Scottish council corrects outdated asylum seeker support figure

Outdated information on Stirling Council’s website about the amount of money asylum seekers living in catered accommodation receive each week has been corrected after Full Fact got in touch.

Earlier this week, a page on the council’s website—which was recorded as having last been updated on 11 September 2026—said: “Asylum seekers receive small allowances (£49.18 a week or £8.86 a week if meals are provided).”

While destitute asylum seekers in self-catered accommodation do receive £49.18 a week in asylum support from the government, the second figure isn’t correct—those in accommodation which provides meals receive £9.95 a week.

Asylum seekers in full-board accommodation received £8.86 a week from January 2024 until June 2025, when the payment was increased to £9.95. It’s remained at that rate since.We came across this error while carrying out some preliminary research for our new AI benchmarking project, which will see Full Fact build a publicly available, auditable benchmark to independently evaluate the output of leading AI models. The increasing use of Large Language Models has made it more important than ever that the information on official websites is accurate.

When we contacted Stirling Council, it told us the information had been correct at the time of publishing and it would update it. We’re grateful that it’s now made the correction.