The level of immigration into the UK is helping to drive a housing crisis and undermining the tourism sector by taking over hotels, a former UUP leader has said.

UUP peer Lord Empey was speaking after Reform UK vowed to block asylum seekers from hotels in ten county council areas it secured in a landslide election victory in England last week.

The News Letter has previously highlighted similar concerns about hotels in Carrick, Bangor and Belfast.

"The problem is that in the year to June 2024 there were around 15,000 people a week coming into the UK,” said Lord Empey. “They were mainly non-Europeans and you just cannot, physically or any other way, integrate that volume of people.

placeholder image — Zia Yusuf, chairman of Reform UK, has vowed that the party will block immigrants from hotels.

"It's obviously one of the things that was driving the election results in England last week. A large number of politicians in Westminster just don't join up the dots between immigration, the housing crisis and concerns about hotels.

"We are also trying to build a tourism sector but if you've got large numbers of them occupied with migrants that can have a very significant economic impact on different localities."

Former co-chair of the NI Conservatives, Trevor Ringland, said the UK “rightly takes pride” in being a sanctuary for genuine asylum seekers. "However, a failure to apply common sense criteria to granting asylum has led to a breakdown in trust by the people of the UK in the system,” he added.

Nigel Farage vowed to “resist” asylum seekers being housed in the county council areas now under Reform control after his party took more than 600 seats and won control of 10 local authorities in Thursday’s polls.

Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf, when asked how this would be possible because contracts are drawn up between the Home Office and accommodation providers, said the party would use “every instrument of power available”.

“Judicial reviews, injunctions, there’s planning laws,” he told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme.

“You know, a lot of these hotels – there has been litigation around this already – a lot of these hotels, when you suddenly turn them into something else which is essentially a hostel that falls foul of any number of regulations, and that’s what our teams of lawyers are exploring at the moment.”

He said the party was “realistic” about the fact the levers of change at a local level “pale in comparison” to the powers of Westminster.

“That’s why this is part of a journey to making Nigel the prime minister with a Reform majority.”

Mr Yusuf said Reform would be publishing a plan to “deport everybody who is currently in this country illegally” if elected to national government.

Meanwhile, the new Reform Greater Lincolnshire mayor, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, doubled down on her suggestion that migrants could be housed in tents, saying the UK was “acting like bees to honey by putting people in hotels”.

“This is taxpayers’ money and it should actually be tents, not rent,” the former Tory minister told LBC.

Dame Andrea also said she wanted to cut up to 10% of Lincolnshire County Council’s staff.

Reform won 44 of the 70 seats on Lincolnshire County Council to take control from the Conservatives.

Dame Andrea’s mayoralty also covers the North Lincolnshire Council and North East Lincolnshire Council administrative areas.

She said she wanted to “root out the waste” at Lincolnshire County Council.

“I think, personally, (we) ought to look at maybe cutting the workforce by up to 10%. We’ve got to have a lean, mean local government.”

“That’s what I personally like to see, but again there’s variables there, because we haven’t elected a Reform county council leader yet, so there’s got to be discussions.”

Dame Andrea also said she was “up for a fight” with the unions, after the head of Unison urged staff at Reform-run councils to join them and secure union protection.

Mr Farage has warned council staff working on diversity or climate change initiatives to seek “alternative careers”.

Mr Yusuf said Reform UK would introduce taskforces to audit spending in the councils where it has won control and suggested the party would be digging into what council job roles involved in order to cut costs.

“If you take Lincolnshire County Council, yes, they do not currently have somebody with the job title ‘DEI officer’, (but) they do spend considerable money on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives”, Mr Yusuf told the BBC.

“And they have other people who have basically that same job, but under a different title, partly in response to the fact that they’ve been inundated by think tanks and activists putting in FOIs (freedom of information requests).”

He said Reform would send “teams” into councils, adding: “We’ll be opening up application shortly. We want the brightest and the best.

“If you’ve got experience in audit, if you’ve got experience in fixing potholes, if you’re a software engineer.

“We’re going to bring taskforces in. We’re now going to have access to the contract, access to the numbers, access to payroll, and we’re going to make these changes.”