Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many hotels are in use as temporary accommodation for people seeking asylum in Northern Ireland; and what recent estimate he has made of the number that will be required by the end of 2024.

The Home Office has been clear that the use of hotels is a temporary and short-term measure to ensure we meet our statutory obligation to accommodate destitute asylum seekers. We have already made significant progress by ending the use of 100 hotels across the UK by 31 March 2024, including 6 in Northern Ireland. A total of 150 hotels will no longer be used for accommodating asylum seekers by the beginning of May, reducing the strain on local communities.

Our statutory accommodation needs are kept under continuous review, and we will write to MPs and local authorities as further decisions on hotels are made.

Data on the number of supported asylum seekers in accommodation (including in contingency hotels and other contingency accommodation) is published in table Asy_D11 here: Asylum and resettlement datasets - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). Data is published on a quarterly basis. The Home Office does not publish a breakdown of statistics which disaggregates the number of hotels used to house asylum seekers by region.