The number of migrants living in hotels across Britain still stands in the tens of thousands, just as a petition to slash asylum spending has crossed the 300,000 mark.
More than 32,000 asylum seekers are being housed in hotels nationwide, with around 70,000 more in other forms of accommodation.
Three-quarters of all the money spent on asylum accommodation currently goes on hotels, equating to £1.3billion out of £1.7billion between 2024-25, according to the National Audit Office (NAO).
The number of migrants living in hotels across Britain still stands in the tens of thousands
GB NEWS
Just last weekend, 1,195 asylum seekers arrived on the South Coast in 19 boats, a record day of crossings in 2025.
And with hotels available in 317 local authorities across Britain, the Government has been urged to “get serious”.
“Being put up in tax-funded, comfortable accommodation while you await a decision, very likely to be positive, of course strengthens the magnet,” Mehmet told GB News.
“Add to this claims – we can never be sure – to come from a country to which you won’t ever be returned, and Britain becomes irresistible, both to migrants and traffickers.
“We either get serious about rejecting claims from bogus asylum seekers and removing them, or the numbers, and the cost to the taxpayer, will just go on rising.”
While William Yarwood, media campaign manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, told GB News: “Spending over a billion pounds a year housing asylum seekers in hotels is indefensible.
“Taxpayers were promised this was temporary, yet the bill keeps climbing and the system remains broken.
“Ministers must get a grip and end this open-chequebook approach before costs spiral even further.”
MORE GBN MEMBERSHIP STORIES ON BRITAIN’S MIGRANT CRISIS:
Shortly before 10pm on Friday evening, the petition passed 300,000
UK GOVERNMENT PETITIONS
At their peak, as many as 400 hotels were in use under the Conservatives, at a cost of £9million every day.
Now, 210 remain open and GB News understands that seven more are due to close by July.
The Home Office has talked up its work with local authorities and other regional bodies to ensure that accommodation sites across the country are properly managed, and that their impact upon locals is minimised.
But GB News has visited towns like Wethersfield, where residents have been left “horrified” by a surge in hotel migrants and has reported on similar fury around the country.
That emotion sent the petition to “stop financial and other support for asylum seekers” past 300,000 signatures on Friday evening.
Rob Bates, director of the Centre for Migration Control, told GB News as the figure rose again: “Under this Labour Government, the asylum system will continue to cost the British taxpayer billions of pounds each and every year.
“It is no wonder that the public has had enough of the asylum con.
“Without warning, communities across Britain are finding their towns transformed by the sudden imposition of young men who have entered our country illegally.
“The secrecy of this process fosters justifiable grievance that the Home Office is prioritising illegal migrants over the safety and wellbeing of the British public.”
Rob Bates warned that the ‘secrecy’ of the asylum hotel process ‘fosters justifiable grievance that the Home Office is prioritising illegal migrants’
GETTY
The petition’s “hotspots” match up with the 13 English councils in which Reform UK surged to power or majorities on May 1.
It also sees strong support in Reform’s parliamentary constituencies like Ashfield, Clacton and Boston & Skegness, and traditional right-wing heartlands in Essex and East Anglia.
Reform councils are on a collision course with the Labour Government over the hotels, the party’s then-chairman Zia Yusuf told The Telegraph in May.
“We will resist the dispersal of thousands of illegal migrants into local communities, which is a huge betrayal of everyone who voted Labour and everyone in the UK,” he said.
“We have a KC leading a team of lawyers, working from his chambers in Temple. We have some of the best lawyers in the country working for free to resist this awful Government.
“People will be quite surprised by the exceptional calibre of our team.
“We will fight Labour in every possible way we can to protect constituents inside Reform-controlled councils from their horrendous agenda. By doing so, we are going to put landlords and hoteliers on notice – if you’re a hotelier or landlord in a Reform council area, do not expect an easy ride if you are betraying your country.”
The petition’s ‘hotspots’ match up with the 13 English councils in which Reform UK surged to power or majorities on May 1
GB NEWS
With Yusuf’s departure, however, it is unclear what the party’s next course of action may be.
Among the runners and riders to replace the 38-year-old is “Bad Boy of Brexit” Arron Banks, the co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign who finished fewer than three percentage points behind his victorious Labour challenger in the West of England mayoral election on May 1.
Banks has spoken out on asylum hotels within the last month.
“Hotels should require planning permission to convert to residential accommodation for immigrants,” he said.
“Reform-controlled councils should withhold it and sue the owners if they don’t comply with planning rules.
“Let the areas that elect Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem councils take them.
“They voted for parties that support mass open-door immigration.”
But the leader of one of those parties, Kemi Badenoch, pledged a “fundamental rebuild” to Britain’s asylum system if her Conservatives retake No10 in future.
She said on Friday: “Britain is being mugged. Our asylum system is completely broken and will require a fundamental rebuild so that the British Government, not people-traffickers, control it.
“That means a total end to asylum claims in this country by illegal immigrants, and removing immediately all those who arrive illegally and try to claim asylum.
“We need a new, sustainable system to admit strictly controlled numbers of those in genuine and actual need, with Parliament having the final say, not just on the rules, but the exact numbers coming in.”
A Home Office spokesman told GB News: “We inherited an asylum system under exceptional pressure and we make no apologies for taking the necessary and immediate action to restore order, increasing asylum decision making and returning nearly 30,000 people with no right to be here.
“All Governments, of any party, have a legal obligation to support asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute.
“To reduce costs to taxpayers, we are accelerating asylum decision-making and ending the use of hotels over time.”
