UK home secretary denies blocking hotel bookings for migrants

By Karim El-Bar

LONDON (AA) – British Home Secretary Suella Braverman told parliament on Monday that she never attempted to stop hotels being booked to house migrants.

Braverman has been under increasing pressure due to reports emerging from the Manston migrant processing center in southeast England that it is overcrowded and has deteriorating living conditions, including outbreaks of diphtheria.

She said she knew “the importance of taking legal advice into account” and that at every point she had “worked hard to find accommodation to relieve pressure at Manston.”

Manston is meant to hold up to 1,000 people for up to 48 hours, but instead is currently holding around 4,000 people.

On Sunday, a migrant center in Dover, also in southeast England, was firebombed by a man who later was found to have killed himself.

The Times, a British daily, claimed in a report that Braverman blocked the booking of new hotels for migrants and ignored legal advice.

"On no occasion have I blocked the procurement of hotels or alternative accommodation to ease the pressure on Manston, that simply isn't true," Braverman said, adding that she in fact had actually approved the booking of dozens of hotels since becoming the home secretary.

She did, however, criticize the sums of money spent on securing hotel accommodation, and said some hotels were four-star. This was not “an acceptable use of taxpayers’ money,” she said.

Braverman told MPs: "Let's be clear about what is really going on here - the British people deserve to know who is serious about stopping the invasion of our southern coast and who is not. Let's stop pretending they are all refugees in distress, the whole country knows that is not true."

She added that she was serious about ending illegal migration and fixing the “hopelessly lax asylum system.”

Earlier in the day, Braverman was forced to admit in a letter that sent official documents from her government email to her personal email on six separate occasions during her first period as home secretary, which lasted six weeks.

She then stepped down from former Prime Minister Liz Truss’ government due to breaching the ministerial code, before being reappointed the home secretary six days later by current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.