Illegal migrants are being given private healthcare while being put up in a Greater Manchester hotel despite Labour’s pledge to stop using hotels and a local NHS walk-in centre being shut down. The Telegraph‘s Dia Chakravarty has more.
Four months after [Yvette] Cooper took over at the Home Office, her department received “ministerial approval” to move asylum seekers into a hotel in a Greater Manchester town which had just elected its first ever Labour MP in July.
It was the week of Halloween when the Group Leader of the eight Conservative members at Trafford Council received a phone call from a friend. What was going on at the Best Western Cresta Court Hotel in Altrincham, the friend asked.
The respectable hotel which would host AGMs and formal dinners appeared to be cancelling all bookings – including weddings – for the year ahead.
“I found out by accident,” Councillor Nathan Evans told me, that nearly 300 asylum seekers – reportedly all young men – were to be housed at the hotel which ordinarily charges £171 for a family room per night according to its Tripadvisor reviews.
It was only at this point that the residents discovered that, without consulting with them, the Home Office had made the decision to place 296 individuals in the market town, which their council had accepted without providing the local population with a hint of a notice. The Cresta Court Hotel had been shut down for 12 months with immediate effect to house asylum seekers. …
In a Town Hall meeting last week – a clip of which has now become viral on social media – incredulous local residents discovered that their new neighbours at the Cresta Court Hotel would be provided with access to private healthcare at taxpayers’ expense.
It would be a bitter pill to swallow for most communities across the country. Struggling to access NHS services is possibly the only experience which every British subject has in common these days. But for the people of Altrincham, it is inexcusable.
Oliver Carrol, the Conservative Parliamentary candidate defeated in July, explains why.
“Local people in Altrincham are outraged that Labour recently decided to shut down Altrincham Hospital’s walk-in centre – built at a cost of millions in 2015 – only to fork out for private healthcare for migrants staying in the town’s only major hotel. It is as tin-eared as it is profligate.”
Worth reading in full.
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