Thread: Longford villagers who can't take any more migrants

The villagers who can't take any more: ROBERT HARDMAN meets fed up residents of Longford, which currently doubles up as overflow hotel accommodation for migrants

Eva and Donald Young, tourists just off the plane from Canada, have paid £34 for their hotel room. Adrian and Katerina, on holiday from Perth, Australia, have spent £50 for theirs (though they say it’s filthy and they wish they hadn’t).

But they are the minority.

Most people staying at the Heathrow Lodge Hotel, right next to Britain’s biggest airport, are not paying a penny for their accommodation — because we, British taxpayers, are.

For this is not so much a hotel as a sprawling Home Office transit camp for asylum-seekers.

And if these non-paying guests are lucky, they might even get a free limousine thrown in.

Longford villagers who can't take any more migrants | Daily Mail Online

This is pure insanity.

This is the complete article, with links.

The villagers who can't take any more:
ROBERT HARDMAN meets fed up residents of Longford, which currently doubles up as overflow hotel accommodation for migrants

By ROBERT HARDMAN FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 18:43 EST, 14 October 2015 | UPDATED: 01:50 EST, 15 October 2015

Eva and Donald Young, tourists just off the plane from Canada, have paid £34 for their hotel room. Adrian and Katerina, on holiday from Perth, Australia, have spent £50 for theirs (though they say it’s filthy and they wish they hadn’t). But they are the minority.

Most people staying at the Heathrow Lodge Hotel, right next to Britain’s biggest airport, are not paying a penny for their accommodation — because we, British taxpayers, are.

For this is not so much a hotel as a sprawling Home Office transit camp for asylum-seekers.

And if these non-paying guests are lucky, they might even get a free limousine thrown in.



Bored: Residents say many of the men simply spend their days sitting on front garden walls as they have nothing else do in the tiny village



Luxury travel: A group of seven migrants were reportedly taken from London to Manchester in this £50,000 Hummer limo at a cost of £3,000 covered by the taxpayer, it was claimed

For in the latest episode of the tragi-comedy that is British migration mayhem, it has emerged that seven asylum-seekers were recently dispatched from the Heathrow Lodge Hotel to Manchester in a limousine. And not just any limousine, but a 16-seat, £50,000 monster known as a stretch Hummer.

The equally monstrous fare — £3,000 — was picked up Home Office contractor Serco. The company receives £40 million a year (a tiny part of its £4 billion revenue) to handle accommodation for asylum-seekers.

Given that there is a perfectly good £26-a-head bus service from Heathrow to Manchester, it doesn’t say much for Serco’s cost-control systems, especially since the company is losing a fortune on this contract (it expects to be down £115 million by 2019).

A Serco spokesman insists there was a train strike on the day in question, thus limiting transport options, and that it won’t happen again.

But you don’t need to spend long at the Heathrow Lodge Hotel to realise that a £428-a-head Hummer ride is a mere footnote to the migration farce here in the ancient village of Longford, Middlesex.

This is certainly unlike any hotel I have ever come across — except, perhaps, Fawlty Towers. My attempt to book a room ends up with me being shooed off the premises as a trespasser.


Longford 'overwhelmed' by migrants as DOZENS arrive daily

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New arrivals: Longford in West London is fast becoming a 'transit camp' for migrants from Calais, locals claim

It’s a large, unprepossessing house in what was once a pretty village on the fringe of Heathrow Airport. It turns out to incorporate much of the surrounding area.

That is because the owner of the hotel, Surinder Arora, has bought up great chunks of Longford as house prices have tumbled amid fears of Heathrow expansion.

If the proposed third runway does go ahead, then Longford will have to be flattened — in which case, Mr Arora (who is described as ‘a Tory Party business adviser’) will receive handsome compensation. If not, he will have acquired a very cheap village which, currently, doubles up as overflow hotel accommodation.

But many residents of Longford have not sold up in the hope that the new runway doesn’t go ahead.

They have long grown used to the noise of planes landing nearby. What irks them are the gangs of young men loitering on the street day and night.


Drop-off: A group of men pile out of a coach which took them to the Heathrow Lodge Hotel, Longford today

Every day for more than a year, busloads of migrants and asylum- seekers have been arriving in the hotel car park, where they have been directed to rooms around Longford.

Walking down Bath Road, I meet a trio sitting on a wall. They are from Syria, Sudan and Ethiopia, and say they reached the UK via Calais. Over the road, I have a long chat with Matt Bassinga, 23, who recently arrived — by plane — from Congo.
Round the corner in Heathrow Close, I find a couple of properties full of Eritrean youths. All are young, unmarried men. The majority reached the UK in the back of a cross-Channel lorry or freight train.

After claiming asylum on British soil, they were sent here pending processing by the Home Office.

After the squalor of the ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais, they are very happy to have a roof over their head.


Mult-millionaire: Owner of Heathrow Lodge Surinder Arora, chairman of Arora Hotels, is estimated to have had a fortune of £356 million at the height of his business, according to The Sunday Times Rich List

TripAdvisor reviews of the Heathrow Lodge Hotel may be abysmal — ‘completely disgusting’, etc — but you won’t hear many complaints from these guests.

Longford residents, on the other hand, are fed up. All stress they sympathise with people fleeing persecution, though some point out no one is being persecuted in Calais.

Their gripe is with a system that dumps large numbers of migrants on a village with no one to turn to.

Certainly, there is no sign of anyone from the Home Office, let alone the hotelier trousering £30 a night per asylum-seeker.

The reclusive Mr Arora was born in the Punjab and arrived in Britain as a teenager. He worked for British Airways and also waited on tables at the Renaissance, a hotel he later bought.

His first venture into the accommodation business was when the family bought a row of houses near Heathrow, which were turned into bed-and-breakfast accommodation for flight crews.

At the height of his business, the Sunday Times Rich List said he had a £356 million fortune. A friend of Sir Cliff Richard, the tycoon is said to reside in an executive enclave near Wentworth golf club, Surrey.


Solution? Villagers say that at the peak of the problem, they believed more than 100 were living in the village, but they have since been assured by the manager of the hotel that there would never be more than 40 at a time

Mr Arora’s office says he ‘politely declines’ to discuss Heathrow Lodge Hotel and the asylum-seekers.

Meanwhile, a Serco spokesman points out that the asylum-seekers at this hotel are not its responsibility. The Home Office pays three companies to accommodate them, and these ones are here courtesy of Clearsprings, which is unavailable for comment. No wonder the locals are frustrated.

‘I have nothing against the refugees, but there are too many people in a small place and it’s hitting my business,’ says Rana Saif, 55, landlord of the King’s Arms pub.

He is the first to point out that he himself is a migrant; born in Pakistan, he spent much of his life in Japan and Sweden before moving here with his three sons in 2012. But he says that migrants have to be managed properly.

‘People don’t like walking down the street when it’s full of gangs of men. In March, I was down to £80 in the bank because locals were not drinking here, but groups of men were coming into my pub demanding cutlery and ketchup and messing the toilets. I finally had enough and told the police that if they didn’t do something, then I would.’

At this point, he says, the hotel staff did apologise and have since taken steps to control their clientele. But he has an extensive collection of photographs of the mess caused by the convoys of arrivals.

A few doors down, I meet Ray, 85, a retired film technician, who has lived here for 60 years. Despite several offers from Mr Arora to buy his house — having bought those on either side — he’s staying put. ‘Where would I go?’ he asks.

He says he got into ‘a right tiswas’ when migrants started walking through his garden and knocking on his windows.

Things have improved, he says, since a recent showdown with the hotel and the arrival of the media. But he says he would be much happier to see some ‘real refugees’.

‘They’re cramming these houses with a lot of young men who say they’re Syrian when a lot of them are not. We’d rather have a refugee family with kids,’ he says.

Interestingly, he says that the local MP has been ‘brilliant’ in following up complaints about the asylum-seekers.

This may surprise anyone who has listened to the very same MP, neo-Marxist Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, calling for Britain to open its doors wider.

Let’s hope Mr McDonnell (who’s been rather confused about Labour’s economic policy of late) is not saying one thing to his voters and another to the Left of his party.

So who do locals blame for all this?

‘It’s that idiot woman who runs Germany,’ says Ray. ‘The one who told everyone in the world that they could come and live in Europe.’

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