Migrant hotel provider offers pay up front to stop asylum seekers' evictions
Bosses of a company managing migrant hotels have offered to pay them up front in an attempt to stop the eviction of asylum seekers.
Last month, Stay Belvedere Hotels (SBHL) was told by the Home Office that its contract to run more than 50 hotels will be ripped up over its alleged behaviour and poor performance.
Some of the managers at the hotels, which were accommodating some 15,000 asylum seekers, threatened last week to evict the migrants after delays in their payments from SBHL.
Now, SBHL has told them that it will pay the entire cost of housing the asylum seekers for April in advance but is asking the landlords to reimburse it if they later agree to terms with alternative government contractors.
The Home Office is seeking to transfer the contracts for housing the asylum seekers to three other operators: Serco, Mears and Corporate Travel Management (CTM), the latter of which was previously brought in by the Tories to run the Bibby Stockholm barge for migrants in Portland, Dorset.
SBHL was subcontracted to run the hotels by Clearsprings Ready Homes, one of three overarching providers that have 10-year contracts with the Home Office to provide accommodation for asylum seekers waiting for claims decisions.
Clearsprings has tripled its profits in just two years to £91 million in 2024. Ministers and officials are understood to be closely scrutinising the contracts agreed with Clearsprings and SBHL amid concerns that they inherited badly drawn agreements from the Tories that have left the taxpayer exposed.
A hotel source said: 'All the hoteliers want is revenue for the accommodation as we all have loans, expenses and salaries to pay. We want this secured for as long as possible.'
There are around 38,000 asylum seekers currently housed in hotels, up 8,000 since the election, despite Labour's pledge to end the use of such accommodation. It comes as the number of migrants crossing the Channel this weekend passed 30,000 since Sir Keir Starmer won the election in July.
SBHL has told landlords that it only received its payments to cover the cost of hotels for March on Thursday evening, which was later than normal.
It told the hoteliers that it had not received a 'firm commitment' from the Home Office to cover the costs for running the hotels in April, although government officials had given verbal assurances that it would be paid.
The company told the landlords that it was committed to 'facilitating a safe and orderly transition' to hand over the contracts for accommodating the asylum seekers to Serco, Mears and CTM.
It would, therefore, pay the April invoices for hotel accommodation in advance in return for the hoteliers committing to return any balance if they found an alternative supplier before the end of April.
A government source said it was up to SBHL and Clearsprings to fulfil their contracts. 'We are progressing with the transition away from SBHL and Clearsprings. They are cooperating, but if they breach their terms at any time and stop cooperating, we will act accordingly,' said the source.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
ANDREW NEIL: Starmer's claim to be 'investing in Britain's renewal' is delusional drivel in a class of its own - even for a Government that's a stranger to the truth
Our first job was to stabilise the economy and public finances,' Keir Starmer tweeted yesterday morning, a few hours before Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered Labour's spending plans for the rest of the decade. 'Now, we move into a new chapter . . . we're investing in Britain's renewal.'
Spectator
6 hours ago
- Spectator
How can ‘sanction' mean two opposing things?
Sir Keir Starmer said 'he could 'not imagine' the circumstances in which he would sanction a new referendum' on Scottish independence, the Times reported the other day. The Mirror said Amazon 'has agreed to sanction businesses that boost their star ratings with bogus reviews'. So we find sanction being used with completely opposite meanings: 'give permission' and 'enact a penalty to enforce obedience to a law'. The latter sense was extended after the first world war to cover economic or military action against a state as a coercive measure. That is the use we daily find applied to action, or the lack of it, against Russia. The diverging meanings both go back to the Latin noun sanctio, deriving from the verb sancire 'to render sacred', hence 'inviolable'. Such a sanctio came to mean a decree, as in that obscure beast of history, the pragmatic sanction, which looks neither pragmatic or like a sanction. The phrase had a good run for its money, though, labelling a decree attributed to St Louis of France against the Papacy in 1268 and a decree by Charles III of Spain in 1759, granting the crown of the Two Sicilies to his son. I would describe as an anxiety dream the thought of having to write about either. Here, pragmatic meant 'to do with affairs of state', a development of the ancient Greek word that, via Latin, also gives us practical. In English pragmatic acquired the meaning 'practical' only in the mid 19th century, allowing the Americans C.S. Peirce and William James to harness pragmatism to describe a kind of philosophy. As for sanction, it is now also deployed to label the removal or reduction of social benefits. In February this year, 5.5 per cent of claimants were being sanctioned. There is, too, the architect of Dublin's Heuston station (often misprinted as Euston station): Sancton Wood (often misprinted as Sanction Wood).
The Independent
6 hours ago
- The Independent
Chancellor unveils £6bn NHS funding after health-centred spending review
Some £6 billion will be spent on speeding up testing and treatment in the NHS, Rachel Reeves has announced, after she placed the health service at the heart of Government spending plans. The Chancellor unveiled the investment, which includes new scanners, ambulances and urgent treatment centres aimed at providing an extra four million appointments in England over the next five years, after Wednesday's spending review. The funding is aimed at reducing waiting lists and reaching Labour's 'milestone' of ensuring the health service carries out 92% of routine operations within 18 weeks. In the review, Ms Reeves set out day-to-day spending across Government for the next three years, as well as plans for capital investment over the next four years. The NHS and defence were seen as the winners from the settlement, as both will see higher than average rises in public spending. This comes at cost of squeezing the budgets of other Whitehall departments and experts have warned tax rises may be needed later this year. The Chancellor and Sir Keir Starmer both sought to portray the review as a 'new phase' for the Government, following the criticism Labour has faced during its first year in power, including over cuts to winter fuel allowance. Ms Reeves claimed the NHS had been 'put on its knees' as a result of under-investment by the previous government, adding: 'We are investing in Britain's renewal, and we will turn that around.' The new £6 billion investment will come from the capital settlement for the NHS and will also help to speed up diagnoses with scans and treatment available in places such as shopping centres and high streets. The scale of day-to-day spending for the NHS is akin to an extra £29 billion a year. In a broadcast interview on Wednesday evening, Ms Reeves said the Government was 'confident' it could meet its pledge to reduce waiting lists after the boost to NHS spending. But while health and defence have benefited from the review, the Home Office, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Department for Transport and Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are all in line for real-terms cuts in day-to-day spending. The Foreign Office is also in line for real-terms cuts, mainly as a result of a reduction in the overseas aid budget, which was slashed as part of the commitment to boost defence spending to 2.6% of gross domestic product – including the intelligence agencies – from 2027. Ms Reeves acknowledged 'not everyone has been able to get exactly what they want' following Cabinet squabbling over departmental budgets. She said 'every penny' of the spending increases had been funded through the tax and borrowing changes she had announced in her first budget. The Chancellor also insisted she would not need to mount another tax raid to pay for her plans, but experts warned the money for the NHS might still not be enough and the Government is under international pressure to boost defence funding further. Paul Johnson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, described the hospital waiting times target as 'enormously ambitious', adding: 'And on defence, it's entirely possible that an increase in the Nato spending target will mean that maintaining defence spending at 2.6% of GDP no longer cuts the mustard.' At a summit later this month Nato members will consider calls to increase spending to 3.5% on defence, with a future 1.5% on defence-related measures. Steven Millard, interim director of the NIESR economic research institute, said the Chancellor's non-negotiable fiscal rules, coupled with the 'small amount of headroom' in her spending plans, meant 'it is now almost inevitable that if she is to keep to her fiscal rules, she will have to raise taxes in the autumn budget'. Elsewhere, policing leaders warned forces may need to make deep cuts after their settlement was announced. The spending review provides more than £2 billion for forces, but ministers have acknowledged some of that 'spending power' will come from council tax hikes.
