Stradey Park Hotel policing bill 'around £300k' says police commissioner

The cost of policing asylum seeker protests outside Llanelli's Stradey Park Hotel has been revealed by Dyfed-Powys Police and Crime Commissioner.

Dafydd Llywelyn says the bill is an estimated £300,000.

The commissioner plans to get the money reimbursed by the UK's Home Office, which wanted to accommodate up to 240 asylum seekers at the hotel.

The amount was revealed by Mr Llywelyn during a Dyfed-Powys police and crime panel meeting.

He plans to raise the matter with Home Secretary Suella Braverman on November 8.

The commissioner said the way in which the situation had played out was "pretty nasty at times" and the behaviour of some protesters who objected to the plans was "very grotesque".

Some police officers, he said, were sworn at, spat at, and even followed home.

A number of arrests were made over the course of several weeks, including when scores of protesters broke into the hotel's grounds on October 1.

Mr Llywelyn said he welcomed the Home Office's U-turn and that, like most of the announcements about the hotel, it had come as "a bit of a shock".

The Plaid Cymru commissioner said he had written several times to the Home Office expressing his concerns that the hotel was unsuitable for a large number of asylum seekers.

He added that the approach had, in his view, "ridden roughshod" over the established "dispersal model", whereby people fleeing conflict in Syria and Afghanistan had been settled in different locations in smaller numbers.

The commissioner said he understood that the Home Office had an issue with the cost of accommodating asylum seekers and had a backlog of asylum decisions to work through but that, in his opinion, "the fundamental flaw is in the way they go about it".

Panel member, Cllr Jonathan Grimes, said he and others had been told that the substantial use of police resources at the Stradey Park Hotel explained why only two police community support officers were present when fighting broke out at a large street fair in Pembroke this month.

"Fortunately nobody was seriously injured," he said.

Cllr Grimes said organisers of the three-day Michaelmas Fair were advised, following enquiries, that extra policing could be provided but at a cost of £74.49p per officer per hour.

"We worked out it would be £4,500 - we were quite shocked," he said.

Mr Llywelyn said other police resources could have been directed to the incident had it been more serious, but he said he would raise it with the relevant superintendent in Pembroke if Cllr Grimes provided him with more details.

He added that the additional policing costs were linked to a national charging rate that forces used for policing football matches.

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