Footage posted online reportedly shows migrants staying in hotel rooms with four-poster beds and games consoles. The video is reported to have been filmed inside a hotel in West Sussex housing hundreds of asylum seekers.
It shows meals served in canteens and appears to show music lessons being put on as well as evidence of drugs and booze being consumed inside bedrooms. The video was uploaded to YouTube by Aston Knight, who told his followers he spent three months living in the four star hotel, filming the migrants who lived there.
He said the footage was filmed between October and December last year. In some scenes, rooms include televisions, landline phones and jewellery. One scene appears to show a device used to grind cannabis in a room.
Mr Knight said: “I was absolutely shocked at the level of luxury. It was something I didn’t expect.” He said his experience changed his view of migrant hotels, adding he used to support their use.
He said: “While the country goes through a cost of living crisis and people are struggling to pay their mortgages, seeing the absolute luxury was shocking.”
The footage, which has not been verified by the Daily Express, emerged amid protests against the use of hotels to house asylum seekers.
Home Office figures published in March show some 32,000 asylum seekers are being accommodated in about 210 hotels around the country.
Hundreds of people protested this month outside a hotel housing asylum-seekers in Epping, Essex, after a recently arrived migrant from Ethiopia was charged with sexual assault. He denies the charge.
Protesters in Epping and a handful of other communities have included locals, but also members of organised far-right groups who hope to capitalise on the discord.
Tiff Lynch, who heads the Police Federation officers union, wrote in the Telegraph that the Epping disorder was “a reminder of how little it takes for tensions to erupt” and how “ill-prepared” the authorities remain to deal with it.
The Government has pledged to end the use of migrant hotels by 2029 as the costs and community tensions rise. It comes as a record 24,000 migrants crossed the Channel so far this year.
