Media correct asylum hotel claims, but government minister doesn’t

Sky News and the Guardian have both corrected claims about asylum hotels, after Full Fact got in touch.

A Sky News post on X (formerly Twitter) claimed: “Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp says the number of asylum hotels has risen since the general election in 2024, after claiming 200 were closed down in the nine months before.” However, according to the video clip in the post—and Hansard’s transcript of it—Mr Philp actually said that “the numbers in asylum hotels have actually gone up”.

After we flagged this mistake, Sky News added a reply to the post, saying: “EDIT: The wording in this post contains an error. It should read ‘the number of asylum seekers in hotels has risen’”.

And last week, after we got in touch, the Guardian removed an incorrect statement in its newsletter, which claimed that “the number of hotels used to house asylum seekers has halved in the year since Labour took power”. In a correction note the Guardian said the inaccurate claim was based on a statement made by a government minister. The government has not yet corrected this claim when asked.

We’ve also asked the Home Office to correct minister Lord Hanson’s claim on LBC, detected by our AI tools, that: “We’ve halved the number of hotels that were in use at the peak of the Tory government’s hotel use.” The Home Office hasn’t yet responded.

As our fact check explained, figures show that in its first year in office Labour reduced the number of hotels used to house asylum seekers by a net of three—from 213 to 210. Government data shows that the number of asylum seekers being housed in hotels went up between June 2024 and June 2025 (the period broadly covering Labour’s first year in government).