The owner of a historic hotel in Cornwall says he turned down a potential £20 million by rejecting a ten-year agreement with the Home Office to house migrants there.
John Mappin, who owns the Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel, said he was contacted by a company “representing the Home Office”, that wanted to use his property as an asylum hotel.
The Express reports: Mr Mappin says that he was offered ‘full occupancy’ of his hotel on a ‘rolling contract’ that he felt could last up to a decade. The rolling contract would have ended up being worth up to £20 million over a ten-year period, according to Mr Mappin, who says that he felt he had to say no for the sake of his village. He said: “We spoke in rough terms-these figures are an approximation. I don’t know how many guests they would have used.
“But my hotel roughly sleeps 100 – if we had done it for a migrant hotel, stacked them in here like sardines, without meaning to be coarse, it would have been roughly £3million a year – and that was two years ago.
“To my knowledge, none of the hotels have shut down, let’s say it would have been £5million in the last two years – over a 10-year period, that is approximately between £15-20million.
“I did not entertain doing this for a nanosecond. I would never ever do this to the local community.
“I’m not doing this from a bad place; I’m doing it for the village.
“I would reject it again because I see what it’s doing.
“My wife is from Kazakhstan – she’s a legal migrant, so how can I be against immigration?”
The Camelot Hotel, located in Tintagel, is steeped in the history and atmosphere and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and former guests include the likes of Sir Winston Churchill and Ava Gardner.
Mr Mappin says that the initial approach was via email, with a representative visiting him to discuss the potential of using the hotel on two occasions.
He claims that he grilled the representative on what would happen to his existing staff if he took the offer.
He added: “Our hotel is a major employer locally and also tourists come and stay with us and contribute to the community.
“It’s not a particularly big village – there’s only around 1,500 residents.
“If you put 3,000 to 4,000 illegal and legal migrants into a local village, it will completely change the demographic.
“What I found extremely alarming was that they didn’t give a damn about what it would do to the local community.
“I have around 30 staff – they wanted me to reduce that to two or three.”
He claimed he asked the company what would happen “if the place got trashed”.
He alleges the company responded, stating they would pay to get the repairs done.
John added: “I said, ‘Hang on a second – that’s not the government money, that’s the people’s money.
“I don’t fancy my money being spent on other people’s hotels when migrants have trashed the place.