High Court finds Home Office should have moved asylum seeking families out of hotel rooms after three months

The Home Office accommodated our clients, SH and BWO, and their families each in a single hotel room for 3 years. On 26 March 2026, the High Court found that any period in these living conditions longer than 3 months was “too long to be consistent with providing them with a dignified standard of living, adequate for health and meeting their essential needs”. The Home Office was therefore in breach of its duty to provide destitute asylum seekers with “adequate” accommodation.

The Court also found that the Home Office was applying too high a standard when assessing the location a person accommodated by the Home Office should be located in. The Home Office’s guidance to only agreeing to accommodate people in specific locations for medical reasons if they have “strong exceptional circumstances” is an “erroneous test”. Instead, accommodation requirements should be based on “needs”.

Judgment

The judgment included a detailed consideration of the facts of each of our client’s living situation including the size and facilities of the accommodation as well as the families’ makeup.

SH, her husband and their two children, aged 7 and 2.5, have been living in a hotel room that has three single beds since December 2022. The Court noted that after SH’s second child was born in September 2023, their living situation must have been “extraordinarily stressful”. No one in the family was able to have an undisturbed night’s sleep and it would have been particularly difficulty to care for a baby without any kitchenette or cooking facilities in the room. The living situation could not be considered adequate for more than a short period of time (e.g. 3 months). SH had also provided medical evidence to demonstrate her need to stay in the local area for support with her mental health. The Judge noted that the Home Office medical advisors did not engage with any of the observations or conclusions set out in the psychologist’s report provided. The subsequent decisions about her accommodation requirements were therefore unlawful. Further, as explained above, the Home Office applied an “erroneous test” to the medical evidence. The Judge quashed the Home Office’s previous decisions about SH’s accommodation requirements.

In July 2022, BWO was placed in a single hotel room with her sons, who at the time were 12 and 17 years old. They remained in this room until July 2025. There were only two beds and so for the entire three years BWO’s family was living in the room and BWO shared a bed with her younger son. The Judge noted this would be “incompatible with personal dignity and..most people’s sense of propriety” for any mother and son, but these conditions were particularly stark because of BWO’s history of trafficking and mobility problems. The Judge highlighted the difficulty the family must have experienced because of the lack of personal privacy in the hotel room for BWO, especially while she managed her knee injury and recovered from surgery, but also for her teenage sons. The Home Office should have prioritised the family for a move at an early stage.

Significance

There are currently around 4,300 asylum seeking families living in hotel rooms, many of whom will have been living in single hotel rooms for more than 3 months. The Home Office must now prioritise getting most families out of hotels to comply with its duty to provide destitute asylum seekers with adequate accommodation.

The Home Office must now also now change its policy and practices of assessing medical evidence when determining asylum seekers’ accommodation requirements. The Home Office should no longer apply an “exceptional circumstances” threshold but should be determining accommodation requirements simply based on need.

SH and BWO were represented by Sasha Rozansky and Lily Moghadam of Deighton Pierce Glynn, instructing Zoë Leventhal KC of Matrix Chambers, Ben Amunwa of 3PB and Toby Vanhegan of 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square.

A link to the judgment can be found here and a link to the Guardian article here.