By bizn_fun 
A report from MPs said this week that billions had been squandered on the hotels which accommodate asylum seekers and that urgent action was needed to reduce the bill.
Mahmood confirmed she wanted to move some migrants to accommodation at army barracks in Inverness and East Sussex by the end of the year.
She said: “I know that asylum hotels are an absolute blight on our communities. I know that they’ve been the site of huge community tensions.
“We are working at pace to deliver new sites, I hope to be within two new military sites by the end of the year. Discussions are underway and well advanced in terms of planning for those moves.”
Mahmood did not say that the move would save the taxpayer money.
Asked whether she might exercise a break clause in the government’s contracts with the companies providing the hotels next spring, she said “all options are on the table”.
She added: “I will need to look very carefully at the legal arrangements in those contracts and the options that are available to us and act in the best interests of our country, of our taxpayers as well.”
Some are sceptical the government will be able to find alternative accommodation to allow it to break the contracts.
Mahmood’s department has also faced intense pressure in recent weeks over other issues including the grooming gangs inquiry, the “one in one out” deal with France, small boats crossings and more.
The minister said the Home Office had “a range of problems” but she would work with Antonia Romeo, the new top civil servant in the department, to address them.
The mistaken release of convicted offender Hadush Kebatu, an asylum seeker who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and a woman in Epping while living in the town’s Bell Hotel, was one of those problems.
Kebatu was deported on Tuesday evening, to Ethiopia. The Conservative MP for Epping Forest, Dr Neil Hudson, said the community was “very relieved” but the mistake was “incredibly frustrating” and the government must now “get a grip”.
The Conservative government had closed the Bell Hotel, Hudson said, but Labour had “opened it up again without any consultation, without talking to anyone locally” and despite “significant management and safeguarding issues”.
“The hotel needs to be closed – it’s the wrong hotel in the wrong place, right near the forest, right near to two schools,” he told the BBC.
Speaking on Monday, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said “mistakes had been made” in the Home Office under the previous Tory government but added that Labour’s decision to scrap the Rwanda scheme – aimed at deterring asylum seekers from coming to the UK in small boats – had exacerbated illegal migration.
“Scrapping that scheme removed the deterrence, and meant that small boat crossings increased by 40%.”