An analysis from a left-wing think tank has found that the average cost of housing and supporting alleged asylum seekers in Britain has more than doubled over the past four years.
The report from the progressive Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said that, adjusted for inflation, housing and support costs for alleged asylum seekers rose from £17,000 per migrant in 2019/20 to around £41,000 in 2023/24.
During the same time, the overall cost to the taxpayer to fund the asylum system has risen from £739 million to an expected £4.7 billion.
According to the IPPR, much of the increase in costs have been driven by the “slow processing of asylum claims and the growing backlog under the previous government.”
Additionally, as the boat migrant crisis in the English Channel continued to grow and space in former accommodations ran out, the former Conservative-in-name-only government began to house the mostly young male migrants arriving from France in hotels across Britain.
The think tank said that hotel accommodation for migrants costs an estimated £145 per night per alleged asylum seeker, compared to an average of £14 per night in traditional asylum accommodations such as in flats or shared housing.
The IPPR noted that since 2019 — around the time when the migrant crisis began to ramp up — the Home Office began to outsource the handling of accomodation to three private contractors: Clearsprings, Mears, and Serco.
While the contracts are set to run through 2029, there is a break clause in 2026, which the think tank argued “offers a critical opportunity for the government to implement decisive reform, but they need to act with urgency to take advantage of the contract break clause and develop a new approach.”
The IPPR suggested that asylum accommodation and support services be delegated to local bodies, which they claimed would be more adept at finding cost-effective locations.
The left-wing think tank also argued that more supervision is needed to ensure better-quality housing for migrants and that asylum seekers should be given help integrating into the country “from day one”—meaning before their asylum claims are even processed—such as “services like English lessons, skills training, and community engagement.”
According to testimony from people in asylum accommodations, some of whom have been in the system for up to eight years without a decision on their asylum claim, the current model also “traps people in unhealthy, unsafe conditions”.
Amid the asylum system being overstretched, the recently-elected Labour Party government is reportedly seeking to “scatter” migrants throughout communities across Britain, through the acquisition of private accommodations, such as empty houses or former student blocks.
Critics of the proposal, such as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage have argued that such a plan would further drive up the already expensive cost of housing in the country.
“Now that the labour government are saying they’re going to use fewer hotels that push up the price of the private rental market, this is a real issue,” Farage said this week.
