By Professor Nasar Meer (University of Glasgow).
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The row over “asylum seekers in hotels” looks like a story about numbers. In reality, it’s a story about how our information ecosystem burdens the most vulnerable with policy failure.
The most powerful force in the UK’s approach to asylum right now isn’t a new statute or a court ruling. It’s amplification: the way a handful of cues – ‘cost’, ‘crisis’, ‘control’ – are ricocheting between broadcast, print and on-line platforms, hardening into the ‘common sense’ of the week.
This is what we’re seeing as the “asylum seekers in hotels” frame dominates our news agendas, a spectacle in which cameras and comment crowd out underlying issues of a lack of safe-routes to seek asylum, colossal backlogs, insufficient caseworker capacity, and delayed tribunal throughput. In placing blame upon people seeking asylum, we overlook the policy failures that are responsible and further traumatise the traumatised. The UK per head receives fewer asylum applications than the EU average, and far fewer than top per-capita recipients like Cyprus or Greece; in absolute terms, the UK’s latest 12-month total (to June 2025) is roughly half of Germany’s 2024 level and below Spain/Italy’s 2024 totals. Under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, the Home Secretary can provide emergency initial accommodation (e.g., hotels) while people apply for longer-term Section 95 support and await “dispersal” housing. Hotels (meant to be temporary) have become “contingency” stock because of the number of people awaiting an initial decision on their asylum application numbers has risen to 91,000, and the Home Office confirms 32,059 people seeking asylum were in hotels at the end of June (up 8% year on year but far below the September 2023 peak of 56,042).
These figures are the on-ramps for the ‘cost/chaos/control’ framing that dominates coverage and have slipped out of view as far-right mobilisation around visible accommodation sites have treated asylum hotels as flashpoints, seizing on local incidents or rumours — most notoriously after the 2024 Southport stabbings — and rapidly circulating misleading claims across social media platforms to recast asylum as a security threat. Multiple investigations show falsehoods spread at speed on digital platforms, translating online agitation into offline protests and, at times, riots across towns and cities. The point is that mainstream media then amplify the salience of these flashpoints. Rolling packages on “asylum hotels”, coupled with highly politicised broadcast segments, sustain attention and legitimise talking points that began on fringe networks. Fact-checkers have had to debunk inflated claims about hotel costs — but corrections often arrive after narratives take hold.
Law now supplies fresh fuel
The interim injunction preventing the Bell Hotel in Epping from being used for asylum accommodation is, at this stage, a planning-law dispute about material change of use. It may be upheld, narrowed or overturned in due course. But as a media object it is perfect: a local flashpoint with national implications, a visual asset, and a template that invites copycat legal bids. Every hearing, application and appeal becomes another “live” for lunchtime news, ensuring the frame persists regardless of whether the underlying caseload is moving in the right direction. The effect on public opinion is classic feedback. Intensive coverage and online agitation raise issue salience; immigration has been at or near the top of voters’ concerns throughout 2025. Yet most people reject violence and show limited support for the wider protest wave — suggesting agitation shifts salience and blame, more than it produces majority endorsement of disorder. Fresh polling shows immigration near the top of concerns, widespread opposition to the 2024 unrest, and a split over who is responsible for hotel use (with many blaming both the previous Conservative and current Labour governments: 40% (choose ‘both equally’ in the same poll). Politics responds to that opinion climate — which then feeds the cycle. New data on record claims and continuing reliance on hotels trigger more protest plans, more polarised media debate, and renewed government promises to end hotel use by 2029. Far-right actors present those developments as vindication and fresh fuel for mobilisation. Courts and councils intervene on specific hotels, generating additional news spikes that reinforce the dynamic. In short: far-right agitation sets the frame; media (social and broadcast) amplify it; public concern rises (even as most reject violence); and policy and legal fights over hotels produce new moments for agitation.
If you want a parable for the cycle, it goes something like this. A visible trigger (a release, a rumour, a ruling) sparks a short-term coverage surge, often framed around cost and control. Salience jumps. Politicians respond with sharper cues and new promises. Those promises generate more coverage, while rival outlets and platforms replicate the frame in pursuit of engagement. In the next news cycle, the original complexity is harder to retrieve. The policy gears grind; the headlines keep spinning.
Can we break that pattern? Not wholly but we can rebalance it.
First, change who speaks and how. If intermedia dynamics favour crisis metaphors, the counter is repetition of context and first-person voice: why people are waiting, how long, what’s changed in processing, what alternatives cost — told by those living the policy as well as those administering it. This is not soft-focus sentimentality; it is a correction to an informational tilt that otherwise treats people as props in a numbers story.
Second, shorten time in the system so hotels become brief by design. That means sustaining high volumes of good-quality initial decisions and clearing the tribunal backlog. We can follow United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Quality Initiative/Quality Protection Partnership recommendations here in improving decision-making through structured training for case workers. Investing in decision quality reduces trauma for people often already severely traumatised, saves time and crucial resources too.
Third, unless we expand safe and accessible routes either through a multi-year resettlement pledge tied to UNHCR needs, humanitarian visas and corridors, or consular-issued humanitarian entry visas and partnerships, desperate people will take desperate measures to move for legitimate reasons that are long documented in the asylum field. The question for ministers, editors and the rest of us is whether we can pivot our attention from the headline friendly flare up, to the underlying infrastructure that creates it.
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Nasar Meer is Professor of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, and Principal Investigator of the Governance and Local Integration of Migrants and Europe’s Refugees (GLIMER) (JPI ERA Net / Horizon).