New RAMFEL report exposes the horror of UK’s asylum hotels

Our new report, Profiting from People: Inside the UK’s Asylum Hotels, reveals how the government’s long-term use of hotels to house people seeking asylum has become a vehicle for profit rather than protection. Drawing on over two years of RAMFEL’s casework and testimonies from people trapped in hotel accommodation, we show how successive governments have handed billions of pounds of public money to private contractors while people are forced to live in unsafe, degrading conditions.

The full report is available here. 

In this period, we supported almost 500 people placed in hotels, including families crammed into single rooms for months on end, children going hungry, and people with serious health conditions denied care. One mother described being unable to open the windows in her mould-infested room. Another family’s baby was documented by a GP as experiencing malnutrition caused by hotel food.

The report draws on extensive research and interviews with hotel residents, revealing:49% said their room was overcrowded, with many explaining that whole families of up to six were forced to live together in a single space.
80% said the food was “really bad”, and largely inedible. 
34% reported having a medical condition or disability, yet none of them received the adjustments they needed.
75% had raised concerns, whether to Migrant Help, the Home Office, or directly with hotel staff. Yet in 76% of these cases, no corrective action was taken. 

Meanwhile, companies such as Clearsprings Ready Homes, Mears Group, and Serco have together made more than £380 million in profit since 2019. In the first seven months of 2024–25 alone, the government spent £1.3 billion on hotel-based accommodation, money that could have gone towards safe, permanent housing instead.

Our report exposes how decades of outsourcing, poor oversight, and deliberate hostility have turned asylum housing into a profit-driven industry. The government continues to ignore repeated warnings about the human cost of this system.

We are calling on the government to:

• End prolonged hotel use.
• Set and enforce minimum standards immediately, that respond to the needs of children, families and vulnerable people.
• Invest in community housing.
• Give people the right to work whilst their asylum claims are processed.
• Build an asylum system based on dignity and integration, end the reliance on private contractors and bring asylum provision back under public control.

For any queries, please contact Layla Hussian, Advocacy Officer, at Layla.Hussain@ramfel.org.uk. 

RAMFEL’s Head of Campaigning, Nick Beales, stated:

“The use of hotels as asylum accommodation has to end without delay. Contrary to what politicians across the divide claim, these hotels are not luxurious – they are vermin infested, prison-like, wholly inadequate for long-term use and are now routinely attacked and targeted by far-right racists.
The people housed in them for months and years on end are desperate to leave and start rebuilding their lives in the UK. However, with no right to work until their claims are approved, they cannot support themselves and must rely on government accommodation.

If the government is serious about reforming the asylum system, they should immediately permit asylum seekers the right to work, allowing them to support themselves and their families. This would save the taxpayer money and strengthen social cohesion by ensuring greater day-to-day interaction between people seeking asylum and local residents.”