The number of asylum seekers housed in government hotels has risen in the first year under Labour, piling further pressure on Sir Keir Starmer to get a grip on the growing number of people making dangerous Channel crossings.
The data follows a High Court ruling on Tuesday that banned the use of the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, for housing asylum seekers after lawyers argued it had become a “feeding ground for unrest” following a string of violent protests near the site.
As the government braces for a fresh round of legal action from councils seeking similar bans in their areas, new Home Office figures reveal that the number of people claiming asylum in the year to June rose to a record 111,000, while the number of small boats crossing the Channel continues to grow.
The government has been repeatedly accused of failing to tackle immigration, with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage saying “the public is right to be very angry” over the rise in asylum seekers being housed in hotels. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp claimed ministers had “lost control of our borders”.
Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has said that the country “is well past breaking point”, and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch questioned whether it would be possible to “set up camps” for migrants, rather than housing them near local communities.
While the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels is up eight per cent year-on-year, the numbers have been consistently falling since December last year. The number of people in hotels – 32,059 – is also significantly lower than the peak of over 56,000 under the Tory government in September 2023.
Labour has also made progress on cutting the backlog of asylum claims and speeding up the number of deportations, with enforced returns up by 25 per cent to 9,072, and an increasing number of criminals deported in the year to June.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said on Thursday that the numbers showed Labour had “strengthened Britain’s visa and immigration controls, cut asylum costs, and sharply increased enforcement and returns”.
The bad news: asylum claims and small boats at record levels
The number of migrants being housed temporarily in hotels has risen by eight per cent to 32,059 in the year to June.
This was up from 29,585 at the same point last year, when the Conservatives were in power, but down from 32,345 in March, and has been falling since last December.
That figure is still far below the peak of 56,000 asylum seekers living in hotels in September 2023.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp slammed “weak” ministers for there being “more immigrants in hotels than at the time of the election”, but Labour has blamed the Tories, with Ms Cooper on Thursday saying the government “inherited a broken immigration and asylum system that the previous government left in chaos”.
The government has said it is committed to ending the use of asylum hotels by the end of this parliament and has already reduced asylum costs by 11 per cent.
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council charity, said: “There’s still far too many people in hotels. Everyone agrees that hotels are the wrong answer – they cost the taxpayer billions, trap people in limbo and are flashpoints in communities.”
The rising numbers in hotels come as a record number of people – 111,084 – submitted claims for asylum in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12 months since records began in 2001.
Small boat migrants, numbers of which have topped 50,000 so far this year under Labour, accounted for 39 per cent of these claims, but many thousands of people also claimed asylum after travelling to the UK on legal visas.
In the year to date, some 6,700 people have claimed asylum after coming to the UK to study, and 5,900 people after arriving for work. Most applicants were from Pakistan, accounting for 10.1 per cent, followed by claimants from Afghanistan and Iran.
The government has made progress on cutting the backlog, and the number of people awaiting a decision continues to fall. The total number waiting was 70,532 in June, down from more than 90,000 at the end of 2024, after the former Tory government stopped processing applications while it waited to see if it could send people to Rwanda under its ultimately failed deportation scheme.
The numbers waiting for more than 12 months for a decision are also falling significantly, although some 19,000 are still waiting.
Mr Solomon, of the Refugee Council, said that the government could be proud of the “genuine achievement” of bringing down the numbers but warned that “this good work is being put at risk by poor-quality decisions”, with “nearly half of appeals” against rejected applications succeeding.
Marley Morris, at the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank, agreed that there were “signs of progress” since the Home Office sped up processing times.
However, she said it needs to “improve the quality of initial decision making and speed up the appeals process”, and expand the “stock of temporary accommodation” available for migrants to reduce spending on hotels, which cost £2.1bn in 2024-25.
The good news: more deportations and removal of criminals
One area where Labour is making real progress is in the significant upturn in deportations. Enforced removals have increased by 25 per cent, with 9,072 people returned to their country of origin in the year to June. Voluntary returns – those leaving willingly – are also up by 13 per cent, with 26,761 people opting to leave the UK. That brings the total number of removals to over 35,000 in the year to June.
There has also been a significant increase in assisted returns, where the Home Office provides support or even financial incentives for migrants to leave the UK. That figure has more than doubled from 4,032 to 9,227. Earlier this year, The Independent revealed that the Home Office had paid £53m for assisted returns over the past four years, with each migrant receiving up to £3,000.
The Home Office has reallocated some 1,000 staff to immigration enforcement, which it notes may have boosted returns. In particular, an increasing number of foreign criminals are being deported, with 5,265 offenders returned – around half of which were EU nationals.
Earlier this year, the prime minister announced that specialist immigration enforcement teams were being sent into prisons to “speed up the removal of prisoners who have no right to be in this country”. The latest figures are the highest number of criminals removed in years, but are still below the peak in 2016.
Migrants and asylum-seekers coming from Albania, Romania, Brazil, and India are among the top nationalities being deported, but the top return destination for migrant removals is France, with 8,403 people sent there in the past year.
The government’s new one-in, one-out deal with France will allow a small number of migrants to be returned after crossing the Channel. But the numbers are small – understood to be around 50 people a week – and so far none are known to have been sent back.
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