Thousands of families hit by pause of lifeline refugee visa route as scale of crackdown revealed
Exclusive: More than 6,000 children will be hit by shutdown after Labour said route was being manipulated by people-smuggling gangs
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Exclusive: More than 6,000 children will be hit by shutdown after Labour said route was being manipulated by people-smuggling gangs
Asylum seekers could be moved from migrant hotels into pop-up buildings with plans to be announced “within weeks”, a minister has said as the government scrambles to get a grip on the asylum accommodation crisis. Pop-up buildings have previously been used to tackle prison overcrowding, with rooms including en-suite bathrooms, a bed, a desk and televisions set up in prison grounds. Now housing secretary Steve Reed has said the government is looking at “modular” forms of building to ensure new sites can go up quickly, as part of plans to end the use of hotels “entirely”. The Home Office also confirmed on Monday that two barracks in Scotland and southern England would be used to house around 900 men temporarily. The plans will see men housed at Cameron Barracks in Inverness and Crowborough Training Camp in East Sussex. Both sites were used to accommodate Afghan families evacuated during the withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 while they were resettled elsewhere, with that work ending earlier this year. Speaking to the media on Monday morning, Mr Reed said further progress on the provision of asylum accommodation would be announced in the coming weeks. It comes after a scathing report found the Home Office had squandered billions of pounds on migrant hotel contracts as a result of mismanagement and incompetence. A cross-party group of MPs also found officials had failed to recoup millions of pounds in excess profits owed by companies running the accommodation. One of the accommodation providers Mears said on Monday that they had now made payments back to the Home Office. Mr Reed said: “You can use modular forms of building. That means it can go up much faster than would normally be the case, and there are planning processes that we can use in these circumstances to make sure that the planning system itself isn’t delayed. “I’m expecting announcements to come on that within weeks, so we just have to wait and see.” He added that the Home Office were looking at former military bases to house migrants, saying: “We could use big sites and get people on there and end the use of hotels entirely. That’s where we want to get to.” Sir Keir Starmer said on Monday that he was “frustrated and angry” about the “mess” he inherited from the Tory government on taking power. Speaking about the backlog of asylum claims, he said: “We had years under the previous government where they didn’t process claims, so tens of thousands of people didn’t have their claims processed” putting pressure on accommodation. Former home secretary Yvette Cooper hinted in September that the Home Office could house asylum seekers in “modular buildings” on industrial or ex-military sites. Pop-up cabins are already being used to expand capacity at former military base RAF Wethersfield, in Essex, which is the Home Office’s largest asylum accommodation site. Plans had been floated to install cabins at RAF Scampton, in Lincolnshire, but this was scrapped when Labour came to power. Building company Portakabin has also said it is open to doing a deal with the Home Office to provide emergency prefabs for asylum seekers. Mr Reed added: “We want to get it right, but the intention is to get those former military bases is one example of it, where we could use big sites and get people on there and end the use of hotels entirely. That’s where we want to get to.” The Home Office, which has pledged to stop using hotels by 2029, was housing around 103,000 people as of June 2025. While the number of asylum seekers in hotels has gone down compared to the peak, with 32,059 people in this accommodation in June, this is still up on the previous year. In the damning report into Home Office asylum accommodation, published on Monday, MPs warned ministers not to use large sites instead of hotels as they have been found to be more costly. In one example, the Home Office spent £15.4m buying a site at former prison Northeye, in East Sussex, to provide asylum accommodation, only to conclude that it was unsuitable and could not be used. The department pressed ahead with the purchase despite clear warnings that the site would require significant work to make it fit for use. The Home Office has said that it plans to also use medium-sized sites, which would accommodate between 200 and 700 people, to house asylum seekers. This would include procuring empty tower blocks, teaching training colleges, and student accommodation. While accommodation providers have been sourcing these sites for some time, certain buildings have run into problems with planning permission or the amount of investment needed to get them up to standard. MPs from the home affairs committee have said that civil servants don’t yet have “a clear and achievable plan for the delivery of medium sites on a scale that it [the Home Office] needs”. The only large site that is currently being used to house asylum seekers is Wethersfield. MPs also warned that the department had little oversight over how huge accommodation contracts were delivered. The projected cost of these contracts has more than tripled between 2019-2029, from £4.5bn to £15.5bn. A spokesperson for Mears said: “The contracts include clauses for payments to be reconciled over time and for profits above a tendered contractual level to be shared back to the Home Office. We work on an open book basis with the Home Office and following an independent audit, Mears has made appropriate and agreed payments back to the Home Office.” Chair of the committee, Dame Karen Bradley, said that the Home Office should be “split up” into two separate departments for managing borders and crime.