Council leaders in Kent claim region is at “breaking point”, condemn Home Office plan to allocate more asylum seekers

Council leaders in Kent and Medway have called on the Government to stop procuring hotel accommodation in their area and cease allocating further adult asylum quotas to the county, saying that they are "astounded" the Home Office has asked them to accommodate a further 1,300 people.

In a scathing open letter to Home Secretary Suella Braverman, the 14 council leaders claimed the region was at "breaking point".

Kent's pushback comes as the need to find accommodation for asylum seekers has intensified after the number of people arriving by boat increased dramatically in August and September.

The region's leaders said that in allocating more asylum seekers to the county – "the rationale being that Kent currently only has 326 adults in asylum dispersal accommodation and lower than regional and national averages per head of the population" – the Home Office had "entirely disregarded the wider part we have played and additional burdens we face unique to Kent".

"Kent & Medway's leaders are clear", the letter continued, in rejecting the calculation "in the strongest possible terms".

"We can only conclude that officers are either working in silos and unaware of the high profile and supportive role Kent has played over many years and the cumulative burden and impact on local services and residents this has had, or worse have misinterpreted the datasets to come to a predetermined conclusion."

The letter also criticised the Government's lack of consultation on where it is placing asylum seekers and condemned a "culture of dismissing local partners [which] is endemic within parts of the Home Office".

It added: "[The] Home Office have failed at every turn to seek the expert insight of statutory partners around safeguarding, public health, Prevent, fire safety, NHS capacity, school places, appropriateness of the facility or its location (e.g. issues relating to deprivation, crime profile, rural isolation, risk of trafficking) before residents are in place, and if at all then only after a crisis occurs requiring local intervention.

"Every time we are then promised lessons are learnt, only for the same to happen again, most recently with the procurement of Holiday Inn Ashford Central this week."

Ashford Borough Council was only notified after the use of the hotel was secured. When the council's chief executive wrote to the Director involved, they received a delayed response that "contained errors and was clearly copied and pasted".

In their correspondence, council officers raised significant concerns about the appropriateness of the site and advised that people not be moved in until outbreak control plans, Prevent and safeguarding assessments were in place as well as arrangements for health provision, and access to schools. “Despite officers being promised they would be notified before residents would be moved in, our officers had to learn from social media that service users had been decanted from another facility in London.”

Kent and Medway’s Leaders described this as “an abject failure of duty, a complete disregard for partners’ statutory duties”.

The letter added that the associated risks to service users, staff on site, local community and public services was inexcusable.

“This culture of dismissing local partners is endemic within parts of the Home Office. It is only a matter of time before we have to manage another serious incident," it warned.

Four local authorities – East Riding of Yorkshire Council, Ipswich Borough Council, Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Great Yarmouth Borough Council – have recently secured temporary injunctions over the housing of asylum seekers in hotels in their area, although a High Court judge yesterday refused to extend the Stoke injunction.

A spokesperson for Ashford said it had no plans to bring legal action at this time.

Cllr Gerry Clarkson, Executive Leader of Ashford Borough Council, said: "We have no control over this decision [in relation to the Holiday Inn] at all, and are extremely angry at the Home Office on how they have handled this situation. They have ignored not only our views, but those of Kent County Council, Kent Police and local health services. They have shown a complete disregard for us and the local community, and this situation cannot continue."

The letter from the Kent and Medway leaders implored the Government to relieve the burden on the region and demanded that it "stop using the county as an easy fix for what is a national, strategic issue".

Kent presently cares for 495 unaccompanied asylum seeker children (UASC) and supports a further 1,000 UASC care leavers.

It also houses asylum seekers in a number of hotels across the county and is home to the asylum seeker processing centre in Manston and a centre in Folkestone & Hythe.

The Manston centre is currently thought to be housing more than 3,000 people, despite being designed to hold up to 1,600 people temporarily.

A Home Office spokesperson said: "The number of people arriving in the UK who seek asylum and require accommodation has reached record levels, placing unprecedented pressures on the asylum system.

The spokesperson added: "The Government is working with all local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland to provide more suitable accommodation for asylum seekers and to end the unacceptable use of hotels, with more than £21 million in grant funding already been provided to local authorities to help them respond to challenges in their area."

Adam Carey