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The amount of the UK’s aid budget spent domestically on asylum seekers fell by a third last year compared to 2023 because of reduced use of hotels and more migrant returns.
The move was welcomed by overseas development campaigners, but they argued that aid spending on asylum seekers within Britain should be cut further given that the budget is set to be raided to fund an uplift in defence funding.
The government spent £2.8bn of its aid budget on asylum seekers in the UK in 2024, down from £4.3bn in 2023, meaning asylum costs fell from 28 per cent of the aid budget to a fifth last year.
Officials said the drop could be attributed to a reduction in the use of asylum hotels achieved by the previous Conservative government, as well as a sharp increase in returns of failed asylum seekers and better use of cheaper accommodation, instead of hotels, to house migrants.
The number of asylum seekers housed in hotels fell from a peak of nearly 60,000 in late 2023 to less than 30,000 in the summer of last year. However, the number has since started to climb again.
Sir Keir Starmer announced in February that he would cut the UK’s aid budget from 0.5 per cent of gross national income to 0.3 per cent from 2027 in order to fund an increase in defence spending.
International aid organisations have warned that such drastic cuts would be damaging to developing countries, and could also undermine efforts to reduce migration of refugees to Britain.
The foreign office, which manages the aid budget, is still working out exactly where the axe will fall.
Gideon Rabinowitz, policy director at Bond, a UK network for aid NGOs, welcomed the reduction in the proportion of UK aid spent domestically, but said: “This figure remains far too high.”
It will be “unsustainable” and poor value for money and “at the expense of essential development and humanitarian programmes” if Britain continued to spend £2.8bn of its slashed aid budget on housing asylum seekers within the UK, he added.
