The real problem with Britain's asylum hotels - and the woman with a bold plan to solve it

13 hours ago Share Save Tom Symonds News correspondent Share Save

BBC

Kate Wareing has dedicated her career to helping people who find themselves in a crisis because they have nowhere to live. It's clearly personal. She worked as a housing officer at the age of 18, remembers sleeping on a sofa herself when a relationship broke up, and now in her early 50s, feels she is only a home owner because of "luck and age". "Everybody needs the security of a home," she says. And now Kate, who is the chief executive of an Oxfordshire housing association, has an idea that she thinks could help the government with one of its most pressing challenges: how to empty asylum hotels by 2029. The pledge to empty them was made by Labour when tensions and anger rose during the summer, in communities where some regard asylum seekers as a threat to local safety. The cost of putting asylum seekers in local hotels is also "cripplingly expensive," points out Kate - and she makes a bold claim: the cost could be cut from about £54,000 a year to just £4,000, for each asylum seeker, by moving them to social housing.

AFP via Getty Images Protests and counter-protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping

Instead of paying private contractors to provide hotel rooms, as it does now, she wants the government to pay councils and housing associations to buy more properties, adding them to the nation's social housing stock, to benefit migrants and others in need of a home. The BBC has been told her proposal has been discussed with several government departments, including the Treasury and the Home Office. Officials are talking to nearly 200 councils about a series of pilot projects, though the Home Office won't give details. The question is, could it really work - if private companies haven't managed to source enough accommodation for asylum seekers, what's to say a council could