Hotels and other accommodation for asylum seekers will cost the British taxpayer £15 billion over 10 years

This is equivalent to £4 million a day and is more than triple the Government’s original estimate, the National Audit Office has revealed.

The NAO’s breakdown also showed that at the end of last year 4,000 failed asylum seekers were still being provided with taxpayer-funded accommodation because they had shown they were ‘destitute’.

The Mail Online reports: Contracts were originally forecast to cost £4.5 billion over a decade from 2019 but are now expected to run to £15.3 billion over same period, after the Channel crisis exploded.

It means that on average the taxpayer will spend £4,191,780 a day on housing asylum seekers over the life of the contracts.

A separate breakdown from the NAO showed overall costs in 2024-25 were £1.67 billion.

That amounted to £4,567,123 a day on average, or £3,172 a minute.

Asylum hotels “may be more profitable” for companies holding the contracts than other types of housing, the Government’s official auditors said.

The Home Office awarded the 10-year contracts to three suppliers in 2019 – Clearsprings Ready Homes, Mears Group and Serco – which each operate two or three UK regions each.

They are responsible for finding a range of self-catering accommodation for asylum seekers who are dispersed across the country, and for sub-contracting hotels for tens of thousands of migrants coming across the Channel by small boat.

The report found Clearsprings is now set to be paid £7.3 billion over the 10 years from 2019 to 2029, the NAO said, while Serco is expected to get £5.5 billion and Mears will receive £2.5 billion.

Its study said: “The total reported profit of suppliers was £383 million between September 2019 and August 2024.

“In the first five years of the contract, available data from suppliers show annual profit margins ranging from a loss of 2% to a profit of 17%.

“This is equivalent to an overall 7% profit margin across the whole service.”

The report went on: “People accommodated in hotels account for 76% of the annual cost of the contracts (£1.3 billion out of an estimated £1.7 billion in 2024-25).