How should the UK house asylum seekers | BBC News

Hundreds of people have got in touch with the BBC about the issue of small boat crossings, illegal immigration and asylum-seeker accommodation.

As pressure builds on the government to speed up its plans to close asylum hotels, there are concerns that it will increase its use of HMOs - rental homes for unrelated groups of people sharing facilities - which could provoke another backlash.

In the first quarter of this year, just over 32,000 asylum seekers were in hotels across the UK. Another 66,000 were housed in taxpayer-funded "dispersal" accommodation - which includes HMOs - according to analysis of Home Office figures by the Migration Observatory, external an independent research centre at University of Oxford.

The UK government said it had inherited an asylum system in chaos, with tens of thousands of individuals stuck in hotels waiting for their claims to be heard. It had taken urgent action, it said, "doubling the rate of asylum decision-making, and reducing the amount of money spent on asylum hotels by almost a billion pounds in the last financial year".

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Post from BBC News on September 09, 2025

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