'I have to do something': The refugee centre volunteers helping asylum seekers in Derbyshire

Asylum seekers will be housed in disused military bases, ferries and barges. It is under new plans to cut the £6million a day the government says it spends on hotel accommodation.

The Minister for Immigration Robert Jenrick will announce today (Wednesday) that people who arrive in the UK after crossing the Channel in small boats will be housed at locations including RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire.

Former minister Sir Edward Leigh has previously denounced the use of Scampton, the former home of the Dambusters, which sits in his constituency.

Dozens of asylum seekers attend Derbyshire Refugee Solidarity on a weekly basis to get help and support with settling into life in the UK.

Many of the people are staying in hotels in the surrounding areas.

Volunteers say numbers are increasing and sometimes they got 140 people - and for the first time they are seeing women and children.

Biniam Guush came to England from Ethiopia and says he fled because of war and conflict in his home country.

He now receives support from the solidarity centre and says he wants to "improve his English skills".

Guush added: "This place helps us to get friends and have access to English courses. It is very helpful. They give us clothes and shoes because when we came here, we did not have anything.

"They helped us by giving us a bicycle to help with transport and there are other activities."

Steve Cooke, chair and volunteer at Derbyshire Refugee Solidarity said: "We are a place of welcome, a place of safety, to meet a community of other asylum seekers but also British people as well and to make them start to integrate and to help them integrate."

He went on to add: "8 years ago like many others did, the pictures of a young boy whose body was swept up on the beach in Greece."

"His name was Alan Kurdi and he had been trying to cross the Aegean Sea with his older brother and his mother, they lost their lives, they drowned and immediately I thought 'I have to do something about this' and that is why I started."

The prime minister Rishi Sunak told his cabinet on Tuesday the cost of using hotels and the pressure it puts on local areas meant it was no longer sustainable.

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