Migrants will be housed in hotels for years to come at a cost of £5.5 millions a day, the Treasury has admitted, as figures show there are 8,000 more asylum seekers living in hotels than when Keir Starmer pledged during the election campaign to “end asylum hotels”. The Times has the story.
Migrants will be housed in hotels and other temporary accommodation for years to come, the Treasury has admitted as it ordered the Home Office to find cheaper providers and to prevent private companies “profiteering” from the small boats crisis.
Treasury advisers tasked with finding annual savings of £4 billion targeted Home Office spending on migrant hotels in an audit launched earlier this month.
A Treasury document setting out its plan said that “global instability” made it inevitable that illegal migrants would continue to come to the UK so demand for temporary accommodation for them would endure, especially as there were “other pressures on housing supply”.
However, it said that the Government’s commitment to build 1.5 million homes in England by 2029 would help to reduce the use of hotels for asylum seekers.
The document, published by the Treasury’s new Office for Value for Money (OVfM), says companies contracted to find hotels for migrants have “made record profits in recent years, leading to accusations of profiteering”.
It pointed to research by the Institute for Public Policy Research which found that the cost to UK taxpayers of each asylum seeker had increased from £17,000 to £41,000 between 2020 and 2024.
There are 8,000 more asylum seekers living in hotels than when Sir Keir Starmer pledged during the election campaign in June last year to “end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds”.
The National Audit Office found that putting a migrant in a hotel cost £145 per night, compared with £14 for dispersal accommodation — large houses, bedsits and flats across different local authorities.
More than 38,000 migrants are in hotels, costing the Home Office £5.5 million a day. A further 65,707 migrants are in dispersal accommodation.
Worth reading in full.
In the Spectator, Andrew Tettenborn highlights the emergence of an anti-ECHR contingent among Labour MPs (spurred by frustrations at the difficulty in removing foreign criminals) to suggest that “we may be seeing the beginning of the end for Britain’s ECHR membership”:
It may take a long time. But ECHRexit, like Brexit once did, looks not only increasingly respectable, but likely to be ultimately successful.
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