What was claimed
A picture shows a family who have claimed asylum in the UK and been given a new five-bedroom house.
Our verdict
The family in the picture are from Afghanistan. The original image shows them settled in Canada, not the UK. A different background has been added to the viral image.
Social media posts that claim to show a family of asylum seekers who have been given a “brand new five-bedroom house” in the UK actually show refugees from Afghanistan who have moved to Canada.
One Facebook post, shared more than 1,400 times, is captioned: “This family just got a brand new 5-bedroom house completely free, funded by you, the taxpayer. Plus weekly allowance Free NHS Etc Why? Because he claimed asylum in the UK.
“While British families struggle with rent, mortgages, and waiting lists, this is what our government prioritises. Is this fair? Is this Britain?”
But using reverse image search we found the picture actually dates back to a 2022 news article about an Afghan family starting their new lives in Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
The viral image has been edited to include a different background to the smaller, white house shown in the original image. Full Fact has been unable to find where the edited background showing a large red brick house is from.
The family’s story was published on the Canadian government’s website as part of its commitment to “welcoming at least 40,000 Afghan refugees”.
As we’ve written many times before, asylum seekers—including those who arrived in the UK on small boats—are not eligible to claim mainstream benefits or social housing, but are provided with some financial support and accommodation if they’re destitute. If they are granted asylum, they will usually receive permission to stay for an initial five years and are allowed to claim benefits and access social housing.
There have been some reports of people who have been granted asylum in the UK, or who have migrated here, being offered or provided with five-bedroom properties by councils.
You can find more of our work checking claims relating to immigration on our website.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the picture of the family shows them settled in Canada, not the UK.
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