One of the most repeated promises Sir Keir Starmer made on his way into Downing Street was that he would end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers. Rachel Reeves put the saving at £1 billion a year. The full briefing said £4 billion saved by the end of 2026. The Public Accounts Committee has now confirmed that the lifetime cost of asylum accommodation contracts has risen from £4.5 billion to £15.3 billion — a more than threefold increase. Labour did not close the hotels. Labour expanded them.
In 2024-25, around £2.1 billion was spent on migrant hotels alone. That works out at £5.77 million every single day, or one Premier League striker's annual salary every twenty-four hours, paid by the taxpayer to provide hotel accommodation for people whose asylum claims are still being processed. This is not pennies. This is a flagship public service in scale, funded entirely by tax revenue, and almost entirely outside any meaningful democratic oversight.
How We Got Here
The hotel system was originally a temporary measure, set up under the previous Conservative government in response to the post-Covid spike in arrivals. The intention was always to wind it down as the asylum backlog cleared and as alternative accommodation came online. Labour came in promising precisely that — a faster decision-making process and a phased exit from the hotels. The arrivals have continued. The decisions have not sped up to anywhere near the levels needed. And the contracts have rolled over.
Channel crossings since 2018 are now within touching distance of 200,000 people. Crossings in early 2026 are running at a similar pace to 2025, which itself topped 41,000 — making up around 89% of all detected unauthorised arrivals. Each one of those arrivals goes into a system that is structurally unable to process them quickly. They go into hotels because there is nowhere else to put them. The hotel companies have a captive customer in the Home Office. The bill keeps climbing.
The 2026 Break Clauses Were a Chance
The contracts have break clauses in 2026. This was the year the government could have walked away, renegotiated terms, or fundamentally changed the model. The plan, briefed in spring, was that approximately 30,000 asylum seekers would be removed from 200 hotels by 2029. 2029 is not a plan. It is a phrase used by ministers who do not expect to be in power to deliver on it. By 2029 most of the people in those hotels will have been there long enough to have integrated, formed relationships, and acquired the kind of human-rights claims that make removal almost impossible. That is exactly how the system has worked for the last decade.
The 'temporary asylum status' rebrand the Home Office floated in March is the same trick under a different name. You do not solve a backlog by inventing a new category to put people into while the underlying decisions remain undecided. You solve it by making decisions — granting status to those entitled to it and removing those who are not. Labour cannot do this because doing it would offend the part of its coalition that does not believe in immigration enforcement at all.
What This Costs Beyond the Money
The £15.3 billion figure is the headline, but the costs run wider. There is the cost to the towns where hotels have been block-booked — Skegness, Stoke, Rotherham, Hove, dozens of others — where the local economy and community trust have been seriously damaged. There is the cost to the asylum seekers themselves, many of whom would prefer to have a decision in months rather than years. There is the cost to the integrity of the immigration system, which is now visibly so dysfunctional that public confidence has collapsed.
And there is the political cost, which Labour is about to pay at the ballot box. Voters do not believe ministers when they say the hotels are closing because the hotels are not closing. They look out of their windows. They see the buses arrive. They draw their conclusions. The next government will inherit a system that has decayed for the better part of a decade, with hotel contracts that auto-renew and providers who have learnt that the British state will pay almost any price to avoid the embarrassment of having no plan at all.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK has been consistent on this from day one. We would close the asylum hotels — properly, not as a slogan. That requires a genuine offshore processing arrangement, the political will to remove people whose claims are rejected, and a Home Office staffed and equipped to take decisions in weeks rather than years. It requires withdrawal from the parts of the European Convention on Human Rights that have been used to block returns. It requires a serious agreement with France, not the photo-opportunity 'one in, one out' pilot that has yielded a handful of returns against tens of thousands of crossings.
Most of all it requires honesty with the public. Labour told the country one thing and did another. The bill is now £15.3 billion and rising and there is no end in sight. The British taxpayer deserves better than a government that pretends. Reform UK will end the hotels. We will not pretend otherwise to please anybody.