The UK government is to terminate contracts with 50 hotels that are currently being used to house migrants as part of plans to reduce the UK’s reliance on hotels as an accommodation source for asylum seekers. Robert Jenrick, the UK’s immigration minister, is set to formally announce on Tuesday that hotel contracts will be cancelled by January due to the financial burden this places on UK taxpayers, which currently runs at around £8m a day.
Although around 400 hotels were being used as asylum accommodation sources, the government has been keen to reduce the number significantly for some time, particularly given that numbers of people entering the UK to claim asylum have been increasing in recent years. Last year’s number of 74,751 asylum claims was the highest for nearly 20 years.
The current use of hotels is required by the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, which states that the Home Office must provide housing for asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute during the processing of their applications. However, in order to reduce the backlog of cases, the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, announced in December 2022 that the government would aim to clear the legacy backlog of cases by the end of this year. Since then, the number of caseworkers employed to process asylum applications has doubled to 2,500.
Labour is calling for the employment of an additional 1,000 caseworkers to help clear the backlog, while some hotels have already stopped housing asylum seekers, for instance in some areas in Northampton and Kettering. Other hotels are expected to remain open with only small numbers of migrants, and barges are also being considered as a further source of housing for migrants who are awaiting outcomes to their applications
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