In Altrincham near Manchester asylum seekers are just settling in at the Cresta Court Hotel, many of them just days after making a treacherous journey across the English Channel.
But, as the new arrivals find sanctuary in a northern town, their presence is causing controversy.
Now young men are huddled in groups outside the hotel drinking coffee or smoking.
In Arabic, a Kurdish man in his 20s tells me: “I’ve been here for a few days, and I haven’t faced any hostility since I arrived. In fact, they’ve shown us a lot of respect.”
In contradiction, someone shouts from a passing car: “Get back on the boats!”
About 200 yards down the road people are gathering in a church to air their concerns.
Residents have just learned about the new arrivals, and only because thousands of bookings were suddenly cancelled, along with meetings and even wedding receptions, as the hotel cleared its commitments to make way for the asylum seekers.
“There’s been an information vacuum,” says a mother of two children.
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Standing to raise her objections in the public meeting, she asks if the migrants are “illegal” and if so, is the hotel “effectively an open prison” near several local girls’ schools and a nursery?
Her voice shakes as she tells the room she has already cancelled a night out with her girlfriends over safety concerns.
Community police officer Colin Dytor says the men’s refugee status is a matter for the Home Office but tries to calm the room.
He adds: “I can assure you we’ve had asylum seekers in Trafford for several years and there has been no spike in crime attributed to these asylum seekers.”
Local resident Roger Roper objects, saying the Britannia Ashley Hotel in Hale the officer is referring to is mostly for migrant families, adding: “This is up to 300 young men. We don’t know anything about them.
“If they don’t have any papers or passports, we don’t know what they are capable of.”
Another woman says she worries about her daughter going out at night, as the men come from a country that “doesn’t value women”.
There is an objection to this point from across the room by two women from a pro-refugee campaign group, but the majority applaud in approval.
The concerned resident continues: “Is there going to be a curfew or are they just going to be able to wander around after seven o’clock? Is my daughter going to be safe? No!”
Inspector Dytor responds: “We can’t just lock people up who haven’t committed a crime. We live in a very tolerant and open society, and we have to continue that.”
‘Some of the comments online have been racist’
Further objections are raised about the cost to the town and the added pressure on already stretched GP services.
A spokesperson for Serco, which runs the hotel, tells us: “No decision has yet been made by the local authority on how healthcare will be provided to those in the hotel.”
Connor Rand, the Labour MP for Altrincham and Sale West, released a statement saying he’s been assured background checks had been done on the men by the Home Office.
Outside the church, protesters hold banners which read “Stand Up to Racism” and “Refugees Welcome in Altrincham.”
A protester who gave her first name as Jane says: “Some of the comments online have been racist. When you are saying refugees should be vetted to make sure they are not paedophiles I think that is racist.”
‘We’ve just been kept in the dark’
Back inside Gwyneth and Roger Roper say it isn’t racist to raise concerns. The couple had a Ukrainian family in their home for 14 months and say they welcome documented asylum seekers.
Gwyneth is chairperson for the chapel who provided the venue after the town hall was cancelled last minute a few days earlier.
She says: “I can’t say I agree or disagree with what’s going on because we’ve just been kept in the dark and treated like mushrooms.
“It’s wrong of local, central government and the Home Office not to consult us on something that could impact the local community.”
Councillor Nathan Evans, leader of the Trafford Conservative Group, who called the meeting, agrees, saying there has been a “wall of silence” where residents have “genuine concerns”.
He adds: “One hundred to probably 150 people stay in that hotel a night. They all go into Altrincham to spend money. That’s gone from the town. Nobody is going to compensate businesses for that.”
Asylum seekers describe treacherous journeys
Unaware of any local uproar, back at the hotel the new arrivals tell me of treacherous journeys from places such as Syria and Afghanistan.
A Kurdish man describes being trafficked through countries in the back of a lorry not knowing where he was when he got let out.
He says: “Eventually, we arrived at a beach, and the smuggler ordered me to board a boat. When I told him I was afraid of the sea, he slapped me several times. Then he reached for his gun and said, ‘You’re in a safe country now, get on the boat’.”
One young man not wanting to speak on camera says he saw people drown in the channel on his crossing as a nearby dingy sank.
Another asylum seeker, Fahad, tells of panic on his boat as waves started to beat against the vessel packed with 70 migrants, but they pressed on wanting the escape conditions in the French migrant camps.
Heated national debate becomes local issue
The government promised it would end the use of hotels for migrants but blames this move on the Rwanda policy, which halted the asylum claims of people who arrived in the UK on small boats, causing a processing backlog.
While the thousands crossing the channel have caused heated national debate, the residents of Altrincham are learning how that sharpens when it becomes a local issue.
Mr Rand, the local Labour MP, said in a statement he wants to find out people’s concerns about Cresta Court, which is why he organised the public meeting.
He said it’s “not the first time a hotel in our community has needed to be used for this purpose”, pointing to the “huge backlog” in the asylum system and the almost 119,000 asylum seekers waiting for their claims to be decided.
“Labour is committed to a fair and controlled asylum system,” he said, but warned “there are no quick fixes”.
Mr Rand pledged to “continue to meet with Home Office officials and with ministers to push for the claims of those in the Cresta Court Hotel to be processed as quickly as possible, so this situation can be resolved.”
There is a lot at stake this week for Sophie Blake, a 52-year-old mother to a young adult, who was diagnosed with stage four cancer in May 2023.
As MPs vote on whether to change the law to allow assisted dying, Sophie tells Sky News of the day her life changed.
“One night I woke up and as I turned I felt a sensation of something in my breast actually move, and it was deep,” she says, speaking from her home in Brighton.
“Something fluidy, a very odd sensation. I woke up and made a doctor’s appointment.”
Sophie underwent an ultrasound followed by a biopsy before she was taken to a room in the clinic and offered water.
“They said, ‘a hundred percent, we believe you have breast cancer’.”
But it was the phone call with her mother that made it feel real.
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“My mum had been waiting at home. She phoned me and said ‘How is it darling?’ and I said ‘I’ve got breast cancer,’ and it was just that moment of having to say it out loud for the first time and that’s when that part of my life suddenly changed.”
Sophie says terminal cancers can leave patients dreading the thought of suffering at the end of their lives.
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“What I don’t want to be is in pain,” she says. “If I am facing an earlier death than I wanted then I want to be able to take control at the end.”
Assisted dying, she believes, gives her control: “It’s an insurance policy to have that there.”
Disability rights advocate Lucy Webster warns that for people like Sophie to have that choice, others could face pressure to die.
“All around the world, if you look at places where the bill has been introduced, they’ve been broadened and broadened and broadened,” she tells Sky News.
Lucy is referring to countries like Canada and Netherlands, where eligibility for assisted deaths have widened since laws allowing it were first passed.
Lucy, who is a wheelchair user and requires a lot of care, says society still sees disabled people as burdens which places them at particular risk.
“I don’t know a single disabled person who has not at some point had a stranger come up to us and say, ‘if I were you, I’d kill myself’,” she says.
The assisted dying bill, she says, reinforces the view that disabled lives aren’t worth living.
“I’ve definitely had doctors and healthcare professionals assume that my quality of life is inherently worse than other people’s. That’s a horrible assumption to be faced with when [for example] you’ve just gone to get antibiotics for a chest infection. There are some really deep-seated medical views on disability that are wrong.”
Under the plans, a person would need to be terminally ill and in the final six months of their life, and would have to take the fatal drugs themselves.
Among the safeguards are that two independent doctors must confirm a patient is eligible for assisted dying and that a High Court judge must give their approval. But the bill does not make clear if that is a rubber-stamping exercise or if judges will have to investigate cases including risks of coercion.
Julian Hughes, honorary professor at Bristol Medical School, says there’s a very big question about whether courts have the room to take on such a task.
“At the moment in the family division I understand there are 19 judges and they supply 19,000 hours of court hearing in a year, but you’d have to have an extra 34,000,” he explains.
“We shouldn’t fool ourselves and think that there wouldn’t be some families who would be interested in getting the inheritance rather than spending the inheritance on care for their elderly family members. We could quickly become a society in which suicide becomes normalised.”
Young people will lose their benefits if they refuse to take up work and training opportunities, a minister has said ahead of announcing measures to cut the welfare bill.
Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, told Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips that “conditions” will be attached to new skills opportunities the government intends to create.
With a record number of young people currently unemployed, Labour promised in its manifesto a “youth guarantee” for 18-21 year olds to have access to training, an apprenticeship, or support to find work.
“If people repeatedly refuse to take up the training work responsibilities, there will be sanctions on their benefits,” Ms Kendall said.
“The reason why we believe this so strongly is that we believe in our responsibility to provide those new opportunities which is what we will do. We will transform those opportunities, but young people will be required to take them up.”
The Labour government has said it will stick to a commitment under the former Tory administration to reduce the welfare bill by £3bn over five years.
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Ms Kendall said her party will bring in its “own reforms” to achieve that target, though did not elaborate further.
The Conservatives had planned to change work capability rules to tighten eligibility, so around 400,000 more people signed off sick long-term would be assessed as needing to prepare for work by 2028/29 to deliver the savings.
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Asked whether these people would ultimately be denied their current benefits under Labour’s plans, Ms Kendall told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg: “I’m saying we will bring forward our own reforms. You wouldn’t expect me to announce this on your programme.
“But my objective is that disabled people should have the same chances and rights to work as everybody else.”
The latest official forecasts published by the government show the number of people claiming incapacity benefits is expected to climb from around 2.5 million in 2019 to 4.2 million in 2029.
Last year there were just over three million claimants.
Ms Kendall will launch proposals on Tuesday designed to “get Britain working” amid concerns about the soaring unemployment rate.
The white paper is expected to include the placement of work coaches in mental health clinics and a “youth guarantee” aimed at ensuring those aged 18-21 are working or studying.
The UK remains the only G7 country that has higher levels of economic inactivity now than before the pandemic.
Ms Kendall said the reasons are “complex” and include the fact that the UK is an older and sicker nation.
Asked whether she believes “normal feelings” are being “over-medicalised”, she said that while some people may be “self-diagnosing” themselves with mental health issues it is a “genuine problem”.
“There’s not one simple thing. You know, the last government said people were too bluesy to work.
“I mean, I don’t know who they were speaking to. There is a genuine problem with mental health in this country.”
Ms Kendall’s language was softer than Sir Keir Starmer, who this weekend promised a crackdown on “criminals” who “game the system” .
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, he said: “Make no mistake, we will get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society.”
A man is fighting for his life after a stabbing on Westminster Bridge, police have said.
Officers were called to the scene at around 10.45am on Sunday to reports of a fight and found a man with a stab injury. He was taken to hospital in critical condition.
Three people have been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and another has been arrested on suspicion of affray.
Two of those arrested were taken to hospital with minor facial injuries, the Met Police said.
It is understood the incident is not being treated as terror-related.
The road remains closed, with the police investigation ongoing.