By Liam Evans

Copyright bbc

The latest Home Office figures showed 32,059 asylum seekers were being housed in hotels in the UK.

In Wales, the figures showed just 76 asylum seekers were housed in such hotels, all in Cardiff, although other forms of accommodation are used to house asylum seekers across the UK.

These figures showed there were 111,000 total asylum applications in the UK in the year to June.

Addressing the Reform UK conference in Birmingham at the beginning of September, the party’s only MS, Laura Anne Jones, said it was an issue in Wales and people had a right to be concerned.

“People think to say ‘oh you’re in Wales, you know it doesn’t affect you there’, but it does,” she told the conference.

The Welsh Refugee Council, which helps people who arrive in Wales said it was concerned about the increase in misinformation that it had seen.

The UK government said it was taking “immediate action to fix the asylum system”.

It said: “We have started closing down hotels and returning more than 35,000 people with no right to be here.

“From over 400 asylum hotels open in summer 2023, costing almost £9m a day, there are now less than 210. We want them all closed by the end of this parliament.”