A furious council has discovered hundreds of asylum seekers were shipped into its city despite telling the Home Office it could not take any more.
Portsmouth City Council found that 55 private rental properties were being used to house a minimum of three asylum seekers each last week.
The migrants have been staying in homes of multiple occupation (HMO) - not council housing.
It comes just two years after James Hill, Portsmouth's director of housing, told the Home Office that the 'system's capacity was such that we couldn't support additional asylum seekers'.
But when a public meeting was hosted in July by Amanda Martin, the Labour MP for Portsmouth North, figures showed the number of private rentals being used to house migrants had increased from 10 at the end of 2019 to 58 in April 2024, The Times first reported.
