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00:00Send them out, send them out, send them out, send them out.
00:07Asylum hotels have led to a summer of protest.
00:10Tensions are rising, communities divided.
00:17If you push people and push people to their limits,
00:21they will get to the point where enough is enough.
00:23Others are offering a helping hand.
00:26If we weren't here, all hell would break loose.
00:29People would get to crisis level.
00:32I'm Raheel Sheikh and I'm setting out to discover the truth
00:35about where asylum seekers are housed
00:37and why some communities feel it's unfair.
00:41We do feel that we were targeted.
00:44We really do feel that.
00:46Send the **** home, mate!
00:48Along the way, I find myself being racially abused.
00:51He's talking about me. He keeps saying send the **** home.
00:55Britain's asylum system is in crisis.
00:58This issue could very well determine who the government is
01:02at the next general election.
01:04What's gone wrong and can it be fixed?
01:06It's Friday evening and a crowd has gathered outside a hotel.
01:12It's a mix of concerned locals and people from further afield.
01:18The Crest-de-Court Hotel was closed to the public last October.
01:30It's now home to around 300 male asylum seekers.
01:46It's about young girls being followed in the streets by these people
01:50that come here illegally on dingies.
01:54They chose to get on that boat and pay whatever they paid to get here,
01:58to get four square meals, comfy bed in what was three-star hotel.
02:04Conservative councillor Nathan Evans is campaigning to get the asylum seekers out of the hotel.
02:08I found out the day before it happened and very next day it's filled with illegal migrants.
02:18And then that was weddings, all sorts of events.
02:20Anything and everything was just cancelled overnight.
02:22They are asylum seekers and asylum seekers aren't illegal.
02:26No, they are claiming to be asylum seekers because they have to claim to be asylum seekers
02:31because if they don't, they have got no right to be here.
02:34We are massively cosmopolitan here, so it is not a colour or race thing.
02:41It is people are worried. The point is they should not be here.
02:45But for some people, race does seem to be an issue.
02:49You are probably not from my land.
02:52Am I not an Englishman to you?
02:53No, you are not. You are British.
02:54But I was born in England.
02:55So you are not English?
02:56You are British passport.
02:57Right.
02:58You are not British British are you?
03:00There is an Anglo nation.
03:01Yeah.
03:02It is white.
03:07The Labour-run council says the hotel isn't an appropriate place for asylum seekers.
03:15But it stresses that Trafford has a proud history
03:18of being a welcoming borough.
03:23Many here agree.
03:26I've heard so many stories about the journey.
03:31Volunteers organise a weekly community meal, inviting asylum seekers from the Cruster Court Hotel.
03:39It is a really great medium isn't it? Food.
03:42Because not only does it mean that you are being fed, but actually you might participate in the cooking.
03:47And for some people who have been in a hotel for weeks or months, they have never had that opportunity.
03:53Could I have the pepper, please?
03:55Pepper.
03:56The vanilla.
03:57The pepper. Thank you.
03:58Ashley Hardingham is a minister at a nearby Baptist church.
04:02Cheers!
04:03Cheers!
04:04Cheers!
04:05There are hundreds of people in Auckland who are volunteering, handing out food, doing all that.
04:11But I don't know, does that not make news or noise?
04:15When you sit with people who have been tortured, who have been beaten, who have fled the Taliban,
04:24who have travelled here in the most desperately difficult journeys with so few resources,
04:31who have seen people die on the journey.
04:36When you hear these stories, you can't help them being moved.
04:44Ali says he fled Afghanistan fearing persecution by the Taliban.
04:49He's now living in the Cruster Court Hotel.
04:52We've changed his name and he's asked us not to show his face.
04:57The only thing I understand is when they say, send them home.
05:02I think the reason is that people think we came here to eat and sleep for free.
05:10That's why they judge us like this.
05:17It's not as luxurious as they think.
05:20Inside the hotel, all we really do is eat, try to keep ourselves occupied.
05:26There's nothing else.
05:33Like most asylum seekers, Ali isn't allowed to work.
05:36He gets food at the hotel and the government gives him just under £10 a week to live on.
05:44Why are individuals not immediately granted the right to work when they arrive?
05:48If they were, people won't think like that about us.
05:52Because right now, people see us as freeloaders.
06:03This year, 32,000 asylum seekers arrived by small boat just like Ali.
06:07It's on course to be a record year.
06:10Most of them will claim asylum, but that's only part of the story.
06:14Most people who claim asylum in the UK do not arrive by small boats.
06:20About 40% do.
06:22The remainder arrive on valid visas.
06:25That's another 40%.
06:26So these are people who are coming to the UK on study visas, work visas or family visas.
06:32And then the large portion of the remaining 20% is thought will be entering the UK from Ireland.
06:37In the last year, more than 110,000 people applied for asylum in the UK.
06:44That's a record high.
06:46The government has a legal obligation to provide housing and support for them if needed.
06:5232,000 people are currently in hotels.
06:56Hotels put huge pressures on the overall asylum support budget.
07:02And they've created this sort of focal point for local community tensions.
07:06And a symbol of why the system isn't working as it should.
07:14In July, there were violent protests outside an Epping hotel.
07:18After an asylum seeker living there was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
07:24He was later convicted and jailed.
07:26Nigel Farage backed local protesters.
07:33Of course there were some bad eggs that turned up at Epping.
07:38But do I understand how people in Epping feel?
07:43You bet your life I do.
07:45You bet your life I do.
07:46The truth is, most asylum seekers aren't housed in hotels.
07:59They're living in private housing, also paid for by the government.
08:04And that's another issue for some communities.
08:06Hi, Guy. Hello.
08:08Is it school holidays still? I don't know what day it is.
08:10Sarah Pochin is a Reform UK MP.
08:16Her constituency, Runcorn and Hellsby, is on the banks of the Mersey in the north-west of England.
08:26She won the seat from Labour in a by-election earlier this year.
08:29People like you, your lives are being affected, you've got young children.
08:35She campaigned to get a nearby asylum hotel closed down.
08:39Now, she says, there's another problem.
08:42Asylum seekers living in shared houses known as HMOs, or houses in multiple occupation.
08:48We've had, to date, 48 separate households coming in to us with their concerns on this particular issue of living with HMOs.
09:01Now, those concerns raise from, you know, noise or coming and going at different hours.
09:09Or it goes through to crime, and that can sometimes be small, what we might class as petty crime.
09:16Stealing bikes, that type of thing.
09:18There is a correlation between migrants living in a community and a rise in crime.
09:28I've got a lot of strange people in the area walking the streets late at night.
09:33Kevin lives on the estate and agrees with his MP that there's a problem.
09:37It's a bit like, you can't let your kids out anymore in the area because you feel a bit like, you know, these people, strange people.
09:46Never seen before, don't speak English.
09:49Just trying to mix, watching the kids play in the community, so...
09:53What's strange about them?
09:55What's strange about them?
09:56Well, they're not from this country and they're all young men.
09:59I'm not racist.
10:01I wouldn't complain if it was an asylum seeker family.
10:04Where do you want them to be? Where do you think they should be housed?
10:07Somewhere where they can be watched.
10:10Sarah Potions claimed that asylum seekers are fueling crime in the area has been disputed.
10:16The police would say that they haven't seen an increase in crime.
10:20My experience of what I've been being told is actually not necessarily the same as what the police think the situation is.
10:30And I also know from what constituents will tell me that they are not reporting all of this to the police.
10:36They're walking around. It's actually been described as in a military style.
10:39Four, six young foreign males walking around these streets.
10:45It's threatening. And people tell me that they feel unsafe to let their children go to the local parks.
10:52Neither of those things are a crime. What's the issue with a group of men walking around and sitting in parks?
10:57The issue is that parents will tell me that their daughters are approached by those groups of men.
11:05It is groups of men that are doing the indecent exposure.
11:10You know, it's foreign nationals.
11:12Cheshire police told Panorama it has no evidence linking incidents of indecent exposure to asylum seekers in Runcorn and Hellsby.
11:23And says crime across Cheshire has fallen for the past three years.
11:33Just across the Mersey in Nearby Widness, people are offering support to asylum seekers.
11:39Are you going to be at your house later on?
11:42Charity worker Pauline is dealing with a crisis.
11:46Yeah. OK. I'll see you later on then. I'll message you before I come to make sure you're there.
11:52The asylum seeker she's speaking to is feeling suicidal.
11:56OK. All right. You're welcome. All right. Bye. Bye-bye.
12:01They've very often got a lot of trauma from their past.
12:04They've been abused, physically abused, sexually abused. We get a lot of people being trafficked.
12:09And their journeys have been very, very difficult.
12:13If we weren't here, all hell would break loose, basically, because people would get to crisis level.
12:24That's a copy of your voucher. You show it at the food bank when you go tomorrow.
12:29Pauline was a teacher until she retired.
12:34You go in to the bank and say you'd like to open an account.
12:39Open an account. Yeah.
12:41Now, along with a team of volunteers, she runs a drop-in centre helping asylum seekers living in the area.
12:47Have you ever had a blood transfusion?
12:53A lot of the time, it's things like food bank vouchers or food or Aldi vouchers and Asda vouchers.
13:03Travel money if they're going to see a lawyer or to see something about their court interview or something like that.
13:09This is Naif. He's 31 and from Syria.
13:14Pauline's helping him prepare for his home office interview, where he'll make his case for asylum.
13:20They may ask you things about your country.
13:23Yeah.
13:24Like whoever's who's there at the time, what the flag looks like, just to check. Yeah.
13:33Yeah.
13:35Naif arrived in the UK by small boat. He'd travelled across five countries.
13:40I had to leave the country because the situation became bad and it was dangerous for my family.
13:48We literally saw death before our eyes because the road was extremely difficult.
13:53Some people would say you were safe in Spain, you were safe in Belgium.
13:59Why did you continue to put your life in danger to come to the UK?
14:03I could have stayed in Spain or one of the countries I passed through,
14:06but I chose the UK because I could integrate into society.
14:11The first thing is that I hope to get residency and get the right to live here in the United Kingdom.
14:18I will try to bring my family because my family live in an insecure area.
14:25Since I spoke to Naif, the Home Office has tightened the rules,
14:29making it harder for him to bring his family to the UK if he's granted leave to remain.
14:34He currently lives in a shared house with three other asylum seekers.
14:39He says he's settled well, but there have been problems.
14:44Me and my friends did face racism here in Widness, in a park.
14:50And most of the racism we faced came from children.
14:54They started shouting loudly, things like,
14:57you are child predators, child predators.
14:59That really began to bother us a lot.
15:03We didn't come here to harass anyone.
15:06I'm married and I have children.
15:09It's impossible for a man of my age to even think, even think of harassing a child.
15:15That leaves a deep pain in your heart.
15:17NAIF's one of 66,000 asylum seekers living in what's called dispersal accommodation.
15:26Private rented housing spread around the UK.
15:28The whole idea was to try to produce a more equitable distribution across the country of asylum seekers.
15:39At the core of the dispersal policy is that it's no choice.
15:42You don't have any say whatsoever in where you're sent to.
15:46It's not just asylum seekers who don't have a say.
15:53Councils don't have much either.
15:55Government contracts for sourcing asylum hotels and HMOs were awarded to three private companies in 2019.
16:02The estimated cost over 10 years is £15 billion.
16:05There seems to be this perception that all the councils decided to do this.
16:09We haven't.
16:11No-one even told us before it happened.
16:14But then we're having to deal with all the, you know, the community issues that come with that.
16:22Andrea Warp is a Labour councillor in Holton in Cheshire and grew up in an area called West Bank.
16:27You're seeing people experiencing very rapid change because it was literally almost overnight.
16:37West Bank is one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in England.
16:41Serco is the company with the asylum housing contracts in this area.
16:46They have concentrated on the cheaper areas.
16:50Circle started doing contracts with private landlords and so they took up quite a bit of the cheaper private rented stock,
17:00which has then put pressure on, you know, local people trying to get housing.
17:07It's not good for the local communities. It's not good for the asylum seekers.
17:11The only people that I can see at the minute that it's potentially good for is the people making money out of it.
17:18Circle is expected to make a profit of 385 million pounds on its asylum accommodation contract over 10 years.
17:31If you look at these multi-billion, 10-year contracts, really baked into them is an incentive for them to try to find the most affordable accommodation.
17:42And that's because the contractors, they get paid by the government a per person nightly rate.
17:48So if they can undercut that, that's additional profits.
17:52Panorama compared data on deprivation and the number of asylum seekers housed in each local authority.
18:01Our analysis suggests that around half of the most deprived areas in England also house the most asylum seekers relative to their populations.
18:08What would you say to people that live in these areas who say that it's just not fair the way that it's currently working?
18:15I appreciate that communities are saying that they're doing more than their kind of fair share of full dispersal.
18:20So we are hearing their message and we're moving to a model that makes sure that that pressure is taken off houses of multiple occupation
18:26and onto other sites where it's more suitable to have bigger numbers of people.
18:29Serco told Panorama the Home Office determines the number of asylum seekers to be accommodated in communities.
18:38It says it consults on every property with the relevant local authority and works closely with them and the Home Office to ensure a balanced and appropriate approach.
18:47It also says it works with private landlords to rent a mix of properties, taking into account the overall housing market in those areas.
19:00While interviewing Andrea, we were interrupted.
19:03A passerby became abusive.
19:13I think we need to keep an eye on this situation.
19:15He's talking about me.
19:16Yeah.
19:17He keeps saying send the phone.
19:18He is.
19:20When Andrea challenged him, he used a racist slur to describe me.
19:25It's the second time I've been singled out because of my race while making this film.
19:31Some people think the tone of the political debate about asylum seekers is fanning the flames.
19:37How much of a concern is it to you that this rhetoric around this issue about asylum seekers, refugees, HMOs is fuelling community tensions locally?
19:48I don't think the rhetoric is fuelling community tensions.
19:51I think what is fuelling community tensions is the fact that people living in these communities affected by HMOs with migrants, asylum seekers in them.
20:04What's happening out there is real.
20:07During the production of this film, I was racially abused just in a nearby area to this actually.
20:13How much of that and behaviour like that do you feel responsible for?
20:16I don't feel directly responsible for any behaviour that might have happened to somebody who was incorrectly identified as someone that shouldn't be here.
20:31So if I was an asylum seeker, would that have been justified behaviour?
20:33No.
20:34I can't talk about a particular incident.
20:37If you push people and push people to their limits, they will get to the point where enough is enough.
20:46Naif's got the bus to Liverpool for a crucial Home Office interview to make his case for asylum.
20:54How are you?
20:55How are you?
20:56You OK?
20:57Yeah, thank you.
20:58Yeah, good, thank you.
20:59But at the last minute, it's been cancelled.
21:01I've been waiting for eight months for this appointment.
21:07That means it's going to be more waiting, frustration and mental and physical exhaustion.
21:13Naif's is one of 70,000 asylum claims waiting for an initial decision.
21:27That backlog has been almost halved since 2023.
21:30But that's created problems further down the line.
21:35There's now a growing backlog of people appealing asylum refusals.
21:40Wait times in the courts are actually quite long.
21:43Anywhere from six months to a year, there are cases that have taken even longer than that.
21:49So this is another backlog that's building and is going to be a headache for the government.
21:52The government says it'll set up a new independent body to tackle the appeals backlog.
22:07But the challenges don't end there.
22:10Mustertree is a charity that supports people in poverty.
22:14Today, Chief Executive Jo Walby is meeting a new client.
22:19You mentioned to me that you had your refugee status in June.
22:26Yeah? Oh. Yeah.
22:28Amira's come from Ethiopia and has just been granted leave to remain in the UK.
22:33But that means she's had to leave her home office accommodation.
22:38So have you had a housing assessment with Manchester Council yet?
22:43OK, she has an appointment this week.
22:46You have an appointment this week. Brilliant.
22:47OK, well done. That's the first thing.
22:51Amira's unlikely to get social housing, so we'll have to rent privately.
22:56At the moment, she's staying with a friend and doesn't have a job.
23:01But you're brave and courageous to get this far, all right?
23:06And we will help you find something.
23:07It might take a while.
23:09The reality is that a lot of people will go through a housing assessment, but young, fit, healthy people won't necessarily get into council housing.
23:23Are we OK? Are we hugging it out? Hug it out.
23:26Thank you. Well done.
23:28It shouldn't be that I'm the first person that's saying to her, you do not have an automatic entitlement to council housing.
23:35We support people through a grief process.
23:36So they don't believe us first of all, then they get angry, then they get upset, and then they accept it.
23:44Joe says that because more asylum claims are being processed, she's seeing more people leaving government accommodation and presenting as homeless.
23:51We have now seen more like 75% to 80% of the people coming through our doors are either seeking asylum or, more notably, people that have just received their refugee status.
24:09Good morning.
24:11Good morning. Good morning.
24:15Tahir fled the civil war in Sudan.
24:17He now comes to Mustertree to learn English.
24:19Who?
24:20What?
24:21What?
24:22Where?
24:23Where?
24:24When?
24:25When?
24:26When?
24:27He was elatedяж 없는 Nigelera.
24:36Well done that.
24:37This town was from you so m给 myself.
24:47He was granted leave to remain in February this year.
24:49It means he's now allowed to work, study and claim benefits.
24:52benefits, but at night he sleeps on the streets of Manchester.
25:18After Tahir was granted leave to remain, he was given 56 days
25:22to move out of his home office accommodation.
25:25He then had to find a job and a place to live.
25:28But like many, he struggled.
25:32You have had thousands of people that have been stuck in accommodation
25:36where they cannot work and they cannot access training.
25:40It is common to see people that have been given their 56 days
25:45that have no option and are sleeping on the streets.
25:48The 56-day time limit was only temporary.
25:53The government's now switched back to 28 days.
25:57Many charities believe this will make things worse.
26:00We're seeing the impact of, you know, 56 days already leading to homelessness.
26:06Cutting that surely would just make the problem worse.
26:09I don't think, you know, artificially inflating that period of time
26:12that someone stays in a hotel is doing them a favour.
26:14We did try 56, that is still available in certain cases,
26:17but the reality is we want that to be as low as possible
26:20because it's in those individuals' interests.
26:22All parties agree that the asylum system isn't working
26:29and they've set out competing visions of how to fix it.
26:34The only way we will stop the boats
26:39is by detaining and deporting absolutely anyone that comes via that route.
26:49We need to process the asylum applications more quickly
26:53so people can be deported if they've got no right to be here.
26:58We need to process people in detention centres.
27:00We need to build proper camps where we keep people safe.
27:05The government had already promised to shut asylum hotels by 2029.
27:10Now it says it wants to do that sooner.
27:13And if you do shut the hotels, where would asylum seekers live?
27:17We think that bigger sites, perhaps ex-military sites,
27:20are a good way of accommodating people that you need to,
27:24but also finding better sites that perhaps aren't such key community ones.
27:28The Home Office is going to pilot new ways to house asylum seekers,
27:32which could give local councils more control.
27:35It's about putting the power into the hands of people who know best their communities,
27:39that a fairly managed system that balances, you know,
27:42the rights of the individuals, the rights of local communities.
27:44Even the British public will lean into it if they think it's done properly.
27:48It wasn't previously, but we are fixing that broken system.
27:54Asylum hotels are just one part of a system that's under huge pressure.
27:59They've become a lightning rod for wider public concern about immigration.
28:04It could very well be the case that immigration is the battleground
28:08upon which the next general election will be fought.
28:12This issue could very well determine who the government is at the next general election.
28:20How the government tackles the crisis will shape the lives of tens of thousands of asylum seekers
28:25and its own future.
28:55To be continued...
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