By Niamh Harris – The People’s Voice
Asylum seekers to be moved into as many as sixteen thousand homes across the UK as young British people struggling to find affordable homes,
The Home Office has already built up a stock of 16,000 properties just for asylum seekers
Home Office contractors have been offering landlords five-year guarenteed full-rent deals to take over the management of properties.
Meanwhile an acute shortage of homes for young workers and families continues to grip Britain with house prices continuing to rise.
GB News reports: The move is being made in an attempt to cut the £8million a day cost of housing migrants in hotels.
Dozens of hotels holding asylum seekers were due to shut by the end of last month.
Another 50 will close by spring amid growing concern from local residents.
There were around 50,000 asylum seekers in 400 taxpayer-funded hotels at the end of last year.
Properties from the private rental and social housing markets are being used to house more than 58,000 asylum seekers across England, Wales and Scotland.
The number in so-called “dispersed accommodation” has doubled compared to where it was a decade ago.
Daily costs for dispersed accommodation can fall to as low as £30, compared with £150 for hotels.
However, there are concerns the situation could create “ghettos” and limit “integration”.
A Home Office insider told The Daily Telegraph: “The department’s strong preference is for dispersal accommodation because it is so much cheaper and much more discreet than hotels. That’s not to say it’s not unpopular.
“Some of the contractors are taking properties in pretty normal streets. You can buy yourself a £300,000 house and suddenly find your next-door neighbour is a house full of asylum seekers.
“MPs are starting to report problems as a result of this.
“It has also been very heavily clustered in places where property is cheap – Hull, Bradford and Teesside. It is potentially damaging to these places because it creates ghettos which are terrible for integration.”
Three contractors have been paid £4billion over 10 years to provide accommodation to asylum seekers.
As many a 30,000 homes may be needed to end the use of hotels as the Government can substantially reduce the 100,000 backlog in asylum claims, The Telegraph has claimed.
However, the report comes after 1.2 million people were registered on council housing waiting lists at the end of 2021/22.