Migrant hotels are not the real problem

Morgan McSweeney’s project for government was somewhat innovative in that it posited that the Labour party could stop illegal migration by preventing people coming. The traditional approach of the Labour party has been to overstate the probability that illegal migrants are doctors, level racism accusations at people who disagree, and advocate for the creation of more categories of visas such that illegal migration is unnecessary. 

The lament of the pro–migration left is that there are no safe and legal routes for many who wish to seek asylum in Britain and as such, they have no option but to get in a small boat. Their solution would not be to prevent the doctors getting in a small boat but to create safe and legal routes such that this was no longer necessary and everyone could live in Britain. 

The 2024 Labour manifesto transgressed against this BlueSky orthodoxy, taking the radical view that the public was not in favour of open borders, and produced a new formulation: smash the criminal gangs, end asylum hotels. This formulation is the stuff manifestos are made of in that it commits to doing almost nothing useful while reading as a comprehensive migration strategy. 

To start with the gangs, it is worth considering what a people smuggler actually is in this instance. Small boats usually do not make it to the other side of the channel. Once they are out of French waters, they get in contact with Border Force or the RNLI and are picked up and ferried to England so that they do not drown themselves. The person in charge of this operation simply needs to know how to procure a boat, fill it with customers, and get someone to rescue it. 

This is not exactly the height of organised crime — the only element of complexity is how one is picked up in the Channel by the relevant authorities such that the overloaded vessel does not sink. Smashing the gangs is an incoherent approach when the crime is this obvious and easy to execute. Do we propose arresting everyone in Northern France with the ability to buy a dinghy who possesses the contact details for the rescue services? Of course not, it is ridiculous to imply this is like fighting a mafia wherein taking out the men in charge will sever a network of relationships currently facilitating a web of criminality. Someone else will just start selling boats. 

One could suggest that whoever is discovering the location of these deliberately distressed vessels stop picking up the phone, thus eliminating the value of the service, but this would be beyond the limits of possible Labour policy thinking. Consequently, in 2026 we don’t hear much about the gangs anymore, as a solution to ending this farce they were an electoral fiction.  

Once illegal immigrants get to the United Kingdom and claim asylum the government has a statutory obligation to house them and make sure they don’t starve. In this situation one would like to have an oven-ready asylum seeker facility wherein they could stay while their claims were processed. Naturally this is Britain and statutory obligations are created with little thought in how they are to be fulfilled so instead the state was left looking for thousands of rooms and settled on cheap hotels as a solution. Hotels have lots of rooms suitable for single men (76 per cent of channel crossers are male) and are happy to replace the struggle of finding visitors to Epping with a contract for a few years of guaranteed income. This is the origin of what has been called the Migrant Hotel.

Hotels being able to absorb large numbers of asylum seekers at once is fantastic for those seeking to house migrants but also creates a distortionary pattern of migration. Normally, illegal immigrants would hide themselves in major cities amongst immigrant communities in which they would not stand out and could illegally work. The Migrant Hotel upends this and plants hundreds of them wherever a cheap hotel can be found. Because the asylum seekers cannot work, and therefore have nothing to do all day, this means you have suddenly added a large population of bored men wandering around a town which may previously not have experienced much migration. For example, Epping, which is still around 90 per cent white, had 140 asylum seekers dropped on it, leading to one of them sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl which in turn led to protests bordering on a riot. The Migrant Hotel concentrates immigration into its most objectionable form: totally unintegrated foreigners arrive all at once, live at taxpayer expense, and provide no local benefit to the community, both because they are banned from doing so and because most asylum seekers are not doctors. 

This being the Platonic ideal of failed integration, it is understandable that McSweeney’s manifesto promised to get rid of them. The right hates the hotels because they hate immigration, the left hates hotels because they make immigration look bad — nobody is happy. But they exist due to laws which the Labour party is unwilling to remove. We are not presently allowed to drag the boats back to France or fly the occupants to Afghanistan and as such they must stay somewhere. Sunak’s government sought to work in the margins by offshoring the migrants to a third country, Rwanda, while they were being processed but this approach failed to overcome the legal hurdles and we ended up paying Paul Kagame £290 million to accept four asylum seekers. Naturally, Labour discarded this program that achieved both cruelty of rhetoric and lack of results.

If you cannot stop people arriving illegally, cannot deport them once they are here, have to house them, yet cannot use hotels to do so, what is left? Well of course you can find them a house. Britain is not very good at building houses with Labour set to miss its 5-year plan of 1.5 million houses by an enormous margin but there are plenty that are already built. You just have to acquire some of these houses and give them out for free. What this means is buying up nondescript houses which might otherwise contain a two parent two child family, cutting them up into a House in Multiple Occupation (HMO) and filling them with the asylum seekers. 

This does solve the Migrant Hotel problem insofar as ten to twenty HMOs scattered across a city is unlikely to be as newsworthy as one giant fortress hotel filled with people from Eritrea. If you took a truly optimistic view of this outcome, one might suggest that dispersed amongst the community the asylum seekers might integrate, make friends, and become English. If you take a dimmer view of human nature, what you have achieved here is to disperse the problems of Migrant Hotels far and wide such that they are no longer a news story but merely the coarsening of life for the entire country and not just the community upon which the hotel is inflicted. 

The problem is at the border and with the laws that bind the hands of the state

What will also be invisible is the effects on the rest of the market for housing. When you take taxpayer money to buy or rent homes out of the market to house people for free you are necessarily disadvantaging others seeking to buy in the same market. These will overwhelmingly be the taxpayers from whom you have taken the money in the first place. The other owners may benefit financially through the increased demand leading to higher prices. Indeed I have seen it argued that immigration is a positive because of this dynamic. But that is only an unalloyed good if you do not experience any downside from living next to asylum seekers and the only reason we are creating the HMOs is to close the hotels because people do not like living near asylum seekers. There have been attempts to place the arrivals on military bases but with 40,000 arriving every year it is not feasible to entirely avoid existing housing unless you are willing to place them in tents.

If we have decided as a country that the occupants of Migrant Hotels create significant problems, and we wish to have fewer of them, the solution is not to turn them into occupants of HMOs. The problem is at the border and with the laws that bind the hands of the state. If those remain unchanged we are going to be having the same arguments about immigration when the next election arrives.