Immigration in NI: Does Belfast have the second highest number of asylum seekers in the UK, and do almost a fifth of them live in BT12?

• Belfast does not have the second highest number of asylum seekers in the UK. Several places have more, including London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Coventry and Bristol.
• As a local authority, the Belfast City Council area has the 20th highest number of people seeking asylum in the UK.
• Per capita, Belfast is the local authority with the 32nd highest proportion in the UK. The latest data suggests they comprise 0.60% of the local population – roughly one in every 167 people.
• FactCheckNI could not find any publicly-available data about the number of asylum seekers living in the BT12 postcode district.
• We have submitted an FoI to the Home Office to get exact figures. Mears Housing, which facilitates accommodation for many asylum seekers living here, said it is inaccurate that 20% of all NI’s asylum population is living in BT12, saying any such suggestion would “significantly overstate” the reality. However, they offered no figures to support their claim and referred FactCheckNI to the Home Office.
• Overall, Belfast has by far the highest proportion of asylum seekers in Northern Ireland. The next highest proportion is in Derry City and Strabane (0.263%) and Causeway Coast and Glens (0.262%), where people seeking asylum seekers currently make up just over one in every 400 people.
• Northern Ireland has a much lower proportion of asylum seekers than England, Scotland or Wales.

***Update 12 December 2025: As detailed below, we made a Freedom of Information request to the Home Office regarding the aspect of this fact check that was initially rated as Unsubstantiated. The Home Office has initially declined to provide this information and FactCheckNI has sought leave to appeal. More details are available here.***

On 22 August in a post on Facebook, DUP MLA Edwin Poots claimed:

In a video attached to this, the MLA made similar points, adding:

“Today we met Mears Housing, who provide most of the accommodation for migrants in Northern Ireland. Belfast has just been declared as the second city in terms of migrant accommodation in the UK, and obviously Belfast is not the second largest city in the UK, and we are standing in an area which is absorbing almost 20% of the migrant population in Northern Ireland in one BT code.”

Before we go into any details on this, we should make clear that this fact check focuses on asylum seekers rather than migrants. Although Mr Poots repeatedly referred to migrants in both his post and his video, he is actually talking about asylum seekers (something we queried with the MLA, as you’ll see below).

Migrants and asylum seekers are not the same thing. Although all asylum seekers tend to be migrants, people move between countries for all sorts of reasons. Earlier this year, we published an article looking at the different circumstances in which people migrate to the UK (and their entitlements).

Now, on with the fact check, which will focus on two aspects of what Mr Poots said:

1. Belfast is home to the second largest number of asylum seekers in the UK.
2. Of that total, almost 20% live in the BT12 postcode district.

The first aspect is inaccurate. Belfast does not have the second highest number of asylum seekers in the UK.

According to the most recent statistics, Belfast City Council area has 2,103 asylum seekers. Several cities – including Leeds (3,326), Glasgow (4,553), Birmingham (4,654), Manchester (3,321) and more – are currently home to a higher number of asylum seekers. London has a great many more asylum seekers than Belfast, indeed several of its 33 individual boroughs are currently home to more asylum seekers than Belfast (Barnet has 3,398, Hillingdon has 3,304, Hounslow 3,132 and so on).

Overall, Belfast is the local authority area with the 20th highest number of asylum seekers in the UK at this time.

There is one specific subcategory of asylum seeker where, by local authority area, Belfast does have the second highest number of asylum seekers – but this involves excluding all other parts of the total asylum population. More details on this are below.

Regarding the second aspect, FactCheckNI could not find any publicly-available data about how many asylum seekers are currently living in BT12.

We have submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Home Office that will hopefully lead to exact figures and this article will be updated when a response is received.

However, a spokesperson for Mears Housing – which is responsible for facilitating accommodation for many asylum seekers in Northern Ireland – told us that while some asylum seekers are housed in BT12, the idea that this amounts to 20% of the total asylum population in NI is a significant overstatement.

For a lot more detail, keep reading.

• Source

FactCheckNI contacted Mr Poots to seek  clarification on his comments – and ask whether he meant to reference “all migrants” or, as it appeared to us, just asylum seekers. He said:

“Home Office asylum seekers figures. Whilst seeking asylum is not illegal, entering the country undocumented is and is widely known as the migrant crisis. I shouldn’t have to do your job but have previously called out fact checkers for misleading claims.”

Asylum seekers it is, then. So, does Belfast have “the second highest number of migrants in the UK”?

• Asylum seekers and different places

No, it doesn’t.

London has more people seeking asylum than Belfast. Glasgow has more. Birmingham and Leeds and Manchester have more. And Liverpool, and Coventry, and Bristol, and more.

This fact check covers a lot of similar ground (as well as some quite different ground) to another article we published recently. And this new claim may repeat some of the same misinterpretations.

The previous check concerned a top ten list of “cities” with the most migrants, citing new Home Office data – the same data Mr Poots referred to in his source.

This data is the latest quarterly statistical release on the immigration system, published on 21 August, which includes regional and local authority data on asylum seekers. 

Of the 361 local authority areas in the UK, Belfast City Council has the 20th highest number of asylum seekers at 31 June 2025. The top 25 is here:

Figure 1 – source: Home Office

Note that London is not at the top of this list – but that’s because London is made up of 33 different local authority areas. If you add those all together, you will see that the UK’s capital has more asylum seekers than anywhere else. Indeed, four of its boroughs are in the top ten above (Barnet, Hillingdon, Hounslow and Ealing) which alone would be enough to move it to the top of the table.

Belfast does not have the second highest number of asylum seekers in the UK. When considering local authority areas – which is the way the Home Office delineates the data – it has the 20th highest number of asylum seekers.

However, Mr Poots made a fair point about relative population sizes, noting that “obviously Belfast is not the second largest city in the UK”. What does the data look like when you factor this in?

• Per capita

The Home Office data also includes information on the relative population of asylum seekers in each local authority area, by calculating the asylum seeker population as a percentage of the total population.

By this measure, Belfast is 32nd among the 361 local authority areas in the list, with 0.60% of its population currently seeking asylum – or around one in every 167 people.

This is quite a high proportion of asylum seekers in the UK context – being 32nd out of the total of 382 local government areas in the UK (not every local authority is on the Home Office list) means Belfast is in the top 10% of local authority areas for asylum seekers as a proportion of total population.

It is particularly high in the context of Northern Ireland, where the local authority with the second highest proportion of asylum seekers is Derry City and Strabane, where 0.263% of the population (just over one in every 400 people) is an asylum seeker, making it 260th in the list of UK local authorities. Causeway Coast and Glens is a fraction behind (0.262% makes it 262th).

Lowest in NI is Mid and East Antrim, where 0.127% of the population is claiming asylum (just over one in every 800 people). It has the 349th highest – therefore the 13th lowest – total proportion of asylum seekers of any local authority in the UK.

This reflects the fact that Northern Ireland broadly has a very low proportion of asylum seekers compared with the rest of the UK.

Figure 2 – source: Home Office

Ultimately, none of this puts Belfast in second place in any way.

• Breakdown

Belfast does have the second highest number of asylum seekers in a particular category, according to the new Home Office data. However, this is a narrow aspect of asylum seekers that can be explained by outlining all the different categories of asylum seeker which are excluded.

• Homes for Ukraine is a scheme launched after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which involves people in the UK sponsoring individuals and families seeking to leave Ukraine and provide housing for them for at least six months.

• The Afghan Resettlement Programme is a collection of schemes established following the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021 – who can be housed in “transitional” accommodation but who mostly are in “settled” housing, which means either social housing or the private rental sector (with or without local authority support).

The rest of the Supported Asylum population consists of those in initial accommodation, dispersal accommodation, contingency accommodation or those who receive only subsistence help (there is one exception to this: former MoD site Wethersfield Airfield, in Braintree, which according to the latest figures houses 653 people awaiting an asylum decision).

Initial accommodation is typically short-stay accommodation for asylum seekers who are at risk of destitution, until they are granted access to asylum support (which provides access to the wider accommodation help below).

Dispersal accommodation is, according to the Home Office, housing “provided to Asylum Seekers whose claim for Asylum Support has been agreed” which can include private rental accommodation. This “long-term temporary accommodation” is made available “until your asylum claim has been fully determined”.

Contingency accommodation is “temporary accommodation (including hotels) used when there is insufficient Initial or Dispersal accommodation available. People housed in contingency accommodation generally move to Dispersal Accommodation when suitable property becomes available.”

Subsistence support refers to asylum seekers who receive some financial assistance, but which does not extend to housing.

• Second in what?

Belfast City Council  is the local authority with the second highest total number of people in the general Supported Asylum system currently housed in dispersal accommodation.

In other words, if you exclude:

• the Homes for Ukraine scheme
• all the schemes under the Afghan Resettlement Programme
• Supported Asylum seekers in initial accommodation
• those in contingency accommodation
• those only receiving subsistence

Then Belfast has the second most asylum seekers by UK local authority (see our previous fact check for the top ten local authorities by people in the Supported Asylum system currently in dispersal accommodation).

This is quite the caveat. For instance, Belfast currently has 2,103 asylum seekers in total – of which 1,707 are in dispersal accommodation. The rest comprises 43 people in initial accommodation, 10 receiving subsistence help only, 281 people here via the Ukraine scheme and 62 under Afghan resettlement (all in housing provided by the state).

Birmingham only has 1,389 asylum seekers in dispersal accommodation. It also has 1,226 in contingency accommodation, 140 receiving subsistence support, it is home to 1,288 people on the Homes for Ukraine scheme, and a further 611 under Afghan resettlement (374 in local authority housing and 237 in privately rented homes).

So, while Birmingham has 318 fewer people in dispersal accommodation than Belfast does, it has 4,654 asylum seekers in total – 2,551 more than in Belfast, or more than double overall.

• Postcode

Mr Poots also claimed that “almost 20%” of all the asylum seekers in Northern Ireland are currently living in the “postcode containing Botanic, Sandy Row, Donegall Road and Falls Road”.

This refers to the BT12 district.

FactCheckNI could not identify any official data outlining the total number of asylum seekers by postcode district (if you know of any, please get in touch). The data with the most granularity (that we were able to come across) are the figures outlined by local authority area – generally much larger areas than initial postcodes – as described above.

We spoke with the Home Office about this and later contacted them in writing. In a telephone conversation, a spokesperson indicated that this data was unlikely to be publicly available and may require the submission of a Freedom of Information request.

At the time of publication of this fact check, we have received no reply to our formal written request for information from the Home Office. We have submitted a Freedom of Information request asking, according to the latest data:

1. How many asylum seekers are being accommodated in the BT12 postcode of Belfast?
2. What percentage of the total number of asylum seekers accommodated in Northern Ireland at this time does this represent?
3. What is the breakdown of all the asylum seekers in BT12 on that date, according to the delineation available in the Home Office figures published on 21 August?

Once we get a response to these queries, we will update this piece.

However, this was not the only digging we did. Mr Poots mentioned in his video that he had just had a meeting with Mears Housing – which facilitates the accommodation of many asylum seekers in Northern Ireland – to discuss this pressure in the BT12 area.

We presented them with Mr Poots’ claim and asked if it was accurate. We asked further, in case this was not true, whether any of the following were true:

• Almost 20% of asylum seekers in Northern Ireland not currently in initial accommodation, contingency accommodation or receiving only subsistence help are currently living in BT12.
• Almost 20% of the asylum seekers in Northern Ireland, excluding those on the Homes for Ukraine scheme and Afghan Resettlement Programme, that are being housed in dispersal accommodation are currently living in BT12.
• Almost 20% of the asylum seekers in Belfast not currently in initial accommodation, contingency accommodation or receiving only subsistence help are currently living in BT12.
• Almost 20% of the asylum seekers in Belfast, excluding those on the Homes for Ukraine scheme and Afghan Resettlement Programme, that are being housed in dispersal accommodation are currently living in BT12.

In response, Mears Housing told us:

“None of the statements are accurate.  While it is correct that some of our service users are housed in this area, the figures used in the statements you have shared, significantly overstate the position.    

“Regards data sources, data is a matter for the Home Office and you may wish to contact them directly with your inquiry.”

While we have no reason to believe Mears Housing’s statement is anything other than correct (although it should be noted that Mr Poots is saying something different), given the lack of  actual figures to work with, this aspect of the DUP MLA’s claim is rated as UNSUBSTANTIATED. This rating may change when the Home Office responds to our Freedom of Information request.