Expenditure on contingency accommodation for asylum seekers in each year since 2020
Case reference FOI2025/01016
Received 27 May 2025
Published 26 June 2025
Request
How much has the council spent on contingency accommodation for asylum seekers, those granted asylum, and those in the country illegally in each year since 2020.
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CLARIFICATION RECEIVED FROM REQUESTER: By "contingency accommodation", I mean temporary housing, hotel rooms, etc. provided for people who have arrived into the country illegally, applied for asylum status and undergoing processing, or have been granted asylum status. This includes support for unaccompanied asylum seekers. Please note, I am requesting information about both child and adult asylum seekers.
Response
How much has the council spent on contingency accommodation for asylum seekers, those granted asylum, and those in the country illegally in each year since 2020.
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CLARIFICATION RECEIVED FROM REQUESTER: By "contingency accommodation", I mean temporary housing, hotel rooms, etc. provided for people who have arrived into the country illegally, applied for asylum status and undergoing processing, or have been granted asylum status. This includes support for unaccompanied asylum seekers. Please note, I am requesting information about both child and adult asylum seekers.
Answer: Children’s Services have advised they have spent £0.00 on contingency accommodation, as they don’t place unaccompanied asylum seeker children (UASC) in temporary or contingency based accommodation. They are placed in foster homes/children’s residential or supported accommodation provisions which are very different to temporary housing, hotel rooms, etc.
Adults Services have advised under Homelessness law (Part VII of the Housing Act 1996) the Council is not responsible for accommodating homeless asylum seekers over the age of 18 as they are not eligible for public funds (No Recourse to Public Funds). The provision of accommodation for this group is the responsibility of the Home Office.
There is no duty upon the Council to accommodate persons in the UK without immigration status that allows them to enter/remain. As such the Council has no data with regard to this matter.
The majority of the data relating to households who have approached Herefordshire Council from 2020 to date, seeking housing assistance under homelessness law (Part VII of the Housing Act 1996) has been archived as the data management system was taken offline in November 2024 and replaced with a new system. Unfortunately, we were unable to transfer the records from one system to the other. This means that we have very limited access to the archived data. We have been able to extract data as to the number of households we have accommodated, and the length of time we accommodated for, between 1st April 2020 and 31st March 2025. We have then compared that number to the number of homeless households we have accommodated during the same period who are not UK nationals and have immigration status that enables them to access public funds. During the period 1st April 2020 to 31st March 2025, we have found that the sub-group to be 17.75% of the overall group. Unfortunately, due to the restrictions on accessing the archived data we are unable to drill down into each financial year from 1st April 2020 onwards to say how many households in the sub-group were accommodated in each financial year or the amount spent on accommodating this sub-group in each financial year.
Having taken the above into account, the Service Area has advised that 17.75% of total spend on temporary accommodation during the period 1st April 2020 and 31st March 2025 was £1,232,836.00.
Please note that the above figure is an approximation and does not take into account variables such as the difference in cost for different types of temporary accommodation, which we are unable to apply based on the data available.
Documents
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