Steven Broomhead is chief executive of Warrington Borough Council and writes a regular column for the Guardian

I often find myself devising and delivering solutions to issues created by other organisation’s difficulties and have to ‘suck it up’ and keep smiling.

One of these recently was the abject failure of the Home Office to communicate or respond to their pre-planned decision to place local alyssum seekers in the Fir Grove Hotel which is a totally inappropriate location. The Prime Minister has recently said “the State can’t fix all your problems” which is true but it can do so much better on how to deliver solutions in partnership.

I expect public sector advisors to communicate and negotiate on difficult challenges. The Home Office simply told us it was going to happen. No details on numbers until the last moment, Nationality, gender, ages and health conditions were not disclosed leaving us all wondering how to provide the appropriate support services. Worst of all there was no compassion for the asylum seekers.

It seemed it was a case of removing this from the computer screen and just send them north. At one point I began to wonder if Matt Hancock will find more sanity in the Jungle. The situation describes in a moment of total failure of policy over the years regarding asylum seekers. Why should it take up to four years for asylum seekers application to be processed? Workloads poor performance management or the byzantine bureaucracy that has been created. Maybe some of the explanations.

It was also disappointing that the hotel owners didn’t also communicate and gave their loyal staff instant notice of job losses. The Jersey based owners are probably very pleased that they now have a year long contract for every room, every night for a year.

The whole situation had also been arranged to prevent the appropriate legal action to be taken as part of their quick time deal, adding to our frustrations. There was the good joint working with Andy Carter MP who has also expressed his frustration and I know he will follow this through with the government. He has done this by raising the matter in Parliament this week. One of the consequences of Brexit is that the Dublin Regulation stipulating that the country where the asylum seeker first arrives e.g. France, no longer applies to the UK.

What matters now is not the empty words of the Home Office that ‘lessons will be learnt’ but finding funding from our already stretched resources to provide a warm welcome to our town and provide the best support necessary. As ever as a town we will display and deliver compassion support and understanding.