Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what progress her Department has made on identifying non-hotel accommodation for Asylum seekers; and if she will provide a timetable for the decommissioning of hotel accommodation.

The enduring solution to this challenge is to stop the illegal, dangerous and unnecessary small boat crossings that are overwhelming our asylum system. Not only is every crossing attempt a potential tragedy, as we have seen far too often, but the people arriving via these small boats have travelled through, and have left, safe countries with fully functioning asylum systems to reach the UK.

We are taking a range of steps to reduce our dependency on hotels to support those already in the asylum system. All local authority areas in England, Scotland and Wales became an asylum dispersal area by default in April 2022. This is increasing the number of suitable properties that can be procured for destitute asylum seekers across the UK, ensuring a fair spread across the country and reducing our reliance on hotels. We also intend to bring forward a range of alternative sites, such as disused holiday parks, former student halls, and surplus military sites, to add thousands of places at half the cost of hotels.

The Home Office is tackling the asylum legacy caseload so that people can exit the system, either by returning to their home country, or granting them asylum so they can begin to make a contribution to the UK. The Home Office has already increased the number of its asylum caseworkers from 597 in 2019/20 to more than 1,000 today, and we are on course to add a further 500 caseworkers by March 2023. We are also improving the productivity of these decision-makers by re-engineering the caseworking process from top to bottom. This includes conducting more focused interviews and streamlining and digitising the caseworking process.

These reforms will speed up decision making, reduce the number of asylum seekers who are awaiting a decision and ease the pressure on local authorities by reducing our dependency on hotels and the number of asylum seekers accommodated in them.