Recommendation 24

Accommodation continues to account for a large proportion of asylum-related spending, with pressure shifting as demand and system capacity change. Spending on asylum accommodation reached around £3.4 billion in 2024–25, and hotels continue to be used as contingency accommodation.58 The Home Office told us that the number of hotels in use had fallen from around 400 at the peak in July 2023 to less than 200 by late 2025. It said it had “saved £700 million” in the previous year, due in part to the reductions in hotel use for asylum accommodation.59 The government has committed to exiting all hotels by the end of this Parliament; however, when asked whether numbers in hotels were now falling, the Home Office acknowledged that numbers had “gone down and then gone up a bit again” in 2024–25 due to an “unacceptably high number of arrivals through illegal migration”.60