Offline on £49.18 a week: digital exclusion and young asylum seekers

Can a young person seeking asylum in the UK keep up with online learning? Often not reliably. In September 2026, asylum support is £49.18 a week for someone in self-catered housing and £9.95 a week where meals are provided. The Home Office’s own costing sets aside £4.21 a week for a basic phone, a SIM and top-ups, and nothing for a laptop or home broadband. In accommodation where meals are provided there is no communications money at all, and Wi-Fi is not a specified requirement in the accommodation contracts.

That gap matters more every year. College enrolment, homework platforms, English practice apps, university applications, mentoring calls and messages from a caseworker all assume a working device and a connection. For a 17-year-old living on asylum support, each of those assumptions can fail on a given week.

This article sets out what asylum support actually pays for, what Wi-Fi provision in asylum accommodation looks like according to inspectors and researchers, how big data poverty is across the UK, and which free or low-cost options a young person can realistically use. It ends with practical guidance on designing learning and mentoring that works on a phone with limited data, and how our own online mentoring programme fits in.

What does asylum support pay in 2026?

People who claim asylum and would otherwise be destitute can ask the Home Office for accommodation, a cash allowance, or both. According to GOV.UK’s asylum support guidance, the standard allowance is £49.18 for each person in the household, loaded each week onto a debit card known as the ASPEN card. If the accommodation provides meals, the allowance is £9.95 per person instead. People who have been refused asylum but still qualify for support receive the same amounts on a payment card.

Most people seeking asylum are not allowed to work while their claim is decided, and they cannot claim mainstream benefits. The allowance is therefore the whole weekly budget, not a top-up.

The Home Office sets the rate by pricing a list of “essential living needs”. Its 2024 rate review, which took effect on 2 June 2025, left the self-catered rate unchanged and raised the catered rate from £8.86 to £9.95. The same document shows exactly how each rate is built up.

Source: Home Office, 2024 Asylum Support Rate Review, results tables. The self-catered assessed total came out below the existing rate, so the rate paid stayed at £49.18.

Two lines in that table shape everything else in this article. The communications line is £4.21 a week, and the list of items behind it is short: a basic phone, one SIM, 12 pay-as-you-go top-ups a year, and notepads and pens. There is no laptop, no tablet and no broadband on the list. And for people in catered accommodation, the communications line does not exist.

The Home Office’s reasoning is stated plainly in the review. It says internet access “can be met in a number of ways”, including public libraries and public Wi-Fi, and that communication funds are not given to people in catered accommodation because the means to communicate are provided directly as part of their accommodation.

How the rate has moved since 2021

The weekly rate has risen by just under £10 in five years, but not smoothly. In February 2021 the Asylum Support (Amendment) Regulations 2021 set it at £39.63. A year later it rose to £40.85. In December 2022 the High Court found that the Home Secretary had failed to review the rate properly in light of inflation, and it was increased on an interim basis to £45, as Doughty Street Chambers reported at the time. The Home Office’s 2023 review records a further interim rise to £47.39 in July 2023, and the current £49.18 from 15 January 2024.

Weekly asylum support rate, self-catered accommodation

Rate per person per week at each change, February 2021 to September 2026

Show the data as a table

Weekly asylum support rate, self-catered accommodation

Category	Value
Feb 2021	£39.63
Feb 2022	£40.85
Dec 2022	£45
Jul 2023	£47.39
Jan 2024	£49.18
Jun 2025	£49.18
Sep 2026	£49.18

Since January 2024 the rate has been flat for more than two and a half years. Whether that is enough for food and clothing is a debate for another article. For the purposes of this one, the point is narrower: the part of the rate meant for staying connected is a little over £4 a week, and it was designed around calls and texts, not around studying.

What does £4.21 a week buy in phone data?

On its own, £4.21 a week is roughly £18 a month. That is enough for a cheap SIM-only plan, if the person can sign up for one. It is not enough for a device, and it cannot stretch to home broadband alongside a phone.

We checked a small number of current prices directly with providers in September 2026. These are examples, not recommendations, and prices change often.

Weekly equivalents are our calculations: monthly prices multiplied by 12 and divided by 52; 30-day prices multiplied by 7 and divided by 30. For someone in catered accommodation on £9.95 a week, a £10 SIM plan costs about 23% of their entire allowance.

On paper, the cheapest SIM plan fits inside the communications allowance. In practice there are three problems.

The allowance is not really spare. The £49.18 is costed so that food alone takes £31.69. Refugee Action reports that many of the people it works with, particularly those with children, end up spending a large share of their money on data. In the British Red Cross study of people seeking asylum in England, almost all participants said they could not afford data, broadband or devices that would let them download apps or make video calls.

Signing up is harder than paying. Monthly SIM plans and broadband contracts generally need a bank card, a bank account or a fixed address. The British Red Cross report describes one participant who could not set up a broadband direct debit using an ASPEN card, and notes that many people seeking asylum lack the proof of address needed to open a bank account. The result, as Refugee Action has pointed out, is heavier reliance on pay-as-you-go data, which Refugee Action describes as the more expensive option.

Social tariffs are tied to benefits. Both social tariffs in the table require mainstream benefits that people seeking asylum cannot claim. Deals designed for low-income households are, in practice, closed to the low-income households in the asylum system until someone is granted status.

A worked example

The following scenario is illustrative. It is a composite built from the published figures above and is not about any real person.

A 17-year-old lives with her mother in self-catered dispersal accommodation in the North West of England. She attends an ESOL course at a further education college three days a week. The household receives £98.36 a week between them. Her college uses an online learning platform for homework and a video tool for catch-up tutorials.

• Her phone is a second-hand smartphone with a cracked screen. The house has no broadband.
• A £10 SIM plan with 20GB covers her month if she avoids video. Her mother needs data too, for appointments and to keep in touch with family abroad.
• A one-hour video tutorial at Zoom’s recommended “high quality” setting would use very roughly half a gigabyte. Four of those a month is about 2GB, before any homework, English apps or messages.
• On non-college days, the nearest library with free Wi-Fi is a bus ride away. One return trip uses the whole of her £6 weekly travel allowance.

She can keep up, just, if nothing else goes wrong. A broken phone, a missed top-up or a move to a different address removes her from online learning entirely.

Is there Wi-Fi in asylum hotels and contingency accommodation?

Sometimes. The honest answer from the published evidence is that provision is inconsistent and, crucially, not required.

The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration looked at hotels, hostels and large sites used as contingency accommodation between November 2023 and June 2024. In the inspection report, published in October 2024, the inspector explained how the Home Office decides which properties to visit. A complaint about overcrowding might prompt an assurance visit because overcrowding links to standards in the contract’s Statement of Requirements. A complaint about a lack of Wi-Fi might not, because Wi-Fi is not a specified requirement.

Put that finding next to the Home Office’s rate review and a contradiction appears. People in catered accommodation receive no communications money because the means to communicate are said to be provided by the accommodation. But the contracts under which that accommodation is run do not require the provider to supply internet access.

The research from people living in the system fills in what that looks like day to day:

• Inconsistent connections. The British Red Cross found that internet access in Home Office accommodation, including hotels, was inconsistent. Some participants described good Wi-Fi, but many said the connection was unreliable; one described hotel Wi-Fi problems lasting up to two to three days, and going to a city-centre library instead.
• Distance and cost. One participant in the same study walked 3.5 miles to a library to get online because they could not afford the bus fare. Another needed two buses and two fares to reach one.
• Signal only in some places. Refugee Action described accommodation with weak Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi limited to communal areas, and a hotel resident who said she had to go up to the roof of the building to get a connection.
• Shared and borrowed devices. People in both reports borrowed devices from friends, other residents or support workers; the British Red Cross found that relying on others to use a phone affected participants’ privacy and autonomy.

How many people are affected?

Hotel use has fallen sharply. According to the Home Office’s immigration system statistics for the year ending June 2026, 93,293 people were receiving asylum support at the end of June 2026, 12% fewer than a year earlier. Of those, 16,021 (17%) were in hotels, half the number a year before and 71% below the peak of 56,018 at the end of September 2023. A further 73,068 were in non-hotel accommodation such as dispersal housing, and 4,204 received subsistence-only support.

People on asylum support living in hotels

Number at the end of each quarter shown, from the September 2023 peak to June 2026

• Sep 2023 (peak)56,018
• Jun 202532,041
• Dec 202530,657
• Mar 202620,885
• Jun 202616,021

  17% of the 93,293 people on asylum support

Show the data as a table

People on asylum support living in hotels

Category	Value
Sep 2023 (peak)	56,018
Jun 2025	32,041
Dec 2025	30,657
Mar 2026	20,885
Jun 2026	16,021

The fall in hotel use is real, and it is good news for connectivity in one sense: most people on asylum support are now outside hotels, in housing such as dispersal accommodation, where the £4.21 communications allowance generally applies. But a house or flat does not come with broadband by default. Refugee Action quotes a man who moved from temporary to permanent accommodation and found the new home had no broadband or Wi-Fi, leaving them relying on his mobile data.

Children are part of this picture. The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee’s October 2025 report on asylum accommodation noted that around 5,000 children were living in contingency hotels as of March 2025. The committee also heard that moves between accommodation sites are frequent, often at short notice, and disruptive for children, who can be forced to change schools.

How big is data poverty across the UK?

Young people seeking asylum are an acute case of a much wider problem. Good Things Foundation, a leading UK digital inclusion charity, defines data poverty as being unable to afford sufficient, secure connectivity to meet essential needs.

Its Digital Nation 2026 infographic, published in July 2026 and drawing on sources including Ofcom’s Communications Affordability Tracker for April 2026, reports that:

• 2.3 million households struggle to afford their mobile contract.
• 2.2 million people are offline altogether.
• 8 million adults lack basic digital skills.
• People who are offline are 2.5 times more likely to be on a low income.

Good Things Foundation’s 2025 Data Poverty Lab report, citing Ofcom’s 2025 tracker, adds that 7% of UK households with a mobile phone struggled to afford it in the previous month, and that 55% of households struggling to pay for communications were also struggling to afford other essentials such as food or energy.

For young people specifically, the most detailed youth-focused source we could verify is Nominet’s Digital Youth Index 2023, which surveyed 8 to 25 year olds across the UK. It found:

• 14% of young people lacked access to a learning device such as a laptop or desktop computer, equivalent to around 2 million young people.
• 15% had no broadband at home, rising to 23% among young people receiving free school meals.
• Nearly 570,000 young people lacked both a learning device and a home internet connection.
• 30% of young people not in education, employment or training had no laptop or desktop computer.

Nominet’s index also found that the cost of living was already cutting into connectivity: 11% of young people said they had had to change or cancel their internet package because of the crisis, rising to 16% of those receiving free school meals, compared with 9% of those who were not.

None of these surveys breaks out young people in the asylum system. But the risk factors they highlight, such as low income and no home broadband, apply to many young people seeking asylum, often alongside frequent moves and a first language other than English.

Why does the usual help miss young people seeking asylum?

The UK has built a set of fixes for data poverty in recent years. Most of them have an eligibility gate that a young person on asylum support does not pass.

Social tariffs need benefits. As the price table above shows, broadband and mobile social tariffs are tied to Universal Credit and similar benefits. The Department for Education’s 16 to 19 Bursary Fund guide states the general position plainly: asylum seekers are not entitled to public funds. That changes when someone is granted refugee status and can claim Universal Credit, which is one reason the weeks after a positive decision are a good moment to review phone and broadband costs.

Free SIMs start at 18. The National Databank gives free SIM cards with mobile data through local community organisations. Its published eligibility criteria require the person to be 18 or over, from a low-income household, and without sufficient internet access or unable to afford their top-ups. A 16- or 17-year-old seeking asylum with a parent does not qualify in their own right.

College bursaries cannot pay for Wi-Fi. The 16 to 19 Bursary Fund guide says colleges may not give cash to asylum seekers, except unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, but may provide in-kind support such as books, equipment or a travel pass, as long as the asylum claim has not been refused. The same guide lists general household bills, explicitly including Wi-Fi, as costs the bursary cannot cover.

Devices depend on a local hub having stock. Good Things Foundation’s National Device Bank provides laptops, tablets and phones through local community organisations, but does not give devices to individuals directly and says it cannot guarantee a device, because demand is high.

Unaccompanied children are in a different system. Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are looked after by local authorities rather than receiving cash support from the Home Office. The bursary guide treats them as children in care, which makes them eligible for the defined vulnerable group bursary of up to £1,200 a year where they have a financial need. Their access to devices and data depends heavily on their placement and their local authority. Our companion article on the education rights of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children covers this in more detail.

Free and low-cost connectivity options: who can use them and how

Despite the gaps, there are real options. The table below brings together what we could verify in September 2026.

Libraries appear in the Home Office’s own reasoning as a way to meet internet needs, and “Information and Digital” is one of the four Universal Library Offers that public library services work to. They are genuinely useful, with two caveats: as the research above shows, getting there can cost money or mean a long walk, and opening hours may not fit the times when a student needs to study.

How can online learning work on a phone with limited data?

The most useful change is often not a new device but a different design. Most online teaching is built on the assumption of a laptop, a fast connection and unlimited time on camera. For a student on asylum support, each hour of video has a visible cost.

As a rough guide, Zoom’s published system requirements recommend 600kbps up and down for high-quality one-to-one video, and 60 to 80kbps for audio-only calls. Converted into data, that is very roughly half a gigabyte for an hour of video and well under a tenth of a gigabyte for an hour of audio. These are our own estimates from recommended bandwidth rather than measured use, and real consumption varies by app and settings. But the ratio is the point: audio uses a small fraction of the data that video does.

The principles below come from the constraints described in the research, and from what makes sense for students whose connection is intermittent rather than absent.

Design principles

Make it audio-first. Cameras can be optional from the first session. Many students will be relieved not to show where they are living, and the privacy benefit matters as much as the data saving.

Send materials ahead, in small files. A two-page PDF or a photo of a worked example can be downloaded once on college or library Wi-Fi and used offline. Links to long videos cannot.

Mix live and asynchronous work. A short live call to talk through a problem, followed by messages and written feedback, uses a fraction of the data of a full hour on screen, and survives a dropped connection.

Plan around where the Wi-Fi is. If a student has good Wi-Fi only at college on Tuesdays, schedule the video-heavy work for then and keep the rest light.

Assume a phone, not a laptop. Check that worksheets are readable on a small screen, that forms can be completed on a phone, and that nothing depends on software that only runs on a computer.

Agree a fallback. Decide in advance what happens if the call drops: switch to audio, move to a messaging app, or pick up by written message later. The student should never feel they have failed because their data ran out.

Low-data learning checklist

For students, a few habits help too: download course materials and English-learning content while on Wi-Fi, set apps to update only on Wi-Fi, lower video quality in call settings, and turn off auto-play in video and social apps. Where a college or library offers a computer, it is often better for writing long pieces of work than a phone.

Where does online mentoring fit in?

Online mentoring is one of the few forms of educational support that can be designed entirely around these constraints, because it is one person working with one student, rather than a platform built for thousands.

Bridging the Future has run online mentoring since 2022. It runs from October to March, with weekly one-to-one or small-group sessions in STEM, IT and English, and help with CVs, personal statements, university applications and mock interviews. Since 2022 our volunteers have supported 32 students through more than 250 hours of mentoring. The programme is for young people aged 16 to 22 from refugee, asylum-seeking and forced-migrant backgrounds, and it starts again in October 2026.

Mentoring conversations do not need high-definition video. Most of what a mentor does — explaining a maths method, reading a draft personal statement, practising an interview answer, working out which route into higher education makes sense — works by voice, by message, or by sharing a single page. The low-data principles above apply directly, and they are the kind of thing a mentor and student can agree between themselves in the first week.

If you are thinking about volunteering as a mentor, the most useful habit you can bring is not assuming a laptop. Ask. What volunteer STEM mentoring actually involves explains how the weekly sessions work.

Our in-person work matters here too. The free summer school at UCL covers travel across TfL Zones 1 to 6, food and learning materials, so for two weeks in August a student’s ability to take part does not depend on their data balance. Summer School 2026 has finished, and Summer School 2027 applications will be announced on our application page.

What would close the gap?

Bridging the Future is a small, volunteer-led charity, and connectivity policy is not ours to set. But the evidence points to a handful of changes that would make a large difference to young people’s education, several of which have already been recommended by others.

Make Wi-Fi a specified requirement in asylum accommodation. The inspector’s finding that a lack of Wi-Fi might not trigger an assurance visit follows directly from its absence in the contract requirements. The British Red Cross has recommended free Wi-Fi in accommodation along with credit for mobile data and devices.

Stop assuming catered accommodation provides the means to communicate. If the communications allowance is withheld because connectivity is provided in kind, the provision should be guaranteed, or the allowance paid.

Open free data to 16- and 17-year-olds through their education provider. The National Databank’s age threshold makes sense for a scheme run through community hubs. A route through colleges, which already assess need for bursaries, would reach the students it currently misses.

Clarify that course devices count as bursary equipment. The bursary guide already allows in-kind equipment for asylum-seeking students. Explicit guidance that a loan device can count, where a course requires online work, would reduce inconsistency between colleges.

Explore free access to education sites. Good Things Foundation’s Data Poverty Lab has identified government–industry exploration of zero-rating online public services, so that data charges are not a barrier to using them, as one opportunity for change. Education platforms used by publicly funded colleges are an obvious candidate.

None of these would solve the wider problems in the asylum system described in articles such as the GCSE vacuum. But a young person who can reliably get online can at least do their homework, reach their tutor, and apply for the next course. Right now, for many, that is not guaranteed.

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Figures compiled in September 2026 from the sources listed below. Weekly price equivalents and data-use estimates are our own calculations from published figures. Rules and figures change — if you spot something out of date, please tell us. This article is general information, not legal, immigration or financial advice.

Keep reading

• The education rights of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children — school places, college and support for young people in local authority care.
• ESOL for young refugees aged 16 to 19 — how English courses work, and where they lead.
• Home fees and student finance for refugees and asylum seekers — what changes when a young person moves on to university.
• One hour a week — what volunteer STEM mentoring actually involves.