Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an estimate of the cost to the public purse of housing asylum seekers in hotels in each of the next three years.

In order to meet our statutory obligations to accommodate asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute, we have been forced to temporarily house asylum seekers in hotels. The use of hotels is a short term solution and we are working hard with Local Authorities and our accommodation providers to find more appropriate accommodation.

Operating hotels as contingency accommodation for asylum seekers is not something we want to be doing and is not a long-term solution. We have been working with providers, local authorities and Strategic Migration Partnerships in order to move people from hotels across the country to more suitable dispersal accommodation. Increased asylum intake has meant that the Home Office has had to deal with growing demand for asylum support and accommodation services. In addition to these pressures, it remains slow to bring on dispersal accommodation, and procurement has not kept pace with intake.

We do not have a set budget for contingency hotels. Costs are subject to change depending on numbers being accommodated within the asylum system. Accommodation costs are considered to be commercially confidential, therefore the Home Office does not publish this information. However, total expenditure on asylum is published in the Home Office Annual Report and Accounts, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/ho-annual-reports-and-accounts.