Flawed contract design and incompetent delivery left the Home Office unable to cope with the surge in demand for asylum accommodation, a report by the Home Affairs Committee has found.

Hotels went from a temporary stopgap to the go-to solution for asylum accommodation, leading to a failed system that is expensive, unpopular with local communities and unsuitable for asylum seekers.

As the cost of asylum accommodation contracts more than tripled, inadequate oversight meant failings went unnoticed and unaddressed. The Home Office failed to keep costs down and underutilised mechanisms to penalise providers for poor performance and reclaim excess profits. No performance penalties are applied for poor performance at asylum hotels, despite hotels accounting for over 75% of spending on asylum accommodation.

Break clauses in 2026 and the end of the contracts in 2029 offer the Home Office an opportunity to end the failed system. However, without a clear long-term plan and the institutional capability to deliver a model that is more effective and offers value for money, past failures risk being repeated, the Committee warns.

According to the report, the Home Office’s approach has been “a series of hasty, short-term responses”. It says the government must now learn from past failures and deliver a clear long-term strategy for asylum accommodation that provides value for money, adequate standards of accommodation and takes account of the impact on local communities.

Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, Dame Karen Bradley said: “The Home Office has presided over a failing asylum accommodation system that has cost taxpayers billions of pounds. Its response to increasing demand has been rushed and chaotic, and the department has neglected the day-to-day management of these contracts.

“The government needs to get a grip on the asylum accommodation system in order to bring costs down and hold providers to account for poor performance.

“Urgent action is needed to lower the cost of asylum accommodation and address the concerns of local communities. While reducing hotel use is rightly a government priority, there will always be a need for flexibility within the system, and the Home Office risks boxing itself in by making undeliverable promises to appeal to popular sentiment. It shouldn’t set itself up for more failure.

“The Home Office has not proved able to develop a long-term strategy for the delivery of asylum accommodation. It has instead focused on short term, reactive responses. There is now an opportunity to draw a line under the current failed, chaotic and expensive system, but the Home Office must finally learn from its previous mistakes or it is doomed to repeat them.”

The expected cost of the Home Office’s asylum accommodation contracts for the ten years between 2019–29 has more than tripled, from £4.5 billion to £15.3 billion. External factors – the Covid-19 pandemic and the dramatic increase in small boat arrivals – and decisions by the previous government, such as pausing asylum decision-making while it pursued the Rwanda scheme – have meant that the Home Office has had to accommodate a growing number of people for longer periods of time.

At the end of 2018, around 47,500 asylum seekers were accommodated by the Home Office. As of June 2025, the Home Office was responsible for accommodating around 103,000 people. The number of asylum seekers in hotels is currently significantly lower than during the peak of hotel use – 32,059 people as of June 2025, compared to 56,042 in September 2023 – although the number of asylum seekers accommodated in hotels was 8% higher in June 2025 compared to June 2024.