Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has made a comparative assessment of the cost of housing refugees in (a) hotels and (b) rented accommodation; and whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of housing more refugees in rented accommodation.

The Home Office has not made a comparative assessment of the cost of housing asylum seekers in either hotels or in rented accommodation on the basis that hotel accommodation is and always has been contingency accommodation where we are unable to procure sufficient Dispersed Accommodation to meet our statutory obligation. Whilst we are working to reduce our use of hotels, we must continue to ensure there is sufficient capacity in the system to meet our obligations.

That is why we wrote to all Local Authorities on 13 April 2022 to set out plans for Full Dispersal. This will reduce and then eliminate the use of hotels for asylum seekers by moving to a full dispersal model for asylum accommodation.

We will achieve this through three key interventions:

1. To reduce and eliminate the use of hotels for asylum seekers by moving to a full dispersal model for asylum accommodation. This will mean expanding our existing approach of using private rental sector housing to all local authority areas across England, Scotland and Wales.

2. We are committed to working with local authorities to move to a fairer distribution of asylum seekers and have launched an informal consultation with local government to inform how this model will work across England, Scotland and Wales and within regions and nations. The consultation will explore how asylum dispersal can better take account of the impact of other protection based immigration on local authorities, including resettlement and the care of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

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3. Providing specific funding to recognise the existing contribution of local authorities and for new dispersed accommodation. We will continue to work with local government to capture and evaluate data to understand the impact of asylum dispersal on local authorities going forward.