Recommendation 27

The Home Office also outlined funding available to local authorities to support asylum accommodation. It said the current grant package provides a single annual payment of £1,200 per asylum seeker in all accommodation types, including dispersal, overflow dispersal, initial and contingency accommodation, and a further £100 per month for each additional occupied bed space between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026. It added that grant funding for 2026–27 will be confirmed in the coming months but is likely 64 HC Committee of Public Accounts, The Asylum Transformation Programme, Seventy-Sixth Report of Session 2022–23, 27 October 2023, conclusion 4 65 HM Treasury, Treasury Minutes Progress Report, Update of the Government responses to the Committee of Public Accounts - The Asylum Transformation Programme, CP 1284, 10 March 2025 66 Q 109 67 C&AG, Investigation into asylum accommodation, Session 2023-24, HC 635, 20 March 2024, para 1.22 68 C&AG’s Report, Asylum accommodation, para 11 69 Letter from the Second Permanent Secretary of the Home Office relating to the inquiry into the asylum system, dated 6 February 2026 19 to be in line with previous allocations.70 MHCLG told us it was building on lessons from the Local Authority Housing Fund, which it said had been “very popular with local authorities” in delivering accommodation used for Afghan resettlement. It said it was developing capital funding models that would allow local authorities to buy housing that, in the short term, “can be leased to the Home Office” and, in the longer term, “revert to local authority ownership and act as social housing or temporary accommodation.71 Commercial capability and contract management