What’s Really Happening Inside Asylum Hotel Accommodation?

Dr Charlotte Sanders, a researcher at SOAS University of London, has been conducting research into the experiences of asylum-seekers in hotel accommodation. Drawing on her extensive interviews, alongside qualitative research in hotels and support services, Dr Sanders worked with animator Danielle Rhoda and creative director Iona Gaskell to produce this short film, which explores the effects of hotel food on asylum-seeker residents' physical and mental health.

 Watch the full film on YouTube here.

This research explores the rise of asylum hotel accommodation in the UK and the impact hotel living has on the health of people seeking asylum, with a particular focus on food provision.

From 2020, the Home Office increasingly relied on contingency hotels to house people seeking asylum. By December 2023, 45,800 people were living in hotels, five times the number in 2019. In 2025, the National Audit Office reported that the Home Office was estimated to have spent £15.3 billion on asylum accommodation contracts with private companies over ten years, with 76% linked to hotels. The same report found that Clearsprings Ready Homes, Serco and Mears Group made £380 million in profits between September 2019 and August 2024, equal to £146 per minute.

Despite these costs, many people continue to face appalling and inadequate living conditions. Reports from Refugee & Migrant Justice, Migrants Organise and Migrant Voice have highlighted harms including unsafe environments, overcrowding, isolation, poor hygiene, lack of agency, inadequate financial support, and harmful food.

Using ethnographic interviews and qualitative research in hotels and support services, this project examines the lived experience of asylum accommodation. Residents consistently described food as a major threat to their physical and mental health, while also speaking of wider feelings of confinement and imprisonment.

Explore the full project and resources here.