UK’s asylum hotel bill down 30%, government says

According to the newly published data, the government spent about one third of the shelter seekers between April 2024 and March 2025 at the hotels.

Annual accounts of home office The show was spent on £ 2.1bn hotel residence – approximately £ 5.77m per day, £ 3BN or £ 8.3m per day, average of the previous year.

Data obtained by BBC verified shows that savings have been motivated by a decrease in the cost of average per capita average night, to use cheap forms of a government’s residence and room sharing.

But Dr. Peter Walsh, from the Migration Observatory Think Tank at Oxford University, warned that the increase in small boat crossings since March could cause renewed dependence on the hotel.

“I don’t think hotels are going away soon on the basis of existing trends,” he said.

Hotel housing is used when no other housing is available for shelter seekers, and the government has committed to stop using asylum hotels by the end of this Parliament.

In the late March 2025, the refuge hotels were 32,345 people, in late June last year to 29,585 people, but less than the total in December.

A senior home office source said that one of the main factors behind savings was taking some refugee seekers from hotels to other types of cheap housing.

He said that the department had given priority to families and children running in regular housing so that they were not staying in hotels for a long time.

The BBC News understands that most people have gone out of hotels that are now living in local housing, or in homes in many businesses (HMOs), a type of rented accommodation where at least three persons share a bathroom and kitchen use.

Most of these assets have been acquired through government contracts with Serco, one of the three companies responsible for asylum housing.

Some savings have been re -organized by organizing elements of contracts, originally signed by the previous orthodox government.

Officials have told the first MPs that maximum room-sharing in hotels has helped reduce the number of sites and per cost in the last financial year.

It is not clear how many people usually share a room, but the Home Office Minister Angela Eagle has earlier stated that “people may double or triple” if the rooms are quite large.

The house office accounts were using 273 hotels in March 2024, but the number has now fallen by 71.

According to the BBC Verifi, the average night cost per capita night in March 2023 fell from £ 162.16 to £ 118.87 by March 2025, according to the analysis of the official data obtained through the freedom of information request.

The accounts of the house office also reveal that about £ 50m public funds were effectively written by the Labor Government to use the RAF scampton site in Lincolnshire to use a conservative plan.

When the labor came to power and rinse the plans, tens of millions were spent on the site.

The annual report of the home office stated that the decision resulted in “creative loss of £ 48.5M”, but a source in the department stated that the site would be even more expensive than hotels, even keeping in mind the loss.

The report also confirmed that Rwanda was paid £ 270M to pay Rwanda to help Rwanda to help support the country’s economic development after the UK government ended the Rwanda scheme.

Orthodox ministers had planned to send some refugees to Rwanda to Rwanda to prevent Rwanda from crossing the channel in small boats.

However, the scheme was barred from legal challenges and Home Secretary Yett Cooper has said that only four people were voluntarily removed in the country due to this.

The Rawandan government said last year that the Labor “had no obligation to pay £ 270m” after the Labor finished the deal.