The number of migrants being hosted in British hotels at the taxpayers’ expense rose from 2,577 in March 2020 to 37,142 by September 2022.
According to government data analysed by the Guardian, an even larger number of migrants are being hosted in so-called dispersal accommodation — typically shared houses and flats — with the figure already standing at 41,388 in March 2020, and rising by another 11,910 between then and September 2022.
The massive increase in migrants being hosted in hotels over the same period, from less than 2,600 to tens of thousands, has grabbed many more headlines, however, in part because concentrating large numbers of migrants in such accommodation has the potential to transform the demographics of communities virtually overnight, and party because of his profile incidents such as a mass stabbing carried out by a hotel migrant in Glasgow believed to be irate at the “culturally inappropriate” free hot meals he had been provided with.
Months on from September, it is a near certainty that the number of migrants hosted in hotels is now far higher, with boatloads of them continuing to cross the English Channel in small boats, among other methods of entry, and the country’s governing Conservative (Tory) Party still unwilling to turn them back to the safe European Union countries they set sail from — usually France but also Belgium and, more rarely, the Netherlands.
While the Guardian, a leftist, generally pro-mass migration outlet, stressed the supposedly poor conditions in the hotels which Britons and tourists would have to pay for the privilege of staying in, many members of the public have expressed displeasure at the enormous sums of money lavished on accommodating migrants in them.
Believed to have reached a cost of almost £7 million a day and rising by October 2022, the sums are far from negligible at a time when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt are lashing the public with tax hikes in the name of fiscal discipline, while workers in sectors ranging from nursing to rubbish collecting are embarking on disruptive strikes to increase pay packets eroded by inflation.
The Tories, then led by Theresa May, first declared boat crossings a “major incident” in 2018, and successive Tory prime ministers and home secretaries have promised imminent, effective action on them repeatedly ever since — yet the have risen from not quite a thousand in 2018 to around 1,800 in 2019, 8,500 in 2020, over 28,500 in 2021, and over 40,000 in 2022.