Migrant hotel near Heathrow among 11 shut as Home Office push to use military sites

The figure now stands at 20,800, as Labour attempts to bring down the £4 billion annual bill to house migrants.

The Holiday Inn at Heathrow is the largest of the hotels to be closed to migrants, with 433 rooms, while other sites to close include ones in Banbury, Bangor in Northern Ireland, Cheltenham, Wolverhampton, Telford, St Helens, Crewe, Aberdeen and two in Halifax.

The closures are expected to cut costs by around £65 million a year, and more are expected in the coming weeks as sites are handed back to local communities.

At the system’s peak under the Conservatives, there were more than 400 migrant hotels, costing taxpayers £9 million a day, and while Labour has trimmed the total asylum accommodation budget by £1 billion since coming into power, there are still 186 hotels housing migrants.

Migrants being moved into large, basic sites such as military barracks .

Crowborough Army camp in East Sussex has accommodated around 350 people since opening three months ago, while RAF Wethersfield, near Braintree in Essex, is housing about 800 people and has capacity for an additional 400.

Meanwhile, the Cameron Barracks in Inverness has yet to be used, with the site delayed for months due to maintenance repairs and planning permission.

The Government is pushing to end the use of hotels for illegal migrants before the next election but is being hampered by large numbers continuing to cross the Channel in small boats .

More than 5,000 have arrived so far this year, including 201 who arrived in three boats on Monday.

Huge numbers of asylum seekers are currently appealing against rejections, with more than 100,000 awaiting the outcome of their appeal and 64,000 waiting for their initial claim.

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Alex Norris, the border security and asylum minister, said expanding the network of large sites was central to the Government's plan.

Norris said: “Hotels were meant to be a short-term stop gap under the previous government, but they spiralled out of control, costing taxpayers billions and dumping the consequences on local communities.

“We are shutting them down by moving people into more basic accommodation, scaling up large sites, removing record numbers of people with no right to remain.

This is about restoring control, ending waste and handing hotels back to the community for good.”
However, the Conservatives have argued that the Government had moved asylum seekers sideways rather than removing them.

“Most asylum seekers are illegal immigrants.

Keir Starmer has let in more small boat illegal immigrants than any prime minister in history and numbers are 45 per cent up since the election.”