The Home Office has announced the "closure" of eleven asylum hotels, returning them to their normal community use.
The department said these closures deliver an estimated saving of close to £65m a year, and more closures will follow in the coming weeks.
Closing all asylum hotels was one of Labour’s flagship commitments in its 2024 general election manifesto. In last year’s Spending Review, chancellor Rachel Reeves said the Home Office would end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by 2029, saving the taxpayer £1bn a year.
According to the Home Office announcement on the latest closures, the number of hotels used for asylum accommodation has halved from its peak of 400 sites under the Conservative government to 185, with the number of people housed in hotels down nearly 20% in the past year and 45% lower than the peak.
However, the peak of 400-plus asylum hotels was in summer 2023 and by the time Labour replaced the Tories in government in July 2024, the number was already down to 213. Therefore, under Labour, the reduction is around 13%.
The closures form part of the government’s plan to fix the asylum system by tackling the immediate pressure of hotel use while driving longer‑term reform through faster asylum decisions, higher removals, and tougher enforcement.
The Home Office said that as well as closing asylum hotels it is concurrently scaling up the use of large, basic accommodation sites “to move people out of hotels for good”. It said this includes moving around 350 illegal migrants to the Crowborough military barracks, which opened three months ago.
Border security and asylum minister Alex Norris said: “Hotels were meant to be a short‑term stop‑gap under the previous government, but they spiralled out of control – costing taxpayers billions and dumping the consequences on local communities.
“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.”
The following hotels have returned to community use:
- Banbury House Hotel – Banbury, Oxfordshire
- Marine Court Hotel – Bangor, Ards and North Down
- 15 Citrus Hotel – Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
- Holiday Inn Heathrow – Hillingdon, London
- Britannia Hotel – Wolverhampton
- Madeley Court Hotel – Madeley, Telford & Wrekin
- OYO Lakeside – St Helens, Merseyside
- Crewe Arms Hotel – Crewe, Cheshire East
- Sure Hotel by Best Western – Aberdeen
- The Rock Hotel – Halifax, Calderdale
- Wool Merchant Hotel – Halifax, Calderdale