The accommodation for asylum applicants will cost the triple taxpayer the amount that the Interior Ministry claimed for the first time, according to new figures.
The contracts signed by the conservative government in 2019 were expected to see £ 4.5 billion or public effective paid to three companies around a period of 10 years.
But a Watchdingdog report, the National Audit Office (NAO) says that the number is now expected to be £ 15.3 billion.
The NAO says that the ministers have “few levers” to control the growing costs, which have a large leg driven by an increase in the number of asylum applicants housed in the hotels.
The average annual cost of asylum accommodation is expected to be higher than the amount that ministers expect to reduce the payment of winter fuel.
The NAO report, which was commissioned by the Select Committee of Interior Affairs of Parliament, says that the number of asylum applicants in accommodation paid for around 47,000 in December 2019 to 110000 in December 2024.
Three quarters of all the money spent on asylum accommodation are currently made in hotels, although they only represent about a third of all asylum seekers who are.
The NAO says that private suppliers that sign agreements with the government can benefit more from hotels than other types of accommodation.
In 2019, the conservative ministers signed seven regional contracts with three companies: Serco, Mears and Clearsprings, to help asylum seekers.
The NAO says that the three companies obtained a combined gain of £ 383 million in asylum accommodation contracts between September 2019 and August 2024.
A large part of the additional costs is accounted for the Clearsprings contract in southern England, which has increased from £ 0.7 billion to £ 7 billion expected.
The founder and director of Clearsprings, Graham King, has previously donated to the Conservative Party, through other companies he has had.
The figures of the Interior Ministry published in February showed that the number of people who claim that asylum in the United Kingdom had reached its highest level since the records begged in 1979.
A spokesman from the Ministry of Interior said that the Labor Government “inherited an asylum system in chaos” and criticized conservatives for signing “disastrous contracts that were wasting millions in taxpayers’ money.”
They said that there were now open ferwer asylum hotels that from the elections and that the tasks of measures were to “forecast the taxpayer £ 4 billion by the end of 2026”.
The Interior Ministry has an optional rest clause next year in contracts with the three companies, but it is understood that they will not be activated.
A senior source of the Ministry of Interior said that the main driving force behind the growing accommodation costs was the increase of people who crossed the channel in small boats.
They said that the “slow border but surely the bones have been delivered to the smuggling gangs of people”, that the conservative government mee had to quickly sign the contracts that “were not in any state.”
The source said that the ministers were in contact with Serco, Mears and Clearsprings “very regularly” and that the Labor Government wants to “keep their feet on the fire.”
They refused to speculate on whether any of the three companies would like to participate in asylum accommodation contracts after 2029.
The executive director of the refugee council told the BBC that “hotels owners have had a big day of payment” and was “of course it has particularly significant profits in the southeast due to the number of hotels and the highest cost of housing.”
Enver Solomon praised the government for “processing claims again,” but asked the ministers to move away from the current system and insalu “work in close association with local authorities” to house asylum seekers.
The decision -making tasks of Boris Johnson’s government to stop processing many asylum statements are considered a great driving force behind the initial increase in asylum seekers who need to be housed.
The Rishi Sunak government assigned to process more of those cases of asylum, but its claim to have cleared the request for orders was rebuked by the United Kingdom surveillance agency last year.
The number of hotels in use fell sharply during Sunak’s time as prime minister and has remained similar since work came to power last July.
In November, the Minister of the Ministry of Interior, Angela Eagle, admitted that more hotels were being used in some parts of the country, but the government insists that the total number has decreased slightly from the general elections.
The Secretary of the Interior of the Conservative Shadow, Chris Philp, said that the use of asylum hotels had “triggered” the surveillance of the Labor.
Reform UK has said that explores all options, including legal challenges, to avoid the use of hotels in the areas of the council that now controls.
Sarah Pochin, the newly chosen deputy of the United Kingdom for Runcorn and Helsby, said: “The explosion of the population is making us all poorer, feeding the crime and putting local communities at risk.”
