LONDON (Reuters) -Britain will end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers before the next election in 2029, finance minister Rachel Reeves said on Wednesday, in a move which will save 1 billion pounds ($1.35 billion) a year.
Each year, thousands of asylum seekers arrive on England’s southern coast in small boats. They are mostly housed in hotels across the country, costing the government 3.1 billion pounds in 2023-24.
“We will be ending the costly use of hotels to house asylum seekers in this parliament,” she said in a speech setting out spending plans for the coming years.
The rising bill for the accommodation plus the impact on tourism and objections from some locals to the presence of asylum seekers in their communities, has made the hotels a hot-button issue in Britain.
Reeves’s Labour party had pledged to end the use of asylum hotels before the general election last year to save “billions of pounds” but had not said by when it would do so.
The use of hotels would be ended by providing more funding to cut the asylum backlog, hear more appeal cases and return those who had no right to be in Britain, Reeves said.
($1 = 0.7416 pounds)
(Reporting by David Milliken, writing by Sarah Young, editing by Catarina Demony and Paul Sandle)
