Charlotte Sanders
Location: South England
Timeline: 2022-2024

PROJECT DETAILS

Recent years have brought a proliferation of types of accommodation for asylum-seekers in the UK, including army barracks, hotels, barges, and hotels. These facilities accommodate but also confine people in ways that break down neat distinctions between carceral and non-carceral spaces.

From 2020, the UK Home Office began to rely increasingly on ‘contingency hotels’ to accommodate asylum-seekers. According to a report from the National Audit Office there were 45,800 asylum-seekers in hotel accommodation by December 2023, five times the number in 2019.

This growth in hotel use runs tandem to increasing privatisation in the asylum accommodation system. In 2025, the National Audit Office reported that across a ten-year period the Home Office were estimated to have spent 15.3 billion pounds on asylum accommodation contracts with private companies, with 76% of this relating to hotels specifically.

The report also found that the three major private companies involved in Home Office asylum hotel provisioning, Clearsprings, Serco and Mears, had profited to the extent of £380 million pounds between September 2019 (when their Home Office contracts started) to August 2024. This amounted to £146 per minute of profit.
Despite these enormous costs, the quality of accommodation and support for people seeking asylum is poor. Reports from organisations such as Migrants Organise, Refugee & Migrant Justice, and Migrant Voice detail the multiple harms to physical and mental health experienced in hotels, caused by issues ranging from lack of security to limited space, loss of agency, social isolation, endemic boredom, unclean rooms, harmful food, and inadequate financial support.

Through ethnographic methods this project explores the effects of hotel accommodation and the system of private contracting on the health of asylum-seeker residents, through the lens of food provisioning.

APPROACH

Through ethnographic interviews and qualitative research in hotels and support services this project investigates the lived experience of accommodation in asylum hotels.
Consistently, hotel residents raised the issue of harmful and inadequate food as a key challenge to their physical and mental health in hotel accommodation. They also spoke of feelings of confinement and even imprisonment in hotels.
After scoping research, this project has focused on producing outputs that can support campaigns for meaningful change for asylum hotel residents, in policy and community. Some of these can be found below in the ‘Resources’ section.

RESOURCES

Blog
Shades Of Carcerality? Reflections On Asylum Accommodation In Italy, France And The UK

Short Film 
Hard to stomach: Food provisioning and carcerality in asylum hotels

Policy
Submission to Home Affairs Select Committee on Asylum Accommodation