Home Office use of hotels for asylum seekers in the UK has increased tenfold since the start of the pandemic, despite repeated pledges from the government to end use of this accommodation.
According to the government’s own data there was a jump in contingency accommodation, which is largely hotels, from 2,577 people in March 2020 to 37,142 in September 2022.
Although the number of people in dispersal accommodation, typically shared housing, in March 2020 was much higher than the hotel figure, at 41,388, the level of increase in percentage and actual terms by September 2022 was much lower. Over this time period an extra 34,565 people were placed in hotel accommodation but an extra 11,910 were placed in shared housing.
This data is revealed at a time when the Home Office is under unprecedented pressure about physical conditions in hotels and the welfare of child asylum seekers in these places.
Plans to provide alternative accommodation have so far floundered, with attempts to place people on an RAF site at Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire scuppered and plans to use a Pontins holiday park in Southport also reportedly put on ice.
The Guardian has collated evidence of insanitary conditions from a number of hotels and other accommodation run by contractor Clearsprings. The company did not respond to a request for comment on conditions in its accommodation and on bumper profits last year made from its Home Office accommodation contract.
Organisations such as Croydon Refugees and New Communities Forum, Migrants Organise and RAMFEL are campaigning to expose accommodation with rodent infestations, damp, mould and leaks.
In one Croydon hotel where rat poison failed to tackle an infestation in a family’s bedroom the hotel manager allegedly advised: “Just shut your eyes then you won’t see them.”
After concerns raised by the Observer about child asylum seekers vanishing from hotels the government admitted that more than 200 missing children were still unaccounted for.
One safeguarding expert working in adult asylum hotels said they had encountered many children wrongly age-assessed as adults who had subsequently been found to be children after social services assessments. A second, working in some of the seven hotels specifically for unaccompanied children, expressed concern about the state of mind some of the children get into, especially when they are kept in hotels for extended periods of time.
“These children feel despair, waiting and waiting with no end in sight and that pushes them into the arms of traffickers. Some of the children don’t feel they have any option other than getting involved with traffickers who force them into cannabis cultivation or county lines drug dealing,” the second expert said.
A Home Office spokesperson said of the accommodation problems highlighted by the Guardian: “We take complaints extremely seriously. We monitor accommodation providers’ performance constantly and can take action if they have fallen short of the required standards. The fairer full dispersal model aims to increase the amount of accommodation available for asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute, helping to reduce the time they need to stay in costly hotels.”
The spokesperson added about age-disputed young people in hotels: “Age assessments are challenging but vital to identifying genuine asylum-seeking children and stop abuse of the system.”
