Plan to close asylum seeker hotels 'will leave thousands homeless'

Home Office plans to significantly reduce the backlog of asylum claims will create a "humanitarian crisis" by increasing homelessness among refugees, Glasgow city council has said.

The council said it believes there is a direct link between a Home Office announcement made yesterday that it is closing 50 hotels being used for asylum seekers and a move to bulkprocess asylum applications later this year, to clear the backlog of unresolved cases.

Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, told MPs yesterday the Home Office would clear asylum seekers from 50 hotels across the UK by January next year, with further tranches of hotels taken out of use for asylum seekers in the following months.

While the full list of areas where hotels are being cleared has not been released, of places identified during Jenrick's statement in the Commons, all but one were in Conservativeheld constituencies. It had been briefed that the Home Office would seek to particularly target marginal Tory seats for the first wave of the programme.

Glasgow council has been told that the Home Office will, over the same period, deal in bulk with the cases of 2,500 asylum seekers living in the city, which has the largest refugee population outside London.