Peter Kyle, an opposition Labour lawmaker for Hove, the area where the hotel detailed in the Observer report was located, slammed government inaction during an impassioned statement on Tuesday in Parliament.
“The uncomfortable truth for us is that if one child who was related to one of us in this room went missing, the world would stop,” he said. “But in the community I represent, a child has gone missing, then five went missing then a dozen went missing, then 50 went missing,” he said, adding that more than 70 were missing “and nothing is happening.”
Yvette Cooper, who heads immigration policy for the Labour Party, speaking on the “BBC Breakfast” show on Thursday morning, said the reports of missing asylum seekers showed that the Conservative government had failed to take serious action to address the issue.
“There is a pattern here but nobody is properly investigating,” she said. “There is no targeted unit going after them and saying, ‘this is a pattern,’ where young people are being trafficked across the channel and then into cannabis farms — or into prostitution in some of the worst cases — but into organized crimes, being picked up from outside these hotels.”
Hotels have been used to house asylum seekers in Britain for years amid a shortage of other temporary housing. In July 2021, unaccompanied minors arriving in Britain began being housed in hotels as well. Britain’s Home Office is responsible for this housing, but it partners with private companies to provide the accommodation and also contracts out the management of the program to another company.
As the time that people wait for their asylum applications to be decided had steadily increased in recent years, the number of people who linger in these hotels has also risen, and rights groups have long criticized the conditions inside these facilities.
The groups had specifically warned that housing unaccompanied children in hotels failed to safeguard some of the most vulnerable asylum seekers and said that they had demanded changes to the way the government processes the claims for asylum.
