As of June this year, there were around 85,000 people waiting to hear whether their application for asylum in the UK had been granted.
There have been many attempts to find places for people to live while they await their asylum decision, from repurposed military sites to the Bibby Stockholm barge. But all the while, protests against asylum seekers being placed in accommodation around the country have continued, and the anger and fear over asylum seekers’ presence has only grown more intense.
Small boat arrivals have just hit their lowest yearly level since 2021. There were 16,700 arrivals between the start of the year and 9 September; that’s down 47 per cent on the same period last year.
These falling numbers present a chance to fix our asylum housing problem – yet Labour is watching it sail by.
The UK has an asylum housing problem, though people disagree about what exactly it is. For some, it’s embodied by Mehrab Omrani (a 45-year-old from Iran who is believed to have lain dead for four months in Home Office accommodation), Victor Hugo Pereira Vargas (who fatally self-harmed in a hotel while suffering extreme anxiety and distress), or Hussein Haseeb Ahmed (who contracted fatal diphtheria at a processing centre).
For others, it is the sudden presence of strangers from overseas in or near their town. But the deaths and depressions of the people inside the system get far less focus than the objections of those protesting outside it – whether they are real or perceived.
Is the problem that the red carpet is being rolled out to invaders intent on destroying Western civilisation? Or that mass migration is fuelling a UK-wide housing crisis? Clearly not.
Asylum seekers are a fraction of a per cent of our population and a drop in an oceanic deficit of millions of homes. But like most successful lies, these exploit small truths: young, male, unvetted arrivals raise safety and fairness concerns; and hotels are exorbitantly expensive. These two issues need addressing. But they are symptoms, not the root, of the problem.
Asylum accommodation comes in two tiers: “dispersal” (homes inside the community) and “contingency” (like hotels and ex-military sites). Dispersal costs the taxpayer about a sixth of hotels and is better for wellbeing and integration. But it requires foresight. “Contingency” is government shorthand for “we did not plan for this”. And therein lies the root of the problem.
Our asylum system is fundamentally reactive. Rather than planning accessible resettlement routes that vet people before they arrive, we force escapees onto elaborate obstacle courses and deal retroactively with whoever emerges. Men disproportionately do so, most sending lifesaving funds back to family members. And they come primarily from conflict zones with no access to legal routes: places like Eritrea (18 per cent), Sudan (13 per cent), Somalia (12 per cent), Afghanistan (12 per cent) and Iran (11 per cent).
Ukrainians once crowded Calais’s shores too, briefly, in 2022. But when the UK opened uncapped resettlement routes, it swiftly deterred dinghy crossings; 70 per cent of those who came were women. And within a year, community housing had been found for over 169,000, quadruple the highest-ever annual small-boat figure.
Meanwhile, nationalities arriving (by necessity) unannounced send the government scrambling for last-minute accommodation, with zero leverage to negotiate costs. This has proven extremely profitable for private contractors Serco, Clearsprings and Mears, with their contracts’ 10-year value spiralling from £4.5bn to £15.3bn. As Clearsprings admitted to the Home Affairs Committee, profit gaps incentivise hotels – and have put the company’s founder on Rich List. A billionaire built, startlingly, out of the UK’s humanitarian aid budget.
The good news: Labour has pledged to end the use of asylum hotels by 2029. The less good news: it is using the same for-profit providers and shifting focus to ex-military sites. We have tried this before: Napier, Penally, Wethersfield. The results I witnessed reporting from inside were hunger strikes, PTSD, and spiralling self-harm and suicide attempts. Most bewilderingly of all, Downing Street admits these may cost even more than hotels.
Perhaps Labour hopes to solve the problem with deterrence. They have, after all, overseen a sharp drop in crossings. But while intelligence operations have dented dinghy supply chains, this reflects securitisation’s reactive nature, not its efficacy. Channel boats were a novelty in 2018; before them came lorries, and before that the Eurotunnel. Each time, mafias industrialised new routes while intelligence slowly caught up.
It is entirely to be expected that boats peaked and then plateaued. But history teaches us that as we secure one route, another is born, likely deadlier and more profitable than the last. Arrivals remain higher than before the boats began. So no, deterrence does not solve “the problem”.
What, then, will?
Use the lapse in numbers to build the system we should have built years ago. End the for-profit accommodation model that has created billionaires. More fundamentally: build a proactive system, not a reactive one. An asylum system that works more transparently and openly is the most evidence-based way to deter irregular journeys (it’s also the only way to justify criminalising everyone else). Labour is quietly making positive moves, planning sponsorship-based “safe and legal routes” modelled on Canada, where communities have privately supported nearly 300,000 refugees.
Yet the number of such spaces made available is expected to be low, with no arrivals expected until late 2027. Unless it operates at a scale that could deter dinghies, it will falsify itself before coming to fruition.
Alas, all this would mean writing policy for evidenced problems, not perceived ones. Instead, Labour is justifying barracks – which are as unsustainably inhumane as they are unsustainably expensive – as a bid for “public confidence”.
It’s a stark intellectual surrender to the far right’s fictions, and it signals a race to the bottom.