There is a thing everyone thinks they know: that the council spends a fortune putting asylum seekers up in hotels. So I went and checked. I pulled every payment Burnley Borough Council has made on temporary accommodation over five years, then cross-checked it against the official government homelessness figures. What I found is more interesting than the rumour, and in some ways worse.
The council does not pay for asylum-seeker accommodation. Not a penny of it. That is run by the Home Office through a private contractor, Serco, and it does not touch the council’s budget. But the decisions Whitehall makes about asylum land on Burnley all the same, just one step later, and the bill arrives dressed as homelessness. In the space of a single year, the share of local homelessness caused by people leaving asylum accommodation went from 1 in 60 to 1 in 9.
What the council actually spends
Temporary accommodation is the housing a council provides when someone becomes homeless and it has a legal duty to help, while a longer-term solution is found. In Burnley it nearly all runs through one budget line, “Housing Advice”, which over five years has paid out £2.47 million across 735 payments, almost all of it on accommodation. It goes to two kinds of place: local hotels used for emergencies, and supported-housing charities.
Split it by type and it is roughly £1.0m on hotels and inns, £1.2m on supported-housing charities, and £0.2m on leased private homes. The hotels are the emergency end: when someone presents as homeless at 5pm with nowhere to go, a B&B is often the only option that night. The council’s own figures show how that cost has grown. In 2019/20 it housed 78 applicants in hotels for £34,037. By 2024/25 the hotel bill had reached roughly £288,000 a year. Something changed.
What it is not: the asylum-hotel myth
Here is the part that gets repeated and is simply wrong. The big “asylum hotels” you read about in the national press are Home Office contracts, run by Serco in the North West. Burnley is a dispersal area, so there are a lot of asylum seekers housed in the town’s cheap private-rented stock, but the council does not pay for any of it. Across five years of council spending, the only payment to Serco at all is a single £4,450 item from the Covid period. The council is not renting hotels for asylum seekers. That bill belongs to Whitehall.
So if you want to be angry about the cost of the asylum system, be angry at the right address. It is not the Town Hall.
What it is: the surge hiding in the figures
Now the part that is real, and that nobody talks about. When the Home Office grants someone refugee status, they have just 28 days to leave their Serco accommodation. After that they are on their own, and the place they turn up is the council’s homelessness desk, because a refugee with leave to remain is owed exactly the same duty as anyone else. At that moment the cost steps quietly off the Home Office’s books and onto Burnley’s.
The official Ministry of Housing data records why each household became homeless, and one of the reasons is “required to leave Home Office asylum accommodation”. Here is what happened in Burnley.
In 2022/23 it was 10 households, about 1 in 60 of all the council’s homelessness cases. The next year it was 88 households, more than 1 in 9. That is close to a nine-fold jump in twelve months. It was not a Burnley decision and it was not random: it is the direct, traceable result of the Home Office clearing its asylum backlog in late 2023, granting status to thousands of people at once and starting the 28-day clock on all of them. The country’s asylum policy was set in Westminster; the homelessness it produced was paid for in towns like this one. At the sharpest end, the “relief” duty, where the household is already homeless and needs a roof that night, the asylum share hit 13.5% in 2023/24.
The honest split
So can I tell you exactly how many pounds of that £2.4 million went on people from the asylum system versus everyone else? No, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The spending data does not record anyone’s immigration status, and the client names are redacted, as they should be. What the official figures let me say is this: by caseload, roughly 9 in 10 of Burnley’s homelessness cases are ordinary local homelessness, the end of a private tenancy, a family no longer able to cope, domestic abuse, and about 1 in 10 is now someone coming out of the asylum system. Two years ago that second figure was almost nothing.
If the money tracked the cases, the asylum-driven share would be something like £40,000 to £50,000 a year of the bill. It might be more, it might be less, because these households can need accommodation for longer or shorter than average. But the direction is not in doubt, and it lines up exactly with the years the hotel costs climbed.
One more thing worth saying plainly, because it cuts against the lazy version of this story: the council also spends around £1.1 million over five years on refugee resettlement and integration, the Syrian and Ukraine schemes, English classes, community work. Every penny of that is government grant money, ring-fenced, sitting in its own budget lines, not council tax and not the homelessness pot. It is a different thing and I have kept it separate.
The wrong town, chosen because it is cheap
Here is what ought to make anyone in Burnley angry. The asylum system does not share people out evenly across the country. It follows the cheap housing, and cheap housing means deprivation, so it lands again and again on towns like this one. Burnley is the fourth most deprived district in England. Its homelessness rate already runs above the regional and national average, its services are stretched thin, and as I have set out before, its people die younger, its crime sits well above the England average, and its housing is being hollowed out. It is the place least able to absorb extra pressure, and for that exact reason it is the place Whitehall keeps choosing, because the houses are cheap and nobody in London has to live with the result.
It is also a town whose community relations have been hard-won, and which once broke down badly: Burnley lived through serious disorder in 2001, and it remains one of the most deprived and most divided towns in the country. A place like that needs stability, investment and a breathing space. What it does not need is to be used, year after year, as the overflow valve for a national system it had no say in and gets no funding for. Loading still more strain onto the towns least equipped to carry it is not generosity. It is a national failure dressed up as one, and it is paid for by the people who already have the least.
What I want done
- Take Burnley off the list. The town is already one of the most deprived and most pressured in the country, and it has nothing left to give. It has taken far more than its share for years, on the back of its cheap housing, and the fair thing now is simple: stop sending asylum seekers and refugees here. The wealthier places that have taken almost nobody can do their bit instead.
- Bring the numbers down and enforce the rules. The only real fix is upstream, in Westminster: far fewer people in the system, decisions taken quickly, and a state that actually removes those with no right to be here rather than granting status and walking away from what happens next. The chaos of the last few years was made by national policy, and it can be ended by national policy.
- Whitehall must pay for what it creates. If central government grants someone status, the duty to house them when their 28 days run out should come with the money to do it. Under the long-standing “new burdens” rule it is supposed to. On asylum move-on it plainly has not, and the bill has fallen on the council tax of one of England’s poorest towns.
- End the 28-day cliff edge. People are tipped out of one arm of the state straight into the lap of another with no time to arrange anything, and the council is left to catch them. Give proper notice, or hand the case over in an orderly way, instead of by eviction letter.
- Spend what we do spend well, and show it. Supported units through partners like Calico and Stepping Stone are cheaper and better than £288,000 a year of emergency hotel rooms, and residents should be able to see, every year, exactly what is spent and what is driving it.
I will not pretend that the people caught in this are the villains, because mostly they are not, and the staff at Calico and Stepping Stone do hard, decent work. But compassion that drains the poorest towns and tells their own residents to keep waiting, keep absorbing and keep paying is not really compassion at all. It is a cost shunted down the line until it lands on the people with the least power to refuse it. Burnley has carried more than its share for long enough. The honest answer is to bring the numbers down, stop using towns like this as the nation’s overflow, and let a place that has given plenty finally look after its own.
Where these numbers come from
You do not need this part to follow the story. It is here so the working can be checked.
- The spending is from Burnley Borough Council’s published “payments over £500” data, 2021/22 to 2025/26, in the “Housing Advice” cost centre. The £2.47m total, the provider amounts, and the hotel-vs-supported split are all sums of that data. The same payments are searchable in my DOGE spending explorer. This is over-£500 payments only, so it excludes sub-£500 placements and is gross of the Housing Benefit subsidy the council reclaims, meaning the net cost to the council is lower than the headline.
- The 2019/20 hotel figure (78 applicants, £34,037) and the providers (Calico’s Gateway and Orchard House, the “A Bed Every Night” scheme) are from Burnley Council’s own “Temporary Accommodation for Homeless Households” report to Executive, 7 July 2020, and its Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy 2021-26.
- The asylum split is from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s statutory homelessness statistics (H-CLIC), detailed local authority tables for 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2024/25. The figures count households owed a prevention or relief duty whose reason for homelessness was “required to leave accommodation provided by the Home Office as asylum support”: 10 (1.6%), 88 (11.4%) and 71 (10.3%) respectively. A further 51 households in 2024/25 were recorded as living in asylum (NASS) accommodation immediately before applying.
- That asylum-seeker accommodation is a Home Office responsibility delivered by Serco, not the council, is a matter of public record (the Home Office Asylum Accommodation and Support Contracts). Burnley’s status as a dispersal area is covered, with the per-head figures, in my earlier piece More People, Fewer Homes.
- Immigration status is not recorded on council payments and applicant names are redacted, so the pound split between asylum-background and other homelessness cannot be calculated from the spending data. The caseload split is the honest measure, and it is the one used here.