Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to reduce the number of asylum seekers being housed in hotels in the West Midlands.

The Home Office has a statutory obligation to provide destitute asylum seekers with accommodation and subsistence support whilst their application for asylum is being considered.

This Government inherited an asylum system under unprecedented strain, with thousands stuck in a backlog without their claims being processed.

The Home Secretary took immediate action by restarting asylum processing and scrapping the unworkable Rwanda policy. This will save an estimated £4 billion for the taxpayer over the next two years. We are delivering a major uplift in returns to remove people with no right to be in the UK. Over the long term this will reduce our reliance on hotels and costs of accommodation.

We remain absolutely committed to ending the use of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers as part of this programme to reduce overall asylum costs.