Crime prevention in Essex is being compromised by the government’s refusal to move migrants out of a hotel in Epping at the centre of protests, the county’s policing commissioner has warned.
Roger Hirst, the police and crime commissioner for Essex, said protests outside the Bell Hotel were likely to continue, requiring the redeployment of hundreds of police officers.
He said it undermined Essex police’s crime prevention plans and work towards the government’s key missions of reducing violence against women and knife crime.
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has rejected calls from Hirst and Epping Forest district council to move migrants out of the hotel and cease using it to house asylum seekers.
She also has yet to respond to a letter that Hirst wrote to her on Tuesday requesting a meeting to review the use of hotels in Epping as protests grew.
Hirst has said that he, along with the two local Conservative MPs and council leaders, would write another letter requesting an urgent meeting. Failing a reply, Hirst said he would camp outside the Home Office in Westminster until he received a response.
“I’ll be going and knocking on their door personally,” he said. “We can’t afford to back off because the protests are not going to go away.
Yvette Cooper has not yet agreed to meet Hirst
REUTERS
“From the policing perspective, Essex police have a really robust plan and they’re really on top of it. The protests have been dealt with.
“But it’s disruptive; it stops local people going about their business and from my perspective, we have several hundred police officers out of place. They’re not getting crime down while they’re there.
“I would like Essex police out doing planned crime prevention and reduction rather than having to commit to keeping the peace.”
He added: “We’ve got the capacity to keep on doing the response stuff and looking after the public, but it’s the crime prevention stuff — getting ahead of crime — that is going to be compromised because we have to put resources where they need to be.
“It compromises our ability to tackle the government’s core missions of halving violence against women and girls and knife crime. It’s distracting several hundred officers.”
Counter-protesters march to the Bell Hotel
The Home Office confirmed that Cooper had received Hirst’s letter and would respond “in due course”. It also said that asylum seekers would not be removed from the Bell Hotel.
A group founded by “football lads” has been helping to co-ordinate protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers.
Several hundred protesters descended on the Brook Hotel in Norwich for a noisy but largely peaceful demonstration during which people chanted “we want our country back” and held placards reading “stop the invasion”.
The protest had been advertised by a group called Together for the Children, which has also helped to organise protests in Epping, Diss in Norfolk and a demonstration later this week outside the Barbican in London.
Together for the Children is led by Phil Hickin, who is also head of the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, a protest movement formed to unite rival football firms against Islamist extremism. The group has been described as “far-right”, a label it disavows.
After the protest in Norwich, Hickin wrote on social media that “the fight has only just begun”. He said: “We need these protests outside every hotel up and down the country housing these illegals until this traitorous government stand up and listen to us.”
There are fears that the protests may escalate and spread around the country as they did last year, when migrant hotels were attacked. Over the weekend protests took place in Manchester, Bournemouth and Portsmouth.
More protests are expected outside migrant hotels this week
During a protest outside the Cresta Court Hotel in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, protesters and counter-protesters hurled bottles at each other across a police dividing line. Among the demonstrators was Ryan Ferguson, who last year was jailed for racially abusing a football player.
The Home Office said: “The government is reducing expensive hotel use as part of a complete overhaul of the asylum system.
“From over 400 asylum hotels open in summer 2023, costing almost £9 million a day, there are now less than 210. We want them all closed by the end of this parliament. We have also removed more than 35,000 people with no right to be in the UK.
“People rightly want to see a robust and effective asylum system and we have a duty to support people who would otherwise be destitute and sleeping rough while their case is decided. Any hotel that remains open is carefully managed with dedicated security and monitoring arrangements.
“We’ll continue to work closely with local police and community partners, in Epping and across the country, as we fix this broken system.”