Recently a group of asylum seekers were transferred from a hostel in Essex to a hostel on Belgrave Road.
On seeing that they were expected to share rooms with four single men to a room, they refused to accept the accommodation provided by the Home Office and staged a protest outside the hostel.
Following reports from concerned locals, Cllr Jim Glen and Cllr Ed Pitt Ford attended the scene for several hours that evening.
They showed strong leadership by listening to both the asylum seekers and the hostel staff and management team and doing their best to calm the situation down.
They reported the situation to the Metropolitan Police, Westminster City Council who took many hours to respond and Nickie Aiken MP who spoke to both the Home Secretary and Immigration Minister within half an hour of the report. Cllrs Jim Glen, Jacqui Wilkinson and Ed Pitt Ford continued to visit the scene over the following days to ensure that the protest remained peaceful and to push for a resolution from the relevant parties.
The protesters have now left the streets and Nickie Aiken continues to lobby on our behalf for asylum seekers to be accommodated outside of Westminster as our housing offer is already over-stretched.
The Labour Leader of the Council, Adam Hug, publicly claimed that the council had only been informed in the early hours of Thursday morning that the asylum seekers had been transferred to the hotel, which is not the case.