What is Robert Jenrick’s record on asylum hotels?published at 14:51 GMT
14:51 GMT
Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist
Jenrick, the MP for Newark, was until yesterday a member of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative shadow cabinet. After his dramatic exit from the party, he appeared at a press conference where he was revealed as the latest member of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
Farage was asked at the press conference whether Reform’s members “would accept the man who opened the asylum hotels”., external Jenrick said: “I was the man who closed 100 asylum hotels.”
The Conservative government introduced the original policy to repurpose existing hotels to accommodate asylum seekers in the UK.
So, what happened under Jenrick’s watch?
The number of asylum hotels increased sharply but he also announced plans to start closing them in his last months in the job.
Image caption,
The number of hotels used to house asylum seekers between March 2020 and December 2024
When Jenrick became immigration minister in October 2022 there were 300 asylum hotels in operation, according to data obtained by the BBC through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. This number rose by almost 100 over the next year, peaking at 398 in September 2023.
A month later, Jenrick told the Commons that the government would start “exiting” asylum hotel contracts, starting with 50 of them. By the time he left his post in December 2023, there were 342 hotels.
Numbers dropped to 296 in February 2024 – just over 100 down from the peak – leaving the number roughly the same as when Jenrick became immigration minister.