Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been urged to include in her upcoming budget a plan requiring migrants to repay the “full cost” of expensive asylum processing and hotel accommodation.
The UK currently spends around £5 billion a year on its asylum system, with £2.1 billion going toward accommodation and support for more than 32,000 migrants housed in some 200 hotels. In addition to housing, asylum seekers also receive a weekly allowance of £49.18.
Perhaps the most well-known case to date involving migrant shelters was that of an Ethiopian migrant living in the Bell Hotel in Epping, who was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman who tried to intervene.
Jo White, MP for Bassetlaw and head of Labour’s Red Wall group—representing the party’s traditional heartlands in northern England—has called on the Chancellor to recover part of these costs. She argued that, as with student loans, the full expense of asylum claims should be repaid over time and that applicants should also be expected to work.
White estimates that up to half of the £5.4 billion spent annually on processing, housing, and supporting asylum seekers could be returned to the Treasury.
“If they understood that this is not a free service and that they have to repay all their costs to the state, it would act as a deterrent,” White said.
