When Mike Leahy moved to London from Ireland 40 years ago, he was told that the streets were paved with gold. The immigrant kept his Irish accent. “There was no gold over here back then,” he says. “But there were jobs.”
Leahy grew old in England and retired to Peterborough 14 years ago. These days he is worried about his pension (shrinking), cares for his wife (she recently broke her ankle) and is bewildered by the building behind him.
Until November it was an ordinary hotel, next to a manmade boating lake, a 20-minute walk from the city centre. Today it houses asylum seekers: more than 100 single men who say they are from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and Kuwait. The cost of using hotels to house asylum seekers has ballooned, from £739 million in 2019-20 to £3.1 billion in 2023-24.
Leahy believes that the money spent on those hotels could have been used for services that he relies on. He does not understand how he could lose his winter fuel allowance while the Treasury manages to find £5.5 million a day to house, feed and provide medical care for the likes of the young men who shuffle around outside what used to be called the Dragonfly. Leahy says his daughter, who lives nearby, no longer allows her own teenage daughters to walk unaccompanied around the lake. Like everybody I spoke to around the hotel, he was confused about how this happened.
“Well you had Rishi [Sunak] who said smash the boats. I didn’t vote for him,” the 70-year-old sighs. “You have Keir Starmer last year. He says smash the gangs. Now you have these guys imprisoned in there.”
• Migrants will be put up in hotels for years yet, Treasury admits
Labour was elected with a manifesto commitment to end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers. A Treasury document released last week said the hotels, which have become a reliable source of profit for the contractors and subcontractors who service them, would probably remain in use until at least 2029. There are 8,000 more asylum seekers living in hotels than when Starmer pledged in June to “end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions”.
Leahy gestures to the back of the hotel. The windows that used to give a view into the restaurant and barare opaque, taped over. A pair of arms dangles out of a window; it looks like an open prison. “Surely a recruiter could find out what skills they have?” he says.
His views on the asylum seekers are typical for the area’s residents: complicated and impossible to pigeonhole, a mix of compassion and cynicism. Leahy does not really want them in Britain but he believes that if they are here then they may as well work. He does not understand why his passport is checked on entry and exit over a British border but these men can come into the country without, he suspects, any identifying documents at all. He thinks his daughter is right to keep her daughters away from the men, and I was told that other women no longer walk by the lake alone. “People are pissed off, no doubt about it. There are some very expensive houses around here. Nobody seems to have an answer. They [the Sunak government] talked about Rwanda. Now they are talking about [sending failed asylum seekers to] the Balkans. I don’t know what the answer is.”
Leahy pulls his dog, named Morse after the fictional detective, away from another walker strolling past. He sounds tired and fed up. “You can’t build a wall in the Channel, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. You have a duty of care under international law to rescue people.”
Eventually, he has, after watching various groups of asylum seekers being housed in various parts of Peterborough over the years, come to a settled view: nothing is going to change. “When’s this going to end? It’s not the 150 men I worry about in there. It’s the next 5,000.”
The 500 or so residents near the Dragonfly in Thorpe Meadows were not consulted about the asylum seekers being housed there. Peterborough city council says it received 48 hours’ notice. One local council source described the move as “the dumping of migrants into communities with no regard for the feelings of the communities involved”.
Residents tell me that they have gathered thousands of signatures for petitions that call for the asylum seekers to be moved on. These were ignored.
In November the area’s local Labour MPs, Sam Carling and Andrew Pakes, called the Home Office’s decision to house asylum seekers at the hotel “inappropriate” and “disappointing”. The Labour leader on the council, Dennis Jones, also complained.
The initial reaction from local residents was alarm and then speculation about what the impact might be, said Harry Machin, of the Thorpe Gate Residents’ Association (TGRA). Residents said they had sent letters and emails to the Home Office, the city council, Surya Hotels (the hotel’s owners), Serco (the contractor running the hotel), councillors and MPs requesting basic information about the Dragonfly. Why was this hotel selected by the Home Office? How long will it be used for asylum accommodation? How many men live at the Dragonfly?
Answers have been in short supply, says Colin Webber, 73, who has lived in Peterborough for 35 years. Also a member of the TGRA, he compared the Home Office to a “mafia”, a “brick wall” and a “dictatorship”.
• Inside the asylum hotels targeted by far right: ‘I don’t feel safe’
I have reported on asylum hotels since 2022 in London, Rotherham, Aldershot and Peterborough. I have followed the Home Office’s unsuccessful attempts to house asylum seekers in other locations: disused military bases and a giant barge. When attempts were made to set fire to asylum hotels last year, during the summer riots in Tamworth and Rotherham, I was shocked by the violence but not surprised. Fear, anger and hopelessness are the predominant emotions that asylum hotels generate.
“Using hotels costs everyone,” says Lucy Mort, a senior research fellow at the IPPR charity. “It costs the government financially, it costs the asylum seekers in terms of their health and mental wellbeing, it costs local communities their cohesion.”
Every year since the Home Office signed decade-long contracts worth about £4.6 billion with three private contractors that are responsible for finding asylum accommodation, the policy has proved dangerous. It is dangerous for the men, women and children who live in the hotels. Asylum seekers have died inside them, committed suicide or allegedly been sexually assaulted and raped by other asylum seekers.
It is also politically dangerous for the governments who are obliged by international treaties to carry out the policy. Every asylum hotel is a tacit admission that the government cannot control its own borders.
There are few amenities around the Dragonfly other than a pub. The closest hub for the asylum seekers is the office of Help (Helping Empower Lives in Peterborough), a two-year-old charity with an office in the city centre.
Help is providing assistance to the men in the Dragonfly in concert with Serco, confirmed Beckie MacLellan, its co-founder and outreach manager. The charity’s office hosts sewing classes and English language lessons. MacLellan, alongside her fellow co-founders, Rania Ali and Mark Murray, is at pains to point out that the charity also helps British citizens with everything from universal credit applications to applying for social housing. The last time MacLellan gave an interview about the Dragonfly, Help was subjected to anonymous threats through its contact form.
She and her colleagues say safety fears are overblown. “It’s not a hotel full of paedophiles. They’re not going to hurt anyone, and they’ve not hurt anyone. The assumption is that these are dangerous people, but why are they dangerous people? There’s no proof.”
For Webber, the most obvious change in the area is the removal of a pontoon and a canal boat mooring on a smaller lake next to the hotel.
He had pointed out to the council that teenagers swam in the lake in the summer, and having 141 single men staying next to it might be a source of trouble. The response was to remove anything on the lake that might be used to aid swimming. A fieldside path from the lake back up into Peterborough was fenced off.
Webber says: “Our civic amenities are being pulled away from us left, right and centre, and we are angry.”
