Official
Official
Published Home Office, ONS, NAO, or parliamentary sources with stable release or document provenance.
Tell users what is known, what is estimated, and what is only publicly evidenced.
This product has to be stricter than a normal dashboard because it mixes official releases with public hotel evidence and later archive recoveries.
Evidence layers
Different source types can coexist on the same site only if the reader can tell exactly what kind of claim each one supports.
Derived estimate
Derived estimate
Rates, tariff estimates, or calculated shares built from published source inputs and documented methods.
Archive-derived
Archive-derived
Recovered historical regional material that must always keep archive URL, capture date, and validation notes.
Public evidence
Public evidence
Council statements, FOIs, planning records, or parliamentary material that help identify hotel sites or hotel presence.
Rules this product assumes
These are the editorial and structural rules that stop the site drifting into vague outrage or false precision.
Never imply the hotel list is complete
Named hotels are a public-evidence ledger, not an official estate register.
Separate spend families
National spend, tariff-based estimates, and local manual evidence should never be merged into one clean-looking line.
Differentiate route, scheme, and status
Small boat arrivals, asylum support, refugee resettlement, refugee family reunion, and Ukraine routes should not be collapsed into one bucket.
Public spending must pass a route test
Whole-council budgets, procurement feeds, and transaction corpora are context only unless a row explicitly ties back to a route or scheme.
Keep release streams separate
National asylum chapters and local authority tables update on different schedules and should not be flattened into one update date.
Integrity claims need document trails
Owner, operator, and supplier risk signals belong in the product, but only after the site-to-entity link and the documentary chain are strong enough to publish.
Separate owner, operator, and prime provider
A hotel owner, a hotel operator, and the regional asylum accommodation prime can all be different entities. The site should keep those roles distinct instead of flattening them into one supplier label.
Route scope classes
Route or scheme specific
Official datasets that directly identify an asylum route, refugee resettlement scheme, refugee family route, or humanitarian route.
Local route-relevant
Council statements, FOIs, planning records, or local documents that explicitly refer to asylum hotels, refugee resettlement, Afghan arrivals, Ukraine arrivals, or related local response.
Context only
General council finance, procurement, or supplier data kept as research context and never merged into public asylum or refugee charts unless a row is explicitly tied to a route or scheme.
Public inclusion test
Include publicly if the source explicitly identifies an asylum route, refugee scheme, family route, or humanitarian route.
Keep small boat arrivals separate from refugee resettlement schemes and from Ukraine humanitarian routes.
Treat local hotel statements, resettlement housing statements, FOIs, and planning records as local route-relevant evidence, not as national totals.
Keep general council finance and procurement as background context unless a row can be attributed to a specific route or scheme.
Route families the site should split
The route model is explicit because the point of the product is to stop incompatible flows being presented as one moralised bucket.
Irregular asylum route Not a refugee scheme
Small boat arrivals
Use small boat or illegal entry route language for the route. Public local asylum-support data does not usually say which supported people arrived this way.
Asylum support system Not a refugee scheme
Asylum seekers receiving support
Best local asylum pressure series, but not a route split. It includes people on support regardless of how they arrived.
Refugee resettlement and relocation Scheme family
Afghan Resettlement Programme
Public local data usually combines Afghan pathways at programme level rather than separating ARAP and ACRS in every table.
Refugee resettlement Scheme family
UK Resettlement Scheme, Mandate, and Community Sponsorship
Public resettlement outputs often group UKRS and Mandate together, with community sponsorship included within that total.
Protection-linked family route Not a refugee resettlement scheme
Refugee Family Reunion
This is a family route connected to people who already have refugee status or humanitarian protection in the UK.
Humanitarian route Not a refugee resettlement scheme
Homes for Ukraine
Useful local route comparison layer but should never be merged into asylum accommodation totals.
Hotel entity-resolution rule
Use this only when the ledger can tie a site to both owner-side and operator-side entities with a strong public source trail.
Use this when one side of the chain is known, such as an owner group or operator brand, but the full site-level entity picture is still incomplete.
Use this when a hotel is publicly named but the starter ledger still lacks a publishable owner or operator match. That is a transparency finding, not a reason to hide the row.
Money-ledger display rule
These rows show who controls a region or visible set of current sites. They are not automatically a disclosed contract value.
These rows can be tariff rates or guidance components. They should not be shown as actual spend totals unless multiplied through with transparent placement counts and method notes.
These rows are valuable accountability facts, but they belong in a distinct display state from contracts and tariffs.