LONDON: Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick said on Tuesday that the UK government will stop using 50 hotels to house asylum seekers by January, with more to follow.
British authorities currently use about 400 hotels to provide accommodation for unprecedented numbers of migrants to the UK. Jenrick said that agreements with hotels across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will begin to be terminated, adding that his plans to reduce the number of asylum claims was “starting to work.” He added that the hotel contracts cost taxpayers £8 million ($9.7 million) a day and are “unacceptable” and “unsustainable,” the BBC reported.
Stephen Kinnock, the opposition Labour Party’s shadow immigration minister, criticized Jenrick for the announcement, pointing out that it applies to only 12 percent of the total number of hotels being used.
“He is like an arsonist who has burnt our house down and expects us to thank him for throwing a bucket of water on it,” Kinnock told Parliament.
The Home Office is obliged to provide accommodation for migrants while their applications for asylum are being processed, to ensure they do not become destitute. In December 2022, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced plans to tackle by the end of this year a legacy backlog of unprocessed applications registered before June 2022. The government subsequently doubled the number of people processing asylum applications to 2,500, but Labour has called for the hiring of 1,000 additional caseworkers to more efficiently tackle the backlog.
Peter Walsh, a researcher at Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, told the BBC that while the legacy backlog has been reduced, the progress was offset by an influx of new applications. He added that he is concerned about the potential alternative housing plans for asylum seekers given the total backlog of cases has remained relatively stagnant since 2022.
This year, the Home Office launched Project Maximise, which aimed to reduce the cost of hotel accommodation by adding beds to rooms to increase the number of people who can stay in them.
