If you want to understand the true cost of losing control of your border, follow the money. The expected bill for the Home Office's asylum accommodation contracts between 2019 and 2029 has more than tripled, from £4.5 billion to £15.3 billion. That is taxpayers' money, your money, being poured into a system that nobody designed and nobody can defend.
The detail is worse than the headline. In 2024/25, hotels accounted for 76% of the entire annual accommodation budget while housing only 35% of the people in the system. Hotels cost roughly six times more than other forms of accommodation. At the peak in June 2023, 51,000 asylum seekers were being put up in more than 400 hotels at a cost of £8 million a day. Eight million pounds. A day.
Still Not Fixed
Ministers will tell you they are getting a grip. The share of asylum seekers in hotels has fallen to around 21% nationally. But scratch the surface and the picture is far less reassuring. In London, 58% of accommodated asylum seekers were still living in hotels at the end of March 2026. The problem hasn't been solved. It has been moved around and partially hidden.
And let's be honest about why the bill exploded in the first place. It exploded because tens of thousands of people kept arriving illegally in small boats, the asylum system couldn't process them, and the only answer anyone had was to book another hotel. You cannot hotel your way out of a border crisis. Every room booked is a signal to the smugglers that Britain will pick up the tab.
What This Money Could Buy
Think about what £15.3 billion means in the real world. It is hospitals. It is potholes filled and police on the beat. It is social care for our own elderly and support for our own homeless veterans. Instead it is being spent housing people who should never have been allowed to make a dangerous, illegal crossing in the first place. That is not compassion. It is a failure of basic competence, and the people of this country are footing the bill.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would stop the boats by removing the incentive to come. That means swift processing, secure and basic accommodation rather than hotels, and the genuine, enforced removal of those with no right to be here. End the hotel gravy train. Close the contracts that have ballooned out of all control. And put British taxpayers, not people-smuggling gangs, back in charge of how this money is spent.
£15.3 billion is the price tag of a border that exists in name only. Reform UK would actually control it — and spend that money on the people it was taken from.