Stockport council has repeatedly written to the home secretary about its concerns over the housing and welfare of asylum seekers in the borough - but says it is still waiting for something to be done. The authority has contacted the government three times since November 2021 - most recently in July last year - expressing fears for both the migrants and the strain being put on public services.
In the July letter he noted that Stockport had 550 asylum seekers living in two hotels ‘resulting in real risks to local services, communities and the asylum seekers themselves’. But council leader Mark Hunter says that, to date, there has been no response from the department - despite town hall bosses stressing the gravity of the situation.
“The government just seems to be hoping it goes away or resolves itself in some miraculous way,” he told the Local Democracy Reporting Service. “We’ve not even had the courtesy of a formal reply.”
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“It continues to cause great concern. We pulled out all the stops over Christmas to try to do various things with the people being accommodated. It was patently clear Serco were not up to it and doing the necessary.”
He added: “We are very concerned this could be a problem that escalates still further if the government were to seek to increase the numbers.”
In July 2022 Coun Hunter sent a letter to then-home secretary Priti Patel, outlining the authority’s ‘serious concerns’ regarding the arrangements in place for temporary and permanent settlement of various communities within Stockport’. The town hall boss said the government had failed to properly consider the inevitable strain this places on our already stretched public services’.
He also expressed his ‘dismay’ at the government’s continued use of a hotel to house more than 320 asylum seekers 'where the inadequate management arrangements and resettlement planning continue to cause extremely negative consequences, such as a very recent attempted suicide and a separate deliberate fire’.
He added “Most importantly, the asylum seekers and Stockport residents are suffering. asylum seekers have been cooped up in a hotel for months and this inhumane treatment acts as a petri dish for mental health issues in a cohort that are already vulnerable.
"I urge you to rethink your temporary and permanent resettlement practices to take into account the unacceptable pressures placed on public services when the same locations are used for asylum seekers, temporary Afghan placements and rehousing Ukrainian families.”
A Home Office spokesperson said the number of people arriving in the UK seeking asylum and accommodation has reached record levels, placing ‘unprecedented pressures’ on the system. They said: “The Home Office and partners identify sites for accommodation based on whether they are safe and available.
“While we accept that hotels do not provide a long-term solution, they do offer safe, secure and clean accommodation, and we are working hard with local authorities to find appropriate accommodation during this challenging time.”
