Visitors booked into the Holiday Inn Hotel, at Garforth in Leeds, are being informed that their room bookings are being cancelled. How many peoplewill have to make alternative arrangements is not known.
No doubt many brides-to-be will be in floods of tears tonight as their wedding plans are tossed into the rubbish bin along with those of many hundreds more travellers. Has the hotel chain gone bust? No, it is something much more serious. This was posted on the Facebook page Leedspace. Thank you to Tony for sending us the following:
Garforth Holiday Inn awareness post for anyone with anything booked.
Comments are being turned off, as it’s not a post for arguing about the whys and wherefores, merely one to ensure anyone with an event booked is aware this is possibly due to change.
This is the very latest we have received;
Dear Garforth & Swillington Councillors. I am writing to inform you that the Home Office have informed the council at very short notice that as part of the government’s current Afghan Resettlement arrangements that they will be using the Holiday Inn, Wakefield Road, Garforth, Leeds LS25 1LH from Thursday 16th September 2021 as an Afghan bridging hotel.
The Holiday Inn, at Garforth will be used for staff who worked for NATO in Afghanistan. As with other bridging hotels that have been stood up across the country service users will be housed at the hotel until permanent accommodation can be found for them.
This maybe in Leeds but can also be in other parts of the country. There is no time limit on how long this hotel will be used. The council are not consulted on any decisions about which hotels are used in the City.
We are also unable to overturn this decision. Officers have met with the Home Office to understand what support will need to be put in place.
In the latest Under The Sunwheel podcast, Steve Frost touches on the subject of the Afghan refugees being re-housed while our own people are having to sleeping rough. Here is what he said:
“I noticed that the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, Labour Party of course. He knows that Manchester is a target destination for, not hundreds, but thousands of these Afghans. And Andy Burnham is saying how welcome they will be, how the city of Manchester is going to provide for these people and their families.
Well Manchester has a massive homeless problem, how the hell are they going to accommodate all the Afghans in Manchester, when there are so many homeless on the streets of Manchester?
If you go to some parts of Manchester, you’ll see people sleeping in tents under flyovers, underpasses and on waste ground. How can that be right? The majority of people you see living like that have been evicted, people who can’t get on the housing list, they’re white British. The nonsense that the left keep churning out about white privilege, it doesn’t exist.”
Under The Sunwheel – Lockdown Episode 14
