Councils across England are weighing up legal challenges after the High Court’s decision to block a hotel in Epping from accommodating asylum seekers.
The ruling blocks asylum seekers from being housed at the Bell Hotel in the Essex town, and current residents must be removed by September 12.
On Wednesday, several local authorities, including some run by the Labour Party, said they were considering their options to take similar action.
The ruling has resulted in another wave of criticism directed at Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour government over immigration, with opposition parties repeatedly accusing the government of failing to adequately tackle the issue.
Yet amid backlash and local council tensions, the figures show that Labour has already made significant steps to move away from the use of hotels.
The multi-billion cost of housing asylum seekers in hotels has dropped markedly from its peak in 2023. Last year (2024/5), the cost for hotel bills was at £2.1bn, down by a third from £3.1bn in the previous year.
The smaller bill is a result of multiple factors, most notably the reduction in the asylum backlog.
The average daily cost for housing each asylum seeker in a hotel has gone down from £176 to £170 per person. This still remains higher than previous years.
The government has also made efforts to reduce the proportion of asylum seekers housed in hotels, moving them towards other types of accommodation.
Figures from March show 32,345 asylum seekers out of over 100,000 were being accommodated in hotels, with the remainder housed in temporary accommodation including council-owned homes and a former airfield.
Just 30 per cent are staying in hotels, which is meant as a contingency – or temporary – measure.
Government accounts show that costs are likely to remain similar this year, with £2.2bn requested by the Home Office to asylum housing costs; suggesting that the number of asylum seekers is unlikely to fall significantly.
In February, Home Office permanent secretary Sir Matthew Rycroft said the department was aiming to “get to zero” asylum hotels by the end of this parliament in 2029.
In 2022, the government began plans to use “large sites” like cruise ships and ex-military bases to accommodate asylum seekers.
Among these are the Bibby Stockholm barge, which was shut down last year, and former RAF airfield Wethersfield which now houses 588 people as of early 2025.
But a review last year found that these sites cost more than hotels as a way to house asylum seekers.
Nonetheless, hotels cost around six times more on average than other types of accommodation, according to analysis by the Migration Observatory; at £170 a day compared to £27 a day.
Yet most of the time, the government is forced to place people in hotels due to a lack of capacity, with a shortage of accommodation and a substantial –albeit decreasing – asylum backlog.
The asylum backlog stood at 78,745 cases at the end of March – a 13 per cent drop from December, and down 41 per cent from the mid-2023 peak.
Yet the sizeable backlog, which is still higher than pre-2022 levels, represents a host of ongoing costs for the government as people wait for a decision on their asylum claims.
Most asylum seekers are still waiting over six months for an initial decision on their claim, although waiting times have improved compared to the same time last year.
The majority of people in the backlog are Afghan, Pakistani and Iranian nationals, according to the Migration Observatory.
The UK’s asylum backlog is the fifth largest in Europe.
Where are asylum seekers staying in the UK?
Now, over 8 in 10 local authorities host some asylum seekers, Home Office figures show. This is a significant rise over the last decade.
Accommodation for asylum seekers varies by region. In the North East of England, just 5 per cent are housed in hotels, while in London hotels make up the majority of accommodation (65 per cent).
Epping Forest council is within the East of England region, which has 41 per cent of migrants housed in hotels.
However, being in Essex, the council is on the edge of London which has a higher concentration of asylum seekers than the rest of the UK.
Around 140 migrants were being housed in The Bell Hotel in Epping, according to BBC reports, all of whom must now leave by September.
Though the hotel has provided accommodation for the Home Office for several years, occupancy has fluctuated, with figures in March showing just 28 asylum seekers housed across Epping Forest hotels.
Reform leader Nigel Farage has called on other councils to seek “Epping-style injunctions” against the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, adding: “It is high time that the outrageously expensive asylum hotel scheme, which nobody in Britain ever voted for, was brought down by popular demand.”
The recent pushback has come amid record levels of small boat crossings to the UK.
Labour’s education minister Baroness Jacqui Smith has admitted that the high numbers are “a problem that, up until this point, we haven’t managed to tackle”.
People coming on small boats make up an increasing proportion of asylum applications. Last year, a third of the UK’s asylum claims came from small boat migrants.
In 2025 so far, over 26,000 migrants have already crossed the English Channel, higher than summer levels in any year to date.
In fact, figures at mid-August have nearly exceeded the entirety of 2023 (29,437).
Meanwhile arrests of people smugglers who enable the crossings were down last year, according to National Crime Agency data obtained by The Independent.
The shadow home secretary called Labour’s failure to “smash the gangs” an “abject failure”.
This suggests that small boats migration could be the highest on record over 2025, bringing with it a slew of new asylum claims; since almost all irregular migrants apply for asylum.
