Select committee: Home Affairs Committee
Recommendation 5
4th Report – The Home Office's management of asylum accommodation
Published 27 Oct 2025
Addressed to Home Office
Home Affairs Committee Asylum accommodation All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
The Home Office should set out plans for enhancing and maintaining its commercial and contract management capability, to ensure that it has the skills and resources necessary to effectively manage the delivery of the contracts and control the costs of asylum accommodation. This essential capability should be embedded as a core function of the department’s operations, with clear accountability to prevent a decline in operational effectiveness over time. The Home Office should institute a consistent and systematic approach to the performance management of its officials and internal capabilities. Given these contracts will continue to cost vast sums of taxpayer money, the Home Office must ensure it acquires the capacity to manage them in a competent way. (Recommendation, Paragraph 44) 96 Oversight of provider performance
From: Home Affairs Committee, 4th Report – The Home Office's management of asylum accommodation (HC 580), 27 October 2025
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 22 January 2026 (deadline 27 December 2025).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government sets its response within its 'Restoring Order and Control' programme, committing to exit asylum hotels 'as soon as possible', while setting out some actions already taken and giving reasons where it does not agree with a recommendation.
- On hotels, the government says it will close them "as soon as possible, and by the end of this Parliament", noting use has fallen from over 400 at its peak to 197 as of 5 January 2026. It does not comment on the timing of individual closures.
- On contract management, it says it has strengthened capability and commissioned an independent review led by Mark Beaton, and reports recovering £74 million in profit share and service credits in the current financial year.
- It says the Home Office "will seek to introduce" a more rigorous profit-share methodology in future contracts, and that revised KPI amendments "will be finalised by February 2026".
- It does not agree to account for Contingency Accommodation directly in the National Allocation Plans, saying this would limit its ability to increase Dispersal Accommodation in areas that already host Contingency Accommodation.