The government is set to impose stricter conditions on migrants receiving asylum support, the Home Office announced on Wednesday. However, the move has drawn immediate fire from Reform UK, who dismissed it as window dressing. The policy shift comes amid intense public pressure over asylum accommodation costs. The Home Office spent £4bn on asylum support in 2024/25, including £2.1bn on hotel accommodation - a figure equivalent to £5.77m per day. Ministers have framed the tougher conditions as part of a broader effort to restore order to the asylum system, but critics on the right argue the measures fall short of meaningful deterrence. The announcement lands against a backdrop of deep and growing public unease. The latest Ipsos polling shows immigration remains the biggest issue facing the country, with 48% of Britons naming it as important. This is on top of the fact that two in five say that Labour is doing a worse job of managing immigration than the previous Conservative government. Some 62% of respondents believe the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels has increased. The scale of hotel use has proved a particular flashpoint. At the end of Q1 2020, only 5% of asylum seekers were in contingency accommodation, but by March 2025 almost a third were staying in such facilities. A petition calling on the government to stop financial support for asylum seekers, on the grounds that it may incentivise illegal migration, attracted over 427,000 signatures earlier this year. Reform UK's shadow home secretary Zia Yusuf said the announcement demonstrated the government was "taking the British people for mugs," arguing that migrants arriving illegally would continue to receive free hotel accommodation at taxpayer expense regardless. He pledged that a Reform government would "deport every single migrant here illegally." The intervention reflects the growing political battle over asylum policy ahead of local elections, with Reform seeking to exploit vulnerability on an issue that has become one of the defining fault lines of this parliament. The government has committed to ending the use of hotels to house asylum seekers before the next general election, with the chancellor allocating £200m to accelerate the transformation of the asylum system. But as of December 2025, around 31,000 asylum seekers remained in hotel accommodation, which is still above the level inherited from the previous government. Tightening support conditions is likely to be attacked by hardliners as a technocratic response to what they characterise as a fundamental border security failure. The government has yet to publish the full details of the new conditions framework....