Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what is the cost of housing asylum seekers at 286-288 London Road, Waterlooville.

Where the Home Office needs to utilise Dispersed Accommodation, it does so in accordance with the principle of Full Dispersal, which was announced in 2022 to ensure that asylum seekers were more fairly distributed across the United Kingdom.

This will reduce our reliance on hotels in the short term whilst we continue our work to fix the broken asylum system, increasing decision making, reducing the supported population and removing people with no right to be here.

The safety and wellbeing of the local communities in which asylum accommodation is located is of paramount importance. When an individual claims asylum, the Home Office will conduct mandatory identity, criminality and security checks. Biographic and biometric data are checked against relevant Home Office systems and police criminality databases including domestic and international data.

Data on the number of supported asylum seekers in accommodation, including hotels, and by local authority can be found within the Asy_D11 tab for our most recent statistics release: Immigration system statistics data tables - GOV.UK.

The Home Office publishes information on asylum expenditure in the Home Office Annual Report and Accounts at Home Office annual reports and accounts - GOV.UK.