I’m a mum-of-two – I’ve been waiting a year to get out of my tiny council flat…meanwhile Bibby migrants are put in hotel
A MUM-of-two has been waiting a year to get out of her tiny council flat – while Bibby migrants are being put into hotels.
Hayley is finding it difficult to cope in her cramped two-bed council flat in the centre of Wolverhampton.
Cradling her three month old daughter, Hayley, 27, looks up at the nearby Britannia hotel – currently providing emergency accommodation for up to 150 migrants – and shakes her head.
She said: “I’ve been waiting all this time for the council to treat me with some degree of humanity, then hey presto, the state is suddenly able to find luxury accommodation for all these asylum seekers.
“It is just so unfair. I worked as a hairdresser since leaving school and I paid my taxes but now I can’t work because I’ve got young children and then when I need to lean on the state for a while, its ears are deaf to me.
“It just makes no sense that they have to take all these people off the Bibby Stockholm and spend a fortune of taxpayers money putting them up in a huge hotel in the city centre. It is utter madness.
“I’m not the only one this is happening too. I know at least half a dozen other people who have been waiting months and months for council accommodation and nothing is happening for them.
“Maybe if they turned up on the south coast in a boat and claimed asylum, the state could put us all up at this nice hotel too.”
Retired supermarket worker Nigel, 68, shared Hayley’s despair as he enjoyed a quiet pint across the road from the Britannia at a Wetherspoons pub.
He said: “I accept that we have a responsibility to give them accommodation of some sort, but does it really need to be a luxury city centre hotel?
“And how long are they going to be there? It seems to me that the process is the problem.
“Some of these guys could be here for years because it is just taking too long to establish whether or not these migrants have a legal right to be here.
“If they do have a legal right to stay in the UK, that’s fine with me, But if we have no legal obligation to allow them to remain here, we need to establish that quickly and say goodbye to them.
“It’s a shame they had the outbreak of legionnaires disease on the ship, because otherwise that might have been a viable solution, rather than the taxpayer, having to fund an open-ended, all expenses paid, stay at a smart hotel.
“I do appreciate that the migrants need somewhere to live, but for how long?“
Factory worker Linda, 62 was even more blunt about the migrant situation in her home city.
She said: “It’s disgusting.
“I’ve paid taxes into this country since I left school at 16, and I get nothing back, yet the government expects us all to pay for these migrants to live in a classy hotel.
“I’d rather the asylum seekers had been sent to Rwanda than taking up hotel accommodation in the UK.
“It does seem crazy that we spent all that money looking at Rwanda and getting everything in place, only to abandon it.
“The government needs to get a grip of the situation, because their incompetence is costing us a packet.
“What is also becoming clear is the UK is not doing enough to prevent these migrants coming here in the first place.”
Last night, the wooden double doors at the entrance of the Britannia hotel were locked.
When Sun journalists pressed an intercom buzzer, the door was opened by a security guard who confirmed the hotel was now for migrants only.
He did not know when it would reopen to the public.
In the hours that followed, scores of migrants went in and out of the hotel, some of them women with young children and even babies in pushchairs.
When approached, none of them was willing to comment.