Figures show UK spending on aid to asylum seekers will rise to £4.3bn in 2023, with the Home Office pledging to close 150 immigration hotels by May.

The department said as part of the initiative, the number of people staying in taxpayer-funded accommodation had dropped from 56,000 in September to less than 20,000 currently. End “destructive” practices.

Around £8m a day was spent last year to provide accommodation for thousands of asylum seekers, prompting the government to look at alternative accommodation including Bibi Stockholm Barge A military base in Portland, Dorset, and disused military bases at Scampton, Lincolnshire, and Wethersfield, Essex.

Former Immigration Secretary Robert Jenrick, He resigned over Rishi Sunak’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, It was announced in October last year that the government would “exit” 50 hotels by the end of January, with more to follow.

Home Secretary James Cleverley said the process would continue “until the last hotel closes”.

He said: “We are committed to ending the use of asylum hotels and providing asylum seekers with more suitable, cheaper accommodation; and we are doing this quickly.”

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“These closures deliver on the government’s plans to reduce hotel use in the asylum system and we will continue to do so until the last hotel closes.”

But Labour’s shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said the announcement amounted to a Tory “celebration of defeat”.

“So-called ‘asylum hotels’ did not exist before the Tories lost control of the asylum backlog and Rishi Sunak pledged to end them by the end of 2023,” he said. “Yet by mid-April, we still had about 250 units still in use.”

The Home Office announcement comes after findings from the Independent Commission on Aid Impact (ICAI) revealed that the amount of aid spent on hosting refugees and asylum seekers in the UK soared to £4.3 billion last year.

ICAI said the figure had been driven up by the £2.5bn the Home Office had paid for hotel accommodation this year, adding that there were “ongoing concerns about value for money” in the department’s spending.

The watchdog said: “Rather than falling as the cost of the Ukrainian and Afghan refugee schemes fell, aid spending in the UK increased further due to Home Office spending on hotel accommodation for asylum seekers.”

Last month, a report by spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO) found the government’s alternative scheme to provide housing for asylum seekers It will actually cost the taxpayer an extra £46m More so than the hotels they seek to replace.

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By the end of March, the Home Office expects to have spent at least £230m developing four major projects – the Bibby Stockholm Barge, a former RAF base and former student accommodation in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

But the NAO found that only two sites have been open so far – the Bibby Stockholm and Wethersfield sites – and they accommodated only around 900 people by the end of January.

Both of them have encountered many setbacks, including legionella outbreaks In the days since the first asylum seekers were admitted, the cost of construction in Wethersfield has risen from £5 million to £49 million.

Next week, lawmakers are expected to vote on amendments to the Rwanda Security Bill, which would seek to declare Rwanda a safe country from which asylum seekers can be deported. It was effectively an attempt to circumvent last year’s Supreme Court ruling that the policy of sending people who arrived in the UK illegally to African countries was illegal.