The summer of 2025 has been marked by protests and counter-protests outside several hotels housing asylum seekers, as well as at other locations. Various trigger events have led to the targeting of The Bell Hotel in Epping (Essex), Thistle City Barbican Hotel in Islington (north London), Best Western Cresta Court Hotel in Altrincham (Greater Manchester), Britannia International Hotel in Canary Wharf (east London), Chine Hotel in Bournemouth (Dorset), and similar migrant hotels elsewhere. The protests in Epping, for example, followed reports that a 41-year-old Ethiopian hotel resident had attempted to kiss a 14-year-old local girl. Protesters have been variously described as “far-right agitators”, “patriots”, “anti-immigration demonstrators”, and “ordinary concerned citizens”, while counter-protesters share “anti-racist” and “anti-fascist” allegiances and “pro-refugee” sympathies. Social media platforms, as usual, have done a good job of adding fuel to the raging fires.
Section 95 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 requires the Home Office to provide accommodation and basic subsistence to support all “destitute or to be likely to become destitute” applicants for asylum, and their dependants, while their eligibility is being considered. Initial accommodation, as a holding measure under Section 98 of the Act, usually entails full-board hostel-style facilities. Longer-term ‘dispersal accommodation’ under Section 95 has traditionally been provided on a ‘no-choice’ basis in private rentals and shared houses, spread across local communities throughout the UK. A shortage of suitable dispersal housing has led to a greater reliance on ‘contingency’ accommodation in hotels. Other options that have been experimented with include disused military facilities and moored offshore vessels (barges, ferries, cruise ships).
A large backlog in processing applications, caused by a shortage of suitably trained Home Office caseworkers able to conduct interviews and make binding decisions, has contributed to the large numbers of asylum seekers with uncertain futures. Over the year ending in March 2025, 85,112 asylum applications (relating to 109,343 people) were made, representing a 15% increase over the preceding 12 months. At the same time, a total of 109, 536 people were awaiting an initial decision on their asylum application.
Britain’s housing shortage explains the temporary use of hotel accommodation, to a much larger extent, and at a much higher cost, than in France, Germany, and Spain-where dedicated reception centres take in most asylum seekers. In the UK, private providers moved into the vacuum. The Conservative government signed seven regional contracts in 2019 with three private providers – Serco, Mears and Clearsprings – to take in asylum seekers, continuing a trend that started seven years previously. Less than 210 hotels are, as of August 2025, being used to house asylum seekers across the UK. Numbers are substantially down from an all-time high of 400 migrant hotels in the summer of 2023. At the end of March 2025, 32, 345 people were residing in asylum hotels. According to the Home Office, £2.1 billion was spent on hotel accommodation between April 2024 and March 2025-down from £3 billion the previous year. Migrant hotels are concentrated in London, the South East, and the East of England, despite the original intention of dispersing asylum seekers more widely. COMPASS (Commercial and Operating Managers Procuring Asylum Support) contracts are meant to cap asylum seeker numbers to less than one per 200 local residents in individual local authorities. Those who seek to deter asylum seekers are proposing detention centres and migrant camps, in place of hotels, to create a less-welcoming environment.
Currently, ‘safe and legal routes’ to asylum are provided by country-specific schemes, including Afghans, British Overseas Citizens from Hong Kong, and Ukrainians, thereby forcing ineligible people to resort to small boat crossings and other unsafe routes of travel. Numbers arriving by small boats have continued to rise, to the tune of 50, 271 between 5 July 2024 and 11 August 2025, worsening an already unsatisfactory situation. It has been noticed that single males over the age of 18 account for the majority of such unauthorised arrivals, probably partly because small-boat travel is less safe for women and children. Anxieties over the threat of sexual assaults on local women have been heightened by the supposed arrival of “sex-starved young men from misogynist cultures”, and backed up by the well-recognised domestic phenomenon of “grooming gangs.”
To conclude, the UK’s asylum system has failed to live up to its originally intended purposes, while delays in processing asylum seekers have led to a logistic nightmare that costs the taxpayer billions of pounds each year. When there are many homeless people on the streets, and others are on long waiting lists awaiting social housing, the provision of accommodation and cash support to newly-arrived people is inevitably bound to cause tensions in a country with a fragile economy, especially when anti-migrant sentiments are increasing throughout Western Europe.
Ashis Banerjee
A brilliant piece saying it as it is 👍
Many thanks!