Asylum seekers arriving in the UK cost around as much to support as a child sent to boarding school, a study found.

Accommodation costs have rocketed over the last four years, with the bill per person rising by 141%.

Even with inflation factored in, the cost went up from £17,000 in 2019 to £41,000 in 2023, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The cost compares to the average boarding school fee of £42,000.

Lucy Mort, a senior research fellow at the IPPR, said: “The asylum accommodation system is costing far too much while failing to provide people fleeing war and persecution with the safe, clean environments they need.”

The total cost of the asylum system is expected to hit £4.7 billion this year – up from £739 million in 2019.

The think tank said that despite the staggering rise in costs, the accommodation is often unsanitary and of a low quality.

Most of the money was spent on hotels, with the bill totalling £3.1 billion.

But the report found that efforts to cut the cost through use of large accommodation centres failed.

It said a key driver of the “astronomical” costs has been a growing backlog of unprocessed asylum claims.

Hotel rooms cost an average of £145 a night while dispersal accommodation – longer term housing such as flats or shared homes – cost about £14.

Around 250 hotels are putting up 30,000 migrants at a cost of £4.2 million a day while 61,778 are in dispersal accommodation.

The IPPR called for the government to decentralise the asylum accommodation system from the Home Office and set up regional bodies to carry out the work instead.

A Home Office spokesman said: “Many of the criticisms in this report apply to the policies of the previous government and the Home Office is working at pace to deliver this government’s agenda.”