Cynically manipulated outrage at asylum hotels masks the private interests benefitting from forced migration due to wars and climate breakdown, argues Hannah Cross

The use of hotel buildings to accommodate people awaiting a decision on their asylum applications is a very neoliberal phenomenon. The main beneficiaries are large corporations, who gain contracts that are supposed to fulfil the state’s role in social provision. This long-running privatisation does not shrink the power of the state. Its power, over people who have crossed borders and wider society, is enhanced in a performance of human-rights obligations that fails to honour these rights and divides the working class.

The use of hotel and contingency accommodation increased from just 5% of asylum housing in 2020, reaching almost half at its peak in 2023. Despite a subsequent increase in dispersal accommodation, by the end of 2024, London housed almost two-thirds of asylum seekers in hotels, while significant hotel use has also continued in the south east and east of England. Hotel accommodation benefits large contractors like Clearsprings, Serco and Mears, while Britannia Hotels made over £150 million in profit since it started to accommodate asylum seekers in 2014. Such contracts even brought the founder of Clearsprings to the Sunday Times Rich List. This company provides housing services to the Home Office that were associated with the highest mortality rate among resident asylum seekers between 2020 and 2023.

This privatisation model follows an outsourcing pattern of state security particular to the UK, US and Australia. Migration management has been in the hands of multinational corporations rather than the application of mixed models and non-profit organisations’ services that are found in other European countries, many of which receive higher numbers of asylum applications per head. Although migration and border management is a brutal industry across Europe, the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ subjects vulnerable groups to abuse and degrading living conditions that companies claim are necessary for their bottom line.

In the UK, there is no choice of accommodation and in all cases the hotels remove autonomy and force cramped conditions on people who are cut off from wider society for indefinite periods of time. There are numerous reports of people living with inedible food, damp, mould, flooding, pest infestations and filthy conditions, heating and water cut-offs, a lack of privacy and safety for children and women, and dehumanising treatment.

By appearance, people deemed illegal and burdensome are being accommodated in hotels, funded by taxpayers who have seen their share of the wealth shrink; for whom hotels have become an unaffordable luxury. The far right exploits this symbolic injustice by terrorising people who have been compelled to leave their homes and find safety, even crossing the Channel to harass people already suffering police abuse in Calais and Dunkirk. Of course, it is the profiteers who are on taxpayer-funded foreign holidays, while people seeking a safe haven and viable livelihood are trapped in an intolerable limbo, in buildings that are not functioning with the hospitality or security of hotels even if they charge hotel prices (averaging £158 per night).

Imperialism and forced migration

Pledging to end hotel use for asylum seekers by 2029, the Labour government has linked it to the policy of cutting boat arrivals from France, which make up around one-third of asylum applications. As of March 2025, the Home Office has not investigated safe routes or legal means of entry for people who have the right to claim asylum, yet fall outside limited visa schemes such as those offered to Ukrainian refugees or to people from Hong Kong. The state and media, representing the Labour government, Conservative and Reform parties, speak of necessarily ‘illegal’ immigration in entirely dehumanising terms, narrowly focusing on competing strategies for reducing numbers.

A large proportion of people in Calais have travelled from the regions of western and southern Asia, the Horn of Africa and Sudan, while there were increases in Channel crossings by Albanian nationals in 2022 and those from Vietnam in 2024 as a consequence of ever-shifting trafficking networks. The majority of people crossing the Channel year-on-year, since Britain’s exit from the EU, are from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Sudan and Syria. Since the expansion of US involvement in these regions, as part of the War on Terror in the early 2000s, it has become evident over time that Western militarism has not only aggravated a fragile balance of power in countries variously impacted by colonial dominance. It has also redivided territories and violently obstructed and controlled the regional circulation of people who have been uprooted by war, forcing people into longer journeys through Europe. Starmer’s latest announced deal with Iraq follows a European pattern of exporting border-security apparatus to indebted countries, to contain people who have been uprooted by force. This will likely create further displacements.

The UK government chooses not to act on its contribution to the catastrophic conditions that displace people and prevent their safe circulation, nor even to treat asylum seekers as human beings in need of refuge while most of the world is in crisis. This narrative void politically enables an economic model that causes chaos and destruction for the benefit of the very few, scapegoating the displaced people who have suffered it the most and holding back social progress in the imperial core.

While the government focuses on an economic power base of war, finance, AI and other industries, the indication is that the devastating human and planetary consequences of this growth strategy will be met with further denial and violence against those who are paying the heaviest price. This blinkered nationalism must be challenged on all levels, starting with the refusal to treat people forced to migrate as a burden. There is no progression out of the authoritarian, unequal and unjust direction of this regime unless there is active solidarity with all those it is exploiting and dispossessing, domestically and internationally.