Burnham calls for wealthier areas to share asylum seeker housing burden

Prime Minister Andy Burnham stepped into a widening argument about where Britain houses its asylum seekers, suggesting Tuesday that the country's wealthier regions have been letting poorer ones shoulder the entire burden. His remarks came after residents of Piddington, a village in Oxfordshire, protested plans to convert a nearby former military base into accommodation for asylum seekers—a proposal the government announced in June as part of a broader shift away from expensive hotel housing.

"We cannot have a situation where it's only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers," Burnham told GB News. He acknowledged he didn't yet know the specifics of the Piddington situation but promised to listen to residents' concerns while insisting that "all parts of the country need to work, to play their part." The comment marked a notable pivot from his earlier stance: in 2018, when serving as mayor of Greater Manchester, he had threatened to block his region from accepting any more asylum seekers, arguing that the northwest was hosting a quarter of the nation's asylum applicants while Greater Manchester alone held 70 percent of the region's numbers.

The government's own figures underscore the uneven distribution Burnham is now critiquing. As of late March, nearly 98,000 people were receiving asylum support across the UK. The north-west had 19,578 of them, London 13,687, and the West Midlands 11,969. When measured against population size, the disparity becomes starker: the north-east and north-west each had roughly 25 to 26 supported asylum seekers per 10,000 residents, far exceeding the national average. Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Coventry, and Belfast topped the list of individual local authorities, with Glasgow alone housing 3,870 people.

The shift toward military bases reflects Labour's campaign promise to end the use of asylum hotels, which have become flashpoints for anti-migrant sentiment. Yet the new approach has sparked its own resistance. Residents of Piddington voted to stage a symbolic referendum on leaving the UK in protest. Last week, demonstrations erupted in Thetford, Norfolk, where protesters attempted to enter homes where they believed asylum seekers were living. These scenes illustrate the raw tension that asylum housing decisions generate in communities already stretched thin.

The Conservative opposition wasted no time attacking Burnham's position. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp declared on social media that "illegal immigrants should all be deported within a week of arrival," and reiterated the party's pledge to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights to enable deportations to Rwanda or other third countries. "Andy Burnham just doesn't get it," Philp wrote, rejecting the premise that housing distribution should be the solution.

Burnham's call for burden-sharing reflects a genuine policy tension: the current system concentrates asylum seekers in lower-income urban areas where housing stock is cheaper and dispersal networks already exist, but where public services are often already strained. Wealthier regions have largely escaped this responsibility. Whether Burnham can persuade those areas to accept a fairer share—or whether his own party will back such a politically fraught shift—remains uncertain. What is clear is that the question of who houses asylum seekers has become one of the defining fault lines in British politics, pitting regional equity against local resistance and national security arguments.