Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of asylum seeker hotels; and whether there is a need to review the funding behind the scheme.

This government inherited an asylum system under exceptional strain, with tens of thousands of people stuck in limbo without any prospect of having their claims processed. At their peak use under the previous government, in the autumn of 2023, more than 400 asylum hotels were being leased by the Home Office, at a cost of almost £9 million a day.

We took immediate action to resolve that exceptional strain by restarting asylum processing, establishing the new Border Security Command to tackle the people-smuggling gangs, cracking down on illegal working across the country, and increasing the return and removal of people with no right to be here. Inevitably, due to the size of the backlog we inherited, the Home Office has been forced to continue with the use of hotels for the time being.

It remains our absolute commitment to end the use of hotels over time, as part of our reduction in overall asylum accommodation costs. In the interim, we are also continuing to increase our operational activity against smuggling gangs and illegal working, and we have increased returns to their highest level since 2018, with almost 17,00 people removed between 5 July and 31 January 2025.