Number of asylum seekers in hotels rises
Now moving on, the Home Office has
released its latest figures on
immigration numbers. Our political
correspondent Rob Pals here and he's
been pouring through these numbers.
There's quite a lot to to get to. So
overdue in terms of what what jumps out
most of all.
>> Yeah, there's a lot of them. These are
the uh regular release of data that
comes out from the home office every 3
months. So it's the first one we've had
since the end of May and it covers the
period the 12 months running um to June
um of this year. So it essentially
pretty much covers Labour's first year
in office, but of course a lot of the
impact of what's going on here is being
influenced by what the Tories did um in
their final years um in office. Uh it
doesn't give you a net migration figure.
So it doesn't tell you sort of how many
overall people are coming in to the
country because it doesn't look at how
many people are leaving. What it does do
is break down the various categories of
visas issued. So in legal migration and
it also looks at um irregular um
crossings and asylum applications as
well. What we're seeing on the the legal
side is I think as expected quite a
pronounced decrease in the various
regular categories. So if you look at
work rellated visas um there were
183,000 visas granted to main applicants
in all work categories in in the year to
June 2025 36% fewer than the year
before. When you go into the health and
care worker category though you see uh
the number of health and care worker
visas issued to migrant workers in a
caring personal service occupation. So
carers basically fell by 88%
on the year before and that's all being
driven by some of these reforms brought
in under the rishies government um to
restrict the number of care worker
visas, health and social care worker
visas that are being issued. So that was
the changes that James Cleverly made
essentially
>> they were. Yeah. Which Labour didn't
stand in the way of and have actually
arguably extended um through the
immigration white paper. But you can see
that is substantially bringing down
those numbers. Um and and um what has
also come down massively is um there was
a big focus on dependence. So people
coming over to study and being able to
bring dependent other people with them.
Um in the study category you can see
whilst um study visas to foreign
students in the year to June 25 were
about flat 4% fewer than the year before
actually dependent visas issued to
dependents they were down by 81%.
So that is coming down quite
substantially as well. So, it's some of
these measures that are driving the
overall decreases in net migration um as
well, which are down to some of the
policies that were adopted by um brought
in by the Conservatives that Labour have
basically adopted. It's a bit of a
different story when it comes to
irregular migration, though.
>> Bring us bring us those numbers.
>> So, small boat crossings and irregular
arrivals, 49,000 irregular arrivals
detected in the year ending June 2025,
27% more than the previous year. Now,
88% of that, so a majority of that chunk
of irregular arrivals as they're termed,
were small boat arrivals. 38% more in
terms of small boat arrivals than the
previous year. Um, but slightly fewer
than the peak in 2022. So, that
essentially mirrors what we're seeing in
the sort of continuous data that we're
tracking for the home office issues that
that small boat arrivals are basically
running close to where they were at
their peak and far higher than they were
last year. Just quickly the number being
housed in hotels. Do we have that?
>> Yes, we do. Um it shows that uh out of
the total number of asylum seekers in
receipt of um accommodation support 30%
were in hotel accommodation that amounts
to 32,000 just over 32,000 in the year
to June 2025. That's 8% more than the
previous year. It's about the same
figure that we've been reporting that
when we've been covering this in the
last few days, we've been reporting the
end the year to March 25 figure. So, it
it's running at about the same rate as
that, but up on the year before. So,
that's not great news for the government
given the battles that they're fighting.
>> The framing as we had with the
government earlier on the program that
framing that the number of hotels has
fallen, but the number of people in
hotels has has risen. Rob Pal, great
stuff as always. Okay.