stoked by some politicians and sections of the media has isolated asylum seekers further and placed a target on their heads. In our letter we are calling on the home secretary to ensure there are clear evacuation protocols for hotels accommodating asylum seekers and, in the longer term, to close down hotels and accommodate asylum seekers in communities, where they can rebuild their lives.”
Steve Smith, the chief executive of Care4Calais, said: “The government must have been aware of the threat of far-right attacks on asylum accommodation sites, such as in Rotherham, as the details of the far-right gatherings were being circulated online in advance.
“The lack of pre-emptive action by the authorities to stop these far-right attacks put the safety of residents, and indeed staff, at risk. We must have an open and transparent investigation into the failure to prevent the far-right putting the lives of people seeking sanctuary in the UK in danger.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The safety and wellbeing of the asylum seekers we support remains our utmost priority and we expect high standards from our accommodation providers.”
