The population of our city is currently almost 290,000. Our international diaspora correspondent Angus Young does his homework and reveals the plain facts of the current immigration debate.
It’s the big political issue of the day so let’s get cracking with some answers about how it relates to Hull. Asylum seekers waiting for decisions to be taken on their applications to remain in the UK have been housed at the Royal Hotel in the city centre since 2019. It was the first time hotel accommodation had been used for this purpose in Hull and came soon after a new ten-year Home Office contract to provide supported asylum seeker accommodation across Yorkshire and the Humber was awarded to housing group Mears. Previously, asylum seekers had typically been housed within existing residential communities in the region under a contract operated by private firm G4S.
At this point It’s probably worth saying that local councils like Hull currently have little or no say on where asylum seekers are sent to live during the application process. Instead, it’s a three-way arrangement involving the Home Office, Mears and willing private property owners such as hotel chains.
The arrival of the pandemic in 2020 turned what had originally been intended to be short-term temporary accommodation at the Royal into much longer stays as the national backlog of processing applications grew. Today the hotel is still being used to house asylum seekers along with at least one other hotel in the city. The current government has pledged to end the use of hotels by 2029 which is both when the next General Election will be held and when the current contract with Mears expires.
Latest Home Office figures up to the end of March this year show there were 305 asylum seekers living in hotels or so-called ‘contingency accommodation’ at that time. In addition, another 597 were living in community-based ‘dispersed accommodation’. By the very nature of the application processing system, these numbers change slightly on a regular basis but the overall figure has remained fairly constant for the last year or so.
In contrast, there were no asylum seekers recorded as being in contingency accommodation in the East Riding on March 31 while there were 54 living in dispersed housing.
The Home Office data also provides details of the number of Ukrainians and Afghans living here as part of respective resettlement schemes due to wars in their home countries. The figures show there were 587 Ukrainians in the East Riding and another 306 in Hull while there were 44 Afghans in the East Riding compared to 110 in Hull.
The statistics provided by the Home Office do not break down the numbers by sex or age but they do include some important context amid all the sound and fury over the issue, especially following last summer’s riot in the city centre when the Royal Hotel and its occupants came under attack from a baying mob.
As of March 31 this year, asylum seekers made up just 0.49 per cent of Hull’s overall population.