The Government’s pledge to stop housing asylum seekers in hotels will likely not happen, the head of the UK’s borders watchdog has warned. David Bolt, independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, said the UK’s housing stock “isn’t sufficient” to cope with the number of people in the asylum system.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced plans to halt using hotels to accommodate asylum seekers by 2029 as part of the spending review unveiled earlier this month. Appearing in front of MPs on the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, Mr Bolt was asked what the challenges would be to achieving that. He replied: “I don’t think it will be achieved, frankly.”
He said a recent inspection looking at asylum decision-making and the quality of the decisions had revealed a “significant increase” in the number of refusals, leading to a rise in the number of appeals over the last year.
Mr Bolt said: “And so the numbers within asylum system (are) not very tractable, they’re very large numbers and it’s very hard to see how they’re going to be reduced significantly even over the length of Parliament.”
He said the amount of housing available is a concern, despite the Home Office appearing to take a different approach to getting more local authorities engaged with housing asylum seekers.
“I think there’s a more fundamental issue about accommodation, or at least housing stock, there simply isn’t sufficient housing stock to be able to deal with the sorts of numbers in the system,” he said.
“I think it’s really, really challenging.”
This was rejected by a Number 10 spokesman who said: “I don’t accept that. As I say the Government is committed to restoring grip to the asylum system, allowing us to end the use of hotels.”
More than 18,000 migrants arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in 2025, a record for this point in the year.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has promised to “smash the gangs” behind the surge in crossings.
But Mr Bolt said he had written to ministers, warning them that he “wasn’t convinced” this was the best approach to stop the issue.
“It did seem to me the challenge was to change the risk reward ratio for those people involved in organised immigration crime, that’s really a difficult thing to achieve, because it’s relatively low cost, relatively low risk for the perpetrators and highly profitable,” he told MPs.
“I’m not sure I feel very optimistic about the ability to smash the gangs and, in any event, it seems to me with organised crime, the best thing you can do is deflect it to something else you’re less concerned about rather than expect to eradicate it.”
He added that he believed the establishment of the Border Security Command has brought energy and focus to the issue and it has been agreed with Border Security Commander for the unit to be inspected later this year.
Mr Bolt said more needs to be done to tackle the issue and look at what is attracting people to the UK, highlighting the “availability of illegal work” as one example.
It comes after asylum seekers were caught working illegally outside a migrant hotel in central London following a Daily Express investigation.
Over two nights, the Express saw at least 10 different men leaving the migrant hotel before doing delivery work. They attached Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats-branded carriers to their bikes and attached mobile phones to their handlebars.
Meanwhile, an investigation by The Sun also reported that Channel migrants were working as fast food delivery riders within hours of arriving in the UK.
A Downing Street spokesman said border security minister Dame Angela Eagle will meet food delivery companies next week, adding that the Government will not stand for the “racket”.
