Glasgow is facing acute pressure from rising numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, with council leaders warning of a substantial budget shortfall and growing strain on homelessness services, a Daily Mail report said Sunday.
The report described people sleeping rough and living in hotels around the city centre, and quoted migrants, council sources and local business owners who described overcrowded temporary accommodation, drug use in public places and difficulty finding permanent housing. It said that, by the end of March, the United Kingdom was attempting to process about 109,500 asylum applications and that Glasgow was hosting more than 4,000 asylum seekers — the highest number per head of population of any UK city.
The city’s SNP-led council has told Westminster it needs additional funding to cope with the number of people needing temporary accommodation; the report quoted council sources saying the budget for services for homeless people is around £110 million short over the next two years. The council has previously described UK asylum policy as a “machine that creates homeless refugees,” the article said, and has urged other Scottish councils to take in some of the people who have arrived in Glasgow.
The Daily Mail piece included on-the-record accounts from migrants in hotel accommodation and on the streets. It quoted 46-year-old Clement Moyo, who said he has lived as an asylum seeker in Britain for 20 years and was fitted with a GPS ankle tag by immigration officials. “I’m in limbo,” Moyo told the publication, adding that he felt he was being treated poorly. Other migrants interviewed described journeys that included travel through Libya, Sicily and across the Channel, and said they had moved from other parts of the UK to Glasgow because of housing availability or friends in the city.
A number of hotels are being used for temporary housing, the report said, naming the Britannia Inn — a 278-room property in the Charing Cross area — and the Alexander Thomson hotel on Argyle Street as places where several migrants were staying. According to the article, some people granted leave to remain have subsequently presented as homeless, adding to the demand for council-managed temporary accommodation.
Council officials quoted in the report said the city is struggling to find long-term housing as available social housing and benefit-funded accommodation have been stretched. The piece cited data indicating that by 2022 the proportion of Glasgow residents born outside the UK had risen to 19.1 percent, up from 12.2 percent in 2011 and 5.7 percent in 2001. It also said that in August there were 4,361 households in temporary accommodation in Glasgow, of which 2,544 were refugees with leave to remain.
Local residents and workers told the Daily Mail they had seen an increase in visible homelessness and in associated social problems. The article quoted a shop assistant near several migrant hotels who said an alley by the Britannia Inn was known locally as a place where drug use took place, and used the term “shooting gallery” in his description. The report also included comments from a volunteer who said demand on homeless services had grown to an unsustainable level.
The story noted a longer history of tensions and crime linked to asylum accommodation and integration issues in parts of Glasgow. It recalled a 2011 police inquiry into grooming gangs and the 2014 conviction of a man identified in reporting as a failed asylum seeker, as well as a 2020 Police Scotland operation that the piece said involved suspects from several foreign nationalities. The article said there are growing calls for the UK-wide grooming inquiry announced earlier this year to be extended to cover Scotland.
Glasgow has been a Home Office dispersal location for asylum seekers since 1999, the report said, and the SNP Scottish Government’s policy of offering accommodation to people judged to be homeless has in recent years attracted some refugees from other parts of the UK. The city council source quoted in the article described a pattern in which people granted leave to remain then present as homeless, creating a high and sustained demand for temporary housing that the council struggles to meet.
Opposition to local ability to cope with demand was reflected in comments from some residents quoted in the article, who said they sympathised with migrants but questioned why long-standing local housing and homelessness pressures could not be addressed first. Others pointed to employment and social services strains as more people arrived.
The Daily Mail report attributed many of the details and personal testimonies to its own reporting on the streets of Glasgow and to council and local sources. Glasgow City Council has previously made public appeals to the UK Government for additional funding to meet homelessness and temporary accommodation costs, and figures on asylum applications and numbers in temporary accommodation are also regularly cited in public briefings and media coverage.
Officials in Westminster and in Glasgow were not quoted at length in the report, and this account reflects the Daily Mail’s field reporting and the sources it cited on conditions in parts of the city. The situation adds to a broader national debate about how the UK manages asylum claims, distributes accommodation across regions and funds local authorities facing sudden and sustained increases in need for temporary housing and support.