Fury as Labour moves 10K migrants out of 11 hotels — but the vast majority remain open

Ten thousand asylum seekers have been cleared out of hotels and rehoused in shared accommodation and repurposed military sites as Labour moves to bring down a £4billion annual bill that has become a political liability.

Figures released by the Home Office show the hotel population has contracted sharply — down by a third since December, when 30,657 migrants were being put up at public expense. The current figure stands at 20,800. Eleven more hotels have been returned to commercial use in the latest round of closures, a group that took in a historic manor house alongside several rated properties, cutting running costs by almost £65million a year. Since taking office Labour has trimmed the total asylum accommodation budget by £1billion, bringing it down from £4.7billion in 2023-24.

The people leaving hotels are going into houses of multiple occupation or onto large consolidated sites. Two former defence installations are among those now in use: Crowborough Army camp in East Sussex, which is accommodating up to 350 people, and RAF Wethersfield outside Braintree in Essex, where the population has reached close to 1,300.

Alex Norris, the minister responsible for border security and asylum, reportedly said expanding the network of large sites — particularly those on former military land — was central to the Government’s plan.

“Hotels were meant to be a short-term stopgap under the previous government, but they spiralled out of control — costing taxpayers billions and dumping the consequences on local communities,” he said.

“We are shutting them down by moving people into more basic accommodation, scaling up large sites, removing record numbers of people with no right to remain. This is about restoring control, ending waste, and handing hotels back to the community for good.”

Opposition fires back

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp disputed the picture of progress, reports The Telegraph, arguing the Government had simply moved asylum seekers sideways rather than removing them.

“That’s despite the Government shunting people from hotels into residential apartments to hide what is going on,” he said. “Those apartments are then not available for young people struggling to get on the housing ladder.

“Most asylum seekers are illegal immigrants. Keir Starmer has let in more small boat illegal immigrants than any prime minister in history, and numbers are 45 per cent up since the election.”

Philp allegedly argued that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights — allowing illegal immigrants to be deported within days of arrival — was the only genuine solution, and said Labour lacked the resolve to pursue it.

He also noted that when measured against the position at the time of the last general election, the hotel population was still higher than it was when Labour came to power — undermining the Government’s claim to have turned the tide.

Hotels closed

With 186 hotels still in operation, the estate has shrunk from approximately 220 at Labour’s election but remains well above historical norms. At its height under the Conservatives — who dramatically expanded the use of commercial accommodation during Covid — the figure topped 400.

The 16th-century Madeley Court Hotel, a listed manor house set in the Shropshire countryside near Telford, is among those handed back. Its 50 rooms had been occupied by migrants since 2021, at rates of up to £150 per night. The building’s architectural status made its use as emergency asylum accommodation particularly controversial.

Two Victorian properties have also been released: the Crewe Arms, a 61-room hotel that had been walled off from paying guests for more than three years, and the Britannia in Wolverhampton, which had accommodated 200 people continuously since the summer of 2021.

The closure list runs further. Banbury House Hotel contributed 64 rooms; OYO Lakeside in St Helens, a three-star property, had taken in 48 asylum seekers over the past year. The Sure Hotel in Aberdeen made headlines in 2024 when a man arrived armed with a crossbow and told officers he intended to “shoot the lot.” He was subsequently arrested and charged with the offence.

Rounding out the eleven are Marine Court Hotel, a seafront property in Bangor; the Citrus Hotel in Cheltenham; the Rock Hotel and Wood Merchant Hotel, a pair of Halifax establishments; and the Holiday Inn at Heathrow — the largest of the group at 433 rooms. Between them, these properties once held 2,199 people at a single point. That number is now zero.