Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation

John Milne Excerpts

Monday 20th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend.

I will turn now to the issue of asylum support, and make two key points. First, people claiming asylum cannot access the UK’s mainstream benefits system. They receive initial full-board accommodation for 90 days, plus about £10 weekly. After that they move to longer-term housing and get around £49.18 a week for food, clothing and toiletries, which is much less than universal credit rates.

Secondly, the UK’s asylum support system is not a pull factor, as some, including Migration Watch, have claimed. The UK rate of £49.18 weekly barely beats France’s €47.60. Once we add in the costs of making an illegal crossing from France, the UK benefits system does not leave an adult male asylum seeker in a better position than in France. Evidence also shows that family, community and cultural connections matter far more than the benefits system.

Picture this, Dr Murrison: imagine that tomorrow we cut all asylum seeker financial support and closed all asylum hotels. What would happen next? Without alternatives, it would increase rough sleeping by over 500%, with over 30,000 more destitute people on our streets. That approach would clearly be immoral, as I trust hon. Members would agree. It would also pile massive pressure on social services, local authorities, NHS emergency services and the police.

The petitioners’ alternative to state support in the community is mass detention. Migration Watch also calls for the detention of all asylum claimants, as its director told me in a conversation last week as I prepared for this debate. Let us think that through. It would clearly be unlawful. It would also be inhumane, financially ruinous and completely useless. There are about 102,000 people in UK asylum accommodation, but our immigration detention capacity is only 2,200, so we would need a massive new detention facility expansion for immediate mass detention.

What would that expansion cost? Based on Ministry of Justice prison expansion plans, the National Audit Office estimates that a single new prison place would cost at least £470,000, excluding land and other costs. That is £47 billion for 100,000 detention places, which is about a third of the entire NHS budget. On top of that, immigration detention costs are about £122 per day, adding up to around £4.5 billion per year for that number of people. Clearly, detention on that scale would mean massive cuts to public services and huge tax rises.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

We would all like to see an end to the use of hotels, which is both wasteful and very unpopular in local communities. However, would the hon. and learned Member agree that the long-term solution to that, releasing pressure across the entire system, is a proper returns agreement with as many countries as possible, but definitely with France, so that we do not need to use any form of accommodation, large camps or hotels?

[Tony Vaughan]

We did have a returns agreement with Europe before we withdrew from the European Union—the Dublin regulation. It was this Government that negotiated a new agreement with France in the UK-France deal. That deal, which is compliant with all the international obligations we have, is the potential way forward to solving the problem.