UK asylum seekers to be banned from taking taxis to medical appointments | Immigration and asylum

Asylum seekers will be banned from taking taxis to medical appointments after it was revealed the Home Office spends around £15.8m a year on the service.

From February they will have to use alternative transport such as buses, no matter how urgent their medical needs are.

However, the government has so far rejected pleas to give asylum seekers free access to public transport, something campaigners have been requesting for years.

The ban on taxis comes as a result of a government review, after a BBC investigation found that some people traveled long distances by taxi to medical appointments, including one man who said he took a 250-mile taxi ride to see a GP, which cost him £600.

Long journeys to medical appointments can result in the asylum seeker being moved to an isolated area, sometimes during treatment such as chemotherapy.

Organizations representing asylum seekers have been fighting for years for a bus pass, which would mean they are not forced to take a taxi when the distance they need to travel is too far to walk.

UK citizens began petitioning the government in 2023 in partnership with a coalition of 25 civil society organisations, asking that bus passes would also enable asylum seekers to take their children to school and go to volunteer placements.

A pilot scheme for free bus travel for asylum seekers in Oxford was launched in November 2024 following a campaign by Citizens UK. Scotland recently recommended providing free bus travel by 2026.

Asylum seekers are currently entitled to one return bus journey a week. Home office contractors often call taxis for all other essential journeys, whether the person concerned wishes to travel by taxi or not.

A subcontractor in south-east London told the BBC that his company would charge the Home Office about £1,000 a day to make about 15 drop-offs from a hotel where asylum seekers were staying to a GP surgery about two miles away.

The government said the stronger new rules would mean taxis would be “strictly limited to exceptional, well-documented cases”, which could include people with physical disabilities, serious or chronic illnesses or pregnancy-related needs.

Such visits must be signed off by the Home Office.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said, “There is a risk that the threshold will be set too high”, adding: “We know that the Home Office has no consistent definition or approach to how vulnerability is assessed, so there is a real risk that those who need transport will not get it.

“The current taxi bill is more a result of government incompetence and poor contract management than of people exploiting it in the asylum system.”

He said: “The use of taxis is symptomatic of an asylum system that allows private contractors to make huge profits at the expense of taxpayers as successive governments have failed to deliver the reforms needed to create an efficient and effective system that treats people kindly and provides value for money.

“The government must end profiteering contracts that will only extend with planned use of military sites and allow people in the asylum system to work so they can support themselves.”

The government also said it planned to crack down on overcharging by taxi firms and other suppliers with regular audits and stronger reporting requirements, which would strengthen transparency and accountability.

The measures are part of a wider crackdown on waste in asylum accommodation and transport contracts, which the government says has already saved more than £74m in housing costs.

Skip past newsletter promotions

After newsletter promotion

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government had inherited conservative contracts that were “wasting billions of taxpayers’ hard-earned money”.

“I am ending the unrestricted use of taxis by asylum seekers to hospital appointments, authorizing them only in the most exceptional circumstances,” she said.

“I will continue to root out waste as we close every single refuge hotel.”

The Government promised to move asylum seekers out of hotels and into alternative accommodation such as military sites by the end of this Parliament, saving £500 million in the process.

Figures released this week show 36,273 asylum seekers are still living in hotels, an increase from June.

The government said it was also speeding up the removal of illegal immigrants, and claimed that around 50,000 people had been removed or deported since Labor came to power.

Raids on illegal working are at their highest level since records began, with more than 8,000 people arrested without the right to work in Britain between October 2024 and September 2025.