Action for Housing says it is disappointed to learn that the long-awaited relocation of the Queen’s Hotel hostel residents to a location in Engineers Lane and to the Sunrise motel, as previously announced by Minister Pat Orfila, will now not go ahead.

A statement continued: "Last week, The Minister told Parliament that the move “would only take place when there is a suitable place to be relocated to” and that she “could not confirm any intended relocation at this stage”. She also said that the government “does not want to be accused afterwards of dumping people here or there and want to get it right”. Hasn’t this administration had enough time to put things right?

“As things stand now the government does not have a suitable place in which to relocate the 50 or over residents of the Queens Hotel hostel, and it seems that the government will not be able to find alternative accommodation for these residents any time soon. In the meantime these residents continue to live in appalling conditions.

“When this issue flared up in November last year, the government promised that the necessary repairs would be done whilst a new location was found. However, almost four months have elapsed and very little or nothing at all has been done to make the hostel more habitable.

“We must not forget that these residents of Moroccan origin were brought to Gibraltar when the frontier closed and they helped us survive in those very difficult times. Many of them were ‘housed’ at Casemates in very cramped and inhumane conditions. Following the Casemates beautification project, the residents were then moved to Buena Vista Barracks, and years later when the area was to be re-developed to make way for luxury properties, they were moved again into another property where they currently reside, the Queens Hotel. 

“So in effect, these men who came to Gibraltar in 1969 or shortly after, have never had decent homes to live in, and for the past 55 years have been moved from one cramped hostel to another and deprived of the privacy and comfort that the rest of us enjoy and take for granted.

“We think it is well overdue that these elderly fellow Gibraltarians should be given the proper housing facilities that the vast majority of us enjoy. They have spent their entire adult lives being moved from hostel to hostel, living in disgusting conditions. This has been and continues to be a shameful situation, and a permanent and acceptable solution must be found.”