Congratulations to Diane Taylor for challenging the justice secretary’s claim that accommodation in hotels is a pull factor encouraging asylum seekers to come to the UK (Dominic Raab is wrong: refugees do not come to the UK for the hotels, 29 March). The image promoted by talk of “Hotel Britain” is of people enjoying a holiday in pleasant surroundings. The reality is very different.
At our advice service, we are seeing increasing numbers of asylum seekers who have been placed in hotels. They are often in severely overcrowded conditions, sometimes sharing a room with strangers, provided with poor and inadequate food, and only £8 a week to spend on necessities, with no support to help them access services such as GPs.
Far from being a pull factor, hotel accommodation, as with other aspects of the hostile environment, is aimed at deterring people from coming to the UK. Only those desperate to find safety would come here to face these conditions.
Rosemary Sales
Trustee, Hackney Migrant Centre, London
• When I watched the first episode of the BBC’s Great Expectations, I idly wondered how long it would be before this Tory government suggested using ships to house immigrants like the prison hulk depicted therein (Home Office planning to house asylum seekers on disused cruise ships, 28 March).
Catherine Roome
Staplehurst, Kent
• The Home Office has a short memory. In 1987, 120 refugees, 60 of them Sri Lankan Tamils, were detained on a passenger liner, the Earl William, in the Thames – until the great storm of 15 October dislodged it. Ships may not be as secure as Braverman believes.
Ruth Valentine
London
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