Home Office considering disused care homes and student flats to house asylum seekers

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The Home Office is looking at using disused care homes and student accommodation to house asylum seekers in new plans to reduce the number of migrant hotels.

Government officials are trying to find new ways to house migrants as the use of costly hotel rooms increases.

As of the end of September, 35,651 asylum seekers were being housed in hotels, up from 29,585 at the end of June. Overall asylum costs are now at £5bn – the highest level of spending on record and up by more than a third in a year. In 2023-24, around £3.1bn was spent on hotels.

Under the Conservative government, hundreds of millions of pounds were spent on mass accommodation sites, such as former military bases and the Bibby Stockholm barge. But a damning report from the spending watchdog found that the scheme was significantly more expensive than paying for hotels – despite the sites housing far fewer migrants than planned.

Officials are looking to roll out 800 new accommodation sites that are neither former military bases nor hotels. Instead some asylum seekers will be housed in disused care homes and vacant student accommodation.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We have inherited enormous pressures in the asylum system and remain absolutely committed to ending the use of hotels to ensure value for money.

“We have identified a range of sites that we are narrowing down to a handful of suitable properties that will enable us to exit hotels sooner.”

While the Labour government has moved asylum seekers out of the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland Port, Dorset, they are still using the large former army base at Wethersfield to house migrants.

The government was taken to court over their use of the site in Essex, with four migrants who were housed there arguing that the state is failing to screen vulnerable people properly before they are moved to the base.

A judgement has not yet been handed down in this case.