As billions are spent buying up flats and houses for asylum seekers, with locals moved out… How long until a group of small boat migrants are moved into a house in your street? A special report by SUE REID

At the heart of a seaside town on Lincolnshire’s east coast, three big Victorian houses stand just a few yards from each other on the same long road. 

Until recently, they contained flats for Skegness people of all ages who paid £500 or so a month to live in them.

Today all that has changed. The former renters are no longer there. 

The new residents, we have discovered, are 21 young Somali and Afghan men, some fresh off the Channel boats, who told the Daily Mail – as they smoked cigarettes in the gardens – of their delight at having a free roof in their newly adopted country.

If this sounds an extraordinary reversal of fortunes for Skegness locals, it is a microcosm of what is happening across the country.

In a giant snub to British people, a secretive government operation is under way to scatter thousands of asylum seekers (and some genuine refugees) across working-class communities, leafy suburban avenues, historic market towns and even in £450,000 new-build houses on smart private housing estates bought with taxpayers’ money.

Faced with fierce, flag-waving public rebellion over the thousands still in 200 migrant hotels, the Home Office has now switched strategy. 

Whitehall mandarins are under orders to give the newcomers, including young foreign men under the age of 30, homes on our streets instead.

This Daily Mail investigation shows that the landscape of Britain is being changed in real time. 

What has been dubbed ‘Operation Scatter’ by social media critics is likely to be the next flashpoint in the furore now rocking the country over uncontrolled immigration and unguarded national borders.

The Home Office refused to answer the simplest of questions: we asked how many houses in multi-occupation (HMOs), like those in Skegness, are being given by the Government to migrants who have been moved from hotels or have recently arrived on our shores.

Then, in a dark moment for freedom of speech, the Home Office demanded I send its media department the headline for this article before publication. 

I was also asked to provide the theme of our investigation, including any criticisms it might be making. 

‘When I refused (I had merely asked for one set of figures), saying that I doubted any British newspaper would agree to this demand, the response was: ‘You’d be surprised.’

My Home Office conversation made it crystal clear that migrant housing is a highly sensitive issue for Sir Keir Starmer’s regime.

It is already struggling to accommodate 300,000 asylum seekers – many of them economic migrants blatantly cheating the system – who are waiting for a verdict on their initial claims or appeals. 

Arriving, too, are thousands of Afghans (and soon it will be Gazans) who might be deserving but are also lured by generous resettlement programmes offered by the UK despite our deep financial woes.

We travelled the country to find out whether or not so-called Operation Scatter really does give preference to foreign newcomers while a total of 1.4 million households in England and Wales languish, sometimes for years, on council or social housing waiting lists.

First stop was an East Sussex housing estate, near a pretty lake, with two pristine homes, where many Britons would love to live. 

Both are owned by the local Wealden District Council, which bought them for a total of £825,000 in October last year to house Afghan families.

This council has twice refused to tell the Daily Mail the total number of properties, including HMOs, it has bought or made available for migrants and refugees. 

In February this year, it had almost 1,300 households, many of them local families, on its waiting list.

Yet we know through government Land Registry records that the lakeside new-builds were purchased for £375,000 and £450,000 – with the council named as the proprietors of both.

A four-hour drive north brings us to a terraced house in a cul-de-sac in the port of Grimsby, Lincolnshire. 

Worth £85,000 on the open market, according to local estate agents, it is perfectly priced for first-time buyers or a young family with children.

But that’s off the cards. According to the Land Registry, the four-bedroom property is leased for the next seven years to Mears, one of the Government’s three giant providers of immigration housing. 

The other two biggest firms are Clearsprings Ready Homes and Serco. Like Mears, they have been awarded multi-billion-pound contracts signed off by the Tories.

This house in Grimsby is home to three young migrant men, two Afghans and a Yemeni. 

One has recently come in on a Channel boat. Another has moved from a Sheffield hotel facing a wind-down.

Abdul, from Afghanistan, told me he is appealing his failed asylum claim and hopes to bring his mother to Britain.

He said she ‘doesn’t like having her face covered with a veil’ in a country now ruled by the Taliban.

But it’s in Skegness where we find one of the most glaring examples of Operation Scatter’s injustice.

When I visited the three Victorian houses occupied by Afghan and Somali men living rent-free, I did a search of the official records, including Companies House, the Government’s register of British businesses.

I discovered that these properties were bought last year by a local firm which installed new kitchens, garden security lights, fences and freshly painted front doors – after the previous residents were told to leave by their landlord.

The lucky new residents – asylum seekers, failed asylum seekers and three who told me they are student visa overstayers – are delighted to be allocated houses in Britain.

‘I am so pleased,’ said one 29-year-old Afghan man when we chatted at the window of the biggest of the houses, which was sold at auction for £120,000 last year through property giants Savills.

He struggled with English so we used a translation app on his mobile phone to understand each other. ‘Asylum? I hope for that and now I wait for the result,’ he said.

‘Your country gives me a living allowance. I am no rent. I only leave Skegness when I travel to London to see my immigration lawyer who is dealing with my case.’

Further south in a commuter town, a half-hour train ride from London, we discovered a three-bedroom house with a large garden and off-street parking. It’s conservatively estimated to be worth £350,000, say estate agents.

This week, a local council allocated it to an Afghan family through a government-sponsored refugee settlement programme. 

Electoral records show that, until earlier this year, it was home to five adults, including a woman of 70. These people had English-sounding names including Smith.

It is unclear whether the council has bought the property or if it was already on its books as a rental property for social housing.

The Daily Mail has chosen not to identify the council concerned or the address of this house.

But on Tuesday, the family was delivered to its new home in a people carrier. The mother, in a hijab, used her mobile phone to film one of the children running excitedly up the steps into their new home.

The properties we identified this week are housing 35 people and are worth at least £2million.

Yet they are only a snapshot of a fast-moving situation as migrants begin to leave the 200 remaining hotels still costing us £5million a day. 

Nearly 29,000 have arrived this year on Channel boats, according to the BBC. More than 50,000 have reached these shores since Labour came to power.

Angela Rayner, until yesterday the housing secretary, has said all of Britain must take a fair share of newcomers. Last month, she said social housing should be allocated to migrants as well as to long-term British residents.

At a contentious Court of Appeal hearing last month, the Home Office thwarted an earlier injunction ending migrants’ stays at The Bell Hotel in Epping, a ruling that provoked yet more protests.

The public mood worsened when Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, said the Home Office had a duty to protect asylum seekers from destitution. 

Their wellbeing, she made clear to Sky News, outweighed the safety concerns of local communities who believe, after a spate of sex attacks, that young foreign men on our streets and in our hotels are a danger to girls and women.

Yet on the Government goes, deaf, it seems, to the mounting concerns. Earlier this year, the Home Office issued a clarion call for 5,000 properties in order to house up to 20,000 migrants.

Ministers now plan to expand existing deals with councils to buy, lease or rent properties with at least two bedrooms to house, on average, four migrants each.

Government contractor Serco has already issued an urgent appeal to private landlords to help provide accommodation. 

‘We are responsible for 30,000 asylum seekers in an ever-growing portfolio of 7,000 properties,’ it chirruped during a national campaign last year. 

‘Our operation model is based on leasing from landlords, investors and property agents with Serco acting as the tenant.’

According to the Home Office, nearly 70,000 migrants are already in private or council accommodation, which includes the properties found by the Daily Mail.

Four townhouses for migrants have also come to light in a Suffolk village. They have been bought by the local council for £300,000 each and include ensuite bathrooms, underfloor heating and electric vehicle charging points.

At one lovely bungalow in a seaside resort – sold in 2023 for £195,000 to Hong Kong investors when the owner, a pensioner, died – we found migrants living there for short periods before they are relocated by the Government.

A neighbour said: ‘Migrants were in there very recently. One man went out every day to work at the local car wash. This lovely bungalow was cared for by the pensioner, now it looks tired with the garden overgrown.

‘The empty spells [between migrants] are wasted money because the landlord’s rent has to be paid using our tax.’ The upshot is that discontent is spreading.

It is not only so-called Right-wing rabble-rousers and the women’s protest group Pink Ladies who are demanding an end to the crisis.

In Portsmouth, Reform councillors say 55 HMOs now house hundreds of migrants – even though the council was never informed about the migrants’ existence by central government. 

The situation was only discovered when constituents complained to city hall that they were being evicted from their rental homes.

An inquiry found landlords had signed lucrative contracts with government immigration housing providers – and got rid of their existing tenants to make way for the new arrivals.

In Labour-run Basildon, Essex, the council has voted to rigorously vet all the HMOs on their patch. 

Highlighting public disquiet, council leader Gavin Callaghan wrote a hard-hitting article on the Socialist-leaning Left Foot Forward website warning that ‘raw emotion’ is sweeping working-class communities due to the ‘unfair’ policy of helping migrants jump the queue.

He wrote that ‘charlatan operators, including Mears, Serco and Clearsprings’, are going ‘door to door, asking private landlords to evict local families who have paid their rent for years so that their property can be converted into asylum-seeker HMOs.

‘Overnight, a landlord can go from earning £22,000 to £60,000 a year in rent,’ he said.

A family of four or five can suddenly find themselves homeless. ‘They turn up at the council, desperate,’ said Cllr Callaghan. 

‘We stick them in temporary accommodation, often a single hotel room miles away from the schools, jobs and community they know.

‘Meanwhile, they watch their family home handed over to six, seven, eight men who have just got off a small boat and are awaiting an asylum decision. If that doesn’t make your blood boil, nothing will.’