Asylum seeker hotel protestors asked to attend Southampton City Council meeting
There are concerns about the impact the demonstrations are having on the community
Protesters and counter protesters who have repeatedly gathered outside a Southampton hotel housing asylum seekers will be asked to attend a council meeting to discuss issues around the demonstrations.
Southampton City Council is also requesting representatives from the Home Office and police attend January’s sitting of the overview and scrutiny management committee (OSMC).
The move comes following debate at a full council meeting on Wednesday, November 26, as concerns mount over the impact of the ongoing weekly activity outside the Highfield House Hotel in Portswood.
Liberal Democrat group leader Cllr Richard Blackman initially tabled a motion which sought to explore relocating the protests to a different location in the city.
The majority of councillors supported an amended motion tabled by Labour council leader Cllr Alex Winning, which retained hopes of moving the demonstrations but added the proposal for the wider subject to be considered at the scrutiny committee meeting.
Cllr Winning said: “This motion calls for constructive engagement, bringing those protesting, the Home Office and police together and I think that is how we find solutions through conversation, not confrontation.”
The council leader said the motion was about protecting residents, supporting businesses and ensuring compassion and freedom of expression can co-exist.
He added: “The protests, while lawful, are not resolving any underlying issues.
“They are instead creating new ones and that is something we can’t ignore.
“There is also a significant strain on police resources.”
Senior Labour cabinet member Cllr Simon Letts said the council’s job was to bring peace and quiet back to Highfield.
Cllr Letts said: “This started out as a protest on the back of other protests about asylum.
“It’s rapidly turning into a series of protests and march about race and about religion and about ethnicity, and anybody who has been there and heard what’s being said by some of those marches knows that is the case.
“This is being turned by a rather nasty group of people to try and divide our city, our city which traditionally has been a place of sanctuary and decency where people have lived in peace together and got on with their lives, into something else and something I don’t like.”
Councillors on all sides said the right to protest was important.
Conservative group leader Cllr Peter Baillie, who tabled his own amendment to the motion, said he did not believe the location in Highfield Lane was a great place for the protests or counter protests.
He said the scrutiny committee was “completely the wrong place” to be bringing two factions together.
Cllr Baillie said: “I’m not really sure what the idea of sending it to OSMC really is.
“Yes, you can have a debate but it is not going to actually act as any sort of conciliation service.”
Concerns around the use of the scrutiny committee were also raised by Conservative councillors Steve Galton and Rob Harwood, and Green Party councillors Matthew Renyard and Katherine Barbour.
Cllr Renyard said the situation with the protests had been kicked down the path for too long in terms of a response from the Labour administration.
Police could be placed in a difficult position at the scrutiny committee meeting, which was likely to be very political, Cllr Galton said.
Cllr Blackman, who chairs the committee, said he had thought long and hard about whether bringing it to scrutiny was the right thing to do.
“I think on balance it is, but we need to think very carefully about how the meeting is planned, how we frame the purpose of the meeting,” Cllr Blackman said.
The approved amended motion resolved:
That the leader of the council, writes to local MPs and the Home Secretary to urge that the government pass legislation allowing the police to move persistent protests to a new location where they cause clear harm to the local community.
That he further writes to the Hampshire Police setting out actions they could take to reduce the obvious harm these protests are causing to the community in Highfield.
That council requests that those protesting for and against the housing of asylum seekers at the Highfield Hotel along with representatives of the Home Office and Highfield police be asked to attend the January meeting of overview and scrutiny management so that the issues around the protests can be explored and recommendations made to help resolve the issue.