Asylum accommodation in West Lothian
Scotland — asylum support snapshot, as at 30 Jun 2026.
31 asylum seekers were in receipt of Home Office asylum support in West Lothian as at 30 Jun 2026, including 23 in contingency hotels.
West Lothian ranks #254 of 346 UK local authorities with supported asylum seekers, carrying 0.5% of Scotland's supported caseload — 1.7 per 10,000 residents (against the mid-2025 population estimate of 187,240). Scotland overview → · Compare all authorities →
The last 12 quarters
Where this sits in the record
Everything here comes from the same published accommodation table as the figures above, across the 12 quarters it covers — so it is available for every authority in all four nations, and no figure is combined with one from a different collection.
Highest and lowest recorded
The highest quarter recorded here is 97 (31 Dec 2023) and the lowest 0 (30 Sep 2023). The latest is 31. The series starts at 30 Sep 2023, so an earlier or later extreme would not appear in it.
Rank, then and now
West Lothian has a recorded caseload in only some of these quarters, so a rank comparison across the whole series would be misleading.
Its own caseload changed by +31 over the same period, against +763 across Scotland — 4.1% of that national movement.
Accommodation mix, against Scotland
| Accommodation type | People here | Share here | Share in Scotland |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dispersal accommodation | 5 | 16.1% | 81.5% |
| Contingency accommodation | 23 | 74.2% | 9.8% |
| — of which hotels | 23 | 74.2% | 9.8% |
| Initial accommodation | — | 0% | 3.9% |
| Other or unclassified | 3 | 9.7% | 4.7% |
Hotels are a subset of contingency accommodation, so the shares do not sum to 100%. Both columns come from the same snapshot of the same table.
Three sections on this site's English local-authority pages have no counterpart here, and that is a gap in what is collected rather than an omission by this site:
- Pupils whose first language is not English — the Department for Education publishes it for England only.
- Households owed a homelessness duty after leaving asylum accommodation — MHCLG's statutory homelessness collection covers England only.
- Census 2021 country-of-birth and English-proficiency context — Scotland and Northern Ireland ran separate censuses on different questions and timetables.
Nothing has been substituted for them. Where a comparable Scotland figure exists in a different collection on a different basis, putting it in the same table as the English one would invent a comparison the publishers did not make.
The legal route, locally
Alongside asylum dispersal, West Lothian has received 66 people through formal resettlement schemes since 2014 (none in the last four published quarters).
Ranked nearby
Data as of
Cite this page
Asylum accommodation in West Lothian. Migration Watchdog, data as of 2026-09-02. https://migrationwatchdog.com/local/west-lothian Underlying figures: UK official statistics, re-published under OGL v3.0 — every figure links to its source on the page.
Sources for this page
- Asylum seekers in receipt of Home Office support by local authority, year ending June 2026 (Home Office, Immigration system statistics) — Home Office · as at 30 Jun 2026 · retrieved 2026-09-02
- Population estimates, local authority based (ONS, via Nomis table NM_31_1) — ONS · mid-2025 · retrieved 2026-09-02