Thousands of asylum seekers living in hotels cannot be told refugee status

Exclusive: Labour slams ‘ridiculous bureaucracy’ as Home Office rules mean people in hotels can’t be formally granted refugee status

Thousands of asylum seekers living in hotels cannot be told if they have been granted refugee status, The Independent can reveal.

Rishi Sunak has pledged to “abolish” a record backlog of asylum decisions that has left more than 140,000 people waiting to learn their fate, blaming the figure on a rise in small boat crossings and migrants “exploiting our system”.

And the home secretary has accused civil servants of assessing asylum claims too slowly, telling a parliamentary committee: “Frankly, their productivity is too low.”

But The Independent understands that a significant number of decisions have been made, but not communicated to refugees because of Home Office rules preventing notices being served to those living in hotels.

Official guidance states: “If the claimant is currently in initial accommodation and leave has been granted such as refugee leave, humanitarian protection etc, caseworkers must delay service of the [permit] until they have been moved from initial accommodation.”

The logjam of cases has left Home Office officials scrambling to find homes through private companies for people with decided cases, prolonging the anguish of Afghans, Syrians and others who do not know their claims have succeeded.

Yvette Cooper, Labour’s shadow home secretary, criticised “yet more ridiculous Conservative bureaucracy” and called the situation “totally ludicrous”.

“This is just increasing the costs to the taxpayer too as thousands of people are stuck in hotels, because the Home Office can’t get a grip,” she told The Independent.

Asylum seekers awaiting decisions are banned from working and must live on just £8 a week. They cannot gain legal employment for a year, and even then, can only get jobs on the government’s shortage occupation list.

The Home Office is legally required to support destitute asylum seekers with accommodation and food while their cases are considered, meaning the inability to serve decisions in hotels is driving up costs to the taxpayer.

The government is now spending at least £7m a day on hotels, having focused on failed policies it claimed would deter small boat migrants rather than creating infrastructure and processes to cope with the projected surge in arrivals.

Dame Diana Johnson, chair of the home affairs committee, told The Independent: “The government’s slow asylum processes have left some individuals waiting years for their claim to be decided. The result is an enormous backlog of asylum claims, a huge hotel bill for the public purse, and people left in limbo – unable to move forward with their lives.

“The prime minister has publicly pledged to clear the asylum backlog by the end of this year. It is concerning to hear of yet another potential blockage in Home Office processes undermining this promise. We need urgent clarification from government on this.”

A government information pack for asylum seekers states that initial accommodation should be used for up to a month, before they are moved into “dispersal accommodation”, such as a flat or shared house.

But more than 45,000 asylum seekers are living in hotels, because of a shortage of proper accommodation and pressure caused by last year’s rise in small boat crossings.

Pressure has been put on the system by last year’s rise in small boat crossings (AFP/Getty)

The use of hotels for asylum seekers started rising in late 2019 and increased further because of insufficient dispersal housing for the rocketing number of people crossing the Channel.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “The Home Office’s failure to communicate its decisions on people’s asylum claims in a timely manner is deeply damaging to men, women and children who have lost everything.

“Refugees who are stuck in limbo in our asylum system have gone through extremely traumatic experiences and all they want is to feel safe and be able to integrate in the UK.”

Mr Solomon said that delays in granting people refugee status “deprive them of the support and rights they are entitled to”, damaging their health and wellbeing while worsening delays in the system.

By the end of September, there were more than 143,000 asylum seekers awaiting initial decisions on their claims, almost triple the figure in 2019, and the government does not publish figures on how many of those decisions had been served.

Some of the nationalities who make up the largest populations of people accommodated in hotels, including Afghans and Syrians, have very high grant rates of around 98 per cent but only a tiny proportion of claims by small migrants have been decided.

Albanians were the single largest national group crossing the Channel in small boats in the past year, but are less likely to claim asylum or have applications granted.

The Home Office said the bar on serving asylum decisions in hotels only relates to grants of protection, rather than refusals, and that exceptions can be made for vulnerable people.

A spokesperson said: “As per our published policy since 2015, we do not generally serve decisions to asylum seekers in either initial accommodation, such as hotels, or contingency accommodation, unless there are exceptional circumstances. This is because we must consider the impact granting protection status will have on a local authority, and the individual.”

“However, this has in no way impacted the asylum backlog. We currently accommodate 58,500 across our dispersed accommodation, for whom we can serve decisions as we work through our cases, with greater speed after an immediate boost of 2,500 caseworkers.”