Submission to Home Affairs Select Committee on Asylum Accommodation

Dr Charlotte Sanders
Location: South England
Year Published: 2023 - 2025

This research was conducted by Dr Charlotte Sanders, Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at SOAS University of London and funded through a SOAS University of London grant. The research aimed to document the experiences of asylum-seekers currently residing across hotels and, in some cases, hostels, under section 98 and section 95 of the Immigration & Asylum Act 1999. The project’s key aims were to better understand the benefits and drawbacks of using hotels as sites for accommodating asylum-seekers, and to ascertain the effects of hotel residency on physical health and mental wellbeing. Assessing the effectiveness of the Home Office’s increasing reliance on hotels for asylum support accommodation from the ethnographic perspective of hotel residents themselves is critical to developing inclusive policy, as well to ensuring that the contractual obligations of companies involved in managing and provisioning hotel accommodation are being fulfilled in practice. This has significance for both human rights obligations and duty of care to those seeking asylum. Part of an ongoing project, this research has included conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with fifteen asylum-seekers residing in ten different hotels across London and Hampshire, and with participants often having experience of multiple hotels, having been moved around over the course of months or years. Interviews took place with interpreters present, both in person and via video calls, and between January 2023 and January 2025.