Poor communication on asylum hotels is allowing misinformation to lead to tension, report finds

A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has found that the accommodation has become flashpoints for frustration because of how they are used and managed, often introduced with little local input and limited transparency.

In the absence of clear, timely information, the report said, rumours and misinformation can spread quickly online, contributing to escalation during moments of tension.

Last summer, protesters gathered outside hotels throughout the country, including in London, Newcastle and Epping in Essex, calling for their closure.

The previous year, hooligans surrounded the Holiday Inn, in Manvers, Rotherham, and tried to set the hotel housing asylum seekers on fire, as part of the post-Southport riots.

Police officers were forced to work 20-hour shifts with no food, water or toilet break, and South Yorkshire Police had to call for help from West Yorkshire and the British Transport Police.

In the investigation that has since followed, at least 86 people have been charged and over 150 years’ worth of jail sentences handed down.

IPPR held focus groups in six areas across England, including Wakefield, and said that tensions are driven less by the presence of asylum accommodation itself and more by how it has been delivered.

One Wakefield man said: “Really, for me, it’s a sense of fairness. Britain’s built on fairness.

“We queue because it’s fair … We work hard and we help people … but then it seems unfair that somebody can come to this country illegally.

“We don’t know who they are; they get an accommodation, they get given clothes, they get given a mobile.”

Other people told IPPR they were upset at the loss of the hotel - likely Cedar Court Hotel - as a community asset.

The hotel had previously been “a place of employment, a venue for events”, one respondent said, asking: “What is the community getting back from the hotel?”

Lucy Mort, principal research fellow at IPPR, said: “In many cases, people were clear that their frustrations weren’t really about people seeking asylum themselves.

“They were about how asylum accommodation is being managed – decisions that feel imposed, communication that comes too late, and a system that doesn’t feel transparent, often in communities where people are already facing housing insecurity, and a wider feeling that the system is unfair.

“Asylum hotels have become flashpoints because they make these problems highly visible, and until those underlying issues are addressed, tensions will keep resurfacing.”

Labour has pledged to close all asylum hotels by the end of the Parliament, with the Home Office recently announcing another 11 had been shut.

Borders minister Alex Norris said hotels were meant to be “a short-term stop-gap” but had “spiralled out of control, costing taxpayers billions and dumping the consequences on local communities”.

He said: “We are shutting them down by moving people into more basic accommodation, scaling up large sites, removing record numbers of people with no right to remain.

“This is about restoring control, ending waste and handing hotels back to the community for good.”

The Home Office said further closures would be announced “soon”. Meanwhile Reform UK said it would move migrant detention centres to Green constituencies because of the party’s open border policy.

“A Reform government will not put any migrant detention centres in any constituency with a Reform MP,” the party’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf said.

“We will not put them where Reform controls the council, and of the remaining areas, we will prioritise Green parliamentary constituencies and Green controlled councils to put those migrant detention centres.”