The Conservatives have told Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood that migrant hotel chiefs should face prosecution if they fail to report threats or crimes committed by asylum seekers. Under new proposals, the Home Office's accommodation providers – Serco, Clearspring Ready Homes, and Mears – should be legally responsible for informing officers about offences committed by those living in taxpayer-funded venues.
Kemi Badenoch's party plans to table the proposal to strengthen Labour's Immigration and Asylum Bill. The Conservatives pointed to the handling of Sudanese asylum seeker Badreddin Abdalla Adam Bosh, who was shot dead by armed police after stabbing six people in June 2020. Just 24 hours before the rampage, Bosh had threatened to stab others in the Park Inn hotel in Glasgow, but Mears staff decided "it wasn't serious enough yet to merit contacting the police".
Proposal Details
Tory officials said they would ban the providers from keeping "serious incidents at their hotels from the police". The plans would cover migrant hotels, controversial military sites in Wethersfield and Crowbourgh, and houses of multiple occupancy.
Sources added: "Our amendment would end the ability of private contractors to handle serious incidents behind closed doors, ensuring police are alerted before threats escalate into further violence. Companies making millions from taxpayer-funded asylum contracts must be held accountable for keeping the public safe."
Official Responses
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: "People have been murdered after warning signs were ignored. Staff have been left terrified, communities kept in the dark and the police denied information they desperately needed. This cannot be allowed to continue. We need to end this culture of cover-ups and buck-passing. Under the Conservatives, hotel operators who conceal serious incidents will face prosecution."
Shadow Home Office minister Matt Vickers said: "It is utterly disgraceful that companies making millions from taxpayers to run asylum hotels can decide to keep serious crimes and threats of violence from the police. We will shut down the asylum hotel system altogether by removing people who have no right to be in Britain. Protecting the public must be our utmost priority."
Recent Incidents
Sudanese asylum seeker Deng Majek stabbed mother-of-one Rhiannon Whyte 23 times in a frenzied 90-second attack after following the 27-year-old to Bescot Road railway station in Walsall in 2024. Staff at the hotel had been concerned about the way the predator stared at them. Ms Whyte died in hospital three days later. No motive has been established for why Majek attacked her. Majek had arrived in the UK on a small boat about three months before the attack and applied for asylum. He was jailed for 29 years in January.
Syrian Mohammed Sharwarq attacked a cleaner at The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, a head chef and two fellow residents in the summer of 2025 while already on police bail for an alleged affray at another asylum hotel in Gloucestershire. And one of the three asylum seekers jailed in July over the gang rape of a woman on Brighton beach had been cautioned for criminal damage at the hotel where all three were living.
Current Figures
Almost 70,000 asylum seekers are now living in communities as Labour continues to spread migrants across the country. Some 69,038 are living in houses, flats and bedsits – including large houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) – which is up from 68,719 three months ago. Another 16,021 are in hotels, while 744 asylum seekers are living in Wethersfield, near Braintree in Essex, and 418 people are in Crowborough, according to the latest Home Office figures.
Ministers want to move 1,257 migrants into MoD Bicester, near Piddington in Oxfordshire, and up to 1,250 in Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire. Another 930 will be housed near the village of Barnham in Suffolk. The Daily Express exposé that villagers were furious with asylum minister Anna Turley over her controversial comments about the site in Linton-on-Ouse have been mirrored within the Home Office.
Ms Turley told MPs on Tuesday, in a session examining Labour's Immigration and Asylum Bill: "We're not housing them in a community. They are being housed on a specific site, that is self-contained, that is away from the community. All of their needs are met on that site, and where they aren't met, they are transported to larger places like cities and towns. That's certainly the situation we have in Wethersfield and Crowborough. It is very rare for those individuals to leave the camp of their own volition. They have to sign in and out. They are not in the village."
Senior civil servants held a question-and-answer session with their officials, it is understood. One asked: "How can you justify RAF Linton-on-Ouse being used for an asylum centre when it is right in the middle of a village, 20 steps from people's houses and near a children's playpark and school? No Labour reps agree to visit this village, but other parties have and are shocked that it is in the middle of the village." But senior staff chose not to answer, it is claimed.
