UK immigration and migration: who is arriving, who is leaving

🧳 How asylum is funded — the figures ✕

What a person seeking asylum receives

£49.18 a week (£7/day) in self-catered accommodation, or £8.86 a week (£1.26/day) where meals are provided — set by the Home Office, reviewed annually. Working is banned until a claim has waited 12 months, and then only in shortage occupations.

Hotels

Hotels are overflow, used because the decision backlog outgrew normal dispersal housing — block-booked, often budget or repurposed, frequently shared rooms; the star rating on an old sign says nothing about what's inside. They cost over £8m a day (~£3bn/yr), roughly six times dispersal housing — which is why successive governments have committed to ending their use.

Any belongings, such as mobile phones

Phones aren't government-issued. They're usually owned before the journey or cheap/charity handsets — and a smartphone is the one indispensable tool of a crossing (maps, translation, family contact), often the only possession that survives it. Smartphone ownership reflects the low cost of connectivity rather than personal wealth.

Who pays

The Home Office budget — i.e. general taxation — with first-year costs partly counted against the overseas aid budget under international accounting rules. The costs are genuinely large and worth debating: the National Audit Office has criticised multi-billion accommodation contracts. The policy argument is about the fix — faster decisions and cheaper dispersal versus deterrence — not about whether the bill exists.

Why people come — the documented drivers

The top small-boat nationalities map onto documented crises: Eritrea's indefinite military conscription, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Sudan's civil war and famine conditions, persecution in Iran, conflict and drought in Somalia. Around half of decided claims from these countries are granted — these are, in the law's own terms, largely refugee-producing states. Nationality is what's recorded; ethnicity isn't collected.

Eastern Europeans on the boats — a picture that has dated

True in 2022: Albanian nationals were the single largest group that year — about 12,700 people, 27% of all arrivals. Since the UK–Albania returns agreement (December 2022), Albanian crossings have fallen by over 99% — 25 people in the first quarter of 2025 — and Albania accounts for most completed returns. No European nationality features in today's top arrivals; the 2022 pattern no longer describes current crossings.

Sources: ONS long-term migration estimates, Home Office asylum & support statistics, Commons Library briefings, Full Fact. Figures are sourced in both directions. Refreshed quarterly.

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