Terms of Use

These terms apply when you use migrantsnearme.com ("the site", "we", "us"). By using the site you accept them. If you create an account, submit a location or vote, the parts of these terms that cover those also apply. Please read them together with our Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle personal data.

Migrants Near Me is an independent project run by one person in the United Kingdom. It is not connected to the Home Office or any other government body, to any political party, or to any campaign group. You can contact us at contact@migrantsnearme.com.

The site maps state accommodation for people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom and other European countries, and shows published figures about what it costs. Each figure is dated and linked to its source. The site is a source of public information. It is not legal, financial or professional advice.

We take care to be accurate, but the information comes from many sources, it changes, and some of it is incomplete or out of date. Sites open and close, published figures are revised, and positions on the map can be approximate. Check the linked source and its date before relying on anything, and do not treat a listing as current unless the page says so.

If you find a mistake, email contact@migrantsnearme.com with what is wrong and, if you can, a source. We correct errors openly.

A listing describes a building and how it is used. It says nothing about any individual who lives or works there. Where a page reports an incident, it names the source and the stage the case had reached (for example reported, charged or convicted). It does not mean that anyone else living at the site had any part in it.

We do not map sites that house only unaccompanied children.

You must not use the site, or anything you take from it, to:

• • harass, threaten, intimidate or target any person, or any building or the people who live or work in it;
• • encourage or organise violence, damage, trespass or hatred;
• • submit information you know to be false or misleading, or the address of a private home;
• • interfere with voting, for example by using automated tools or by voting more than once on the same location;
• • copy the site or its information in bulk with automated tools (scraping) without our permission. Search engines indexing the site in the usual way are welcome;
• • get around the site’s security, access accounts or data that are not yours, or disrupt the service;
• • pretend to be someone else.

We may remove content, decline submissions, block access and close accounts that break these terms. Where we believe someone is at risk, we may report it to the police.

You need a free account with a verified email address to submit locations. Voting does not need an account.

• • You must be 18 or over to create an account.
• • Keep your password safe. You are responsible for what is done with your account.
• • Your username is shown with the locations you submit. It must not be offensive or misleading, or someone else’s name.
• • You can delete your account at any time; your current password is needed. When you do, the votes linked to your account are deleted. Locations you submitted are kept, including any not yet published or declined, because they are part of our record of what has been reported, but your username and the link to your account are removed from them.

When you submit a location:

• • you confirm that, as far as you know, it is accurate and it is not a private home;
• • please include a source, such as a news report or an official document, wherever you can;
• • it goes into a review queue and appears on the map only if we can check it against independent sources. We may edit it, decline it, or remove it later, for example if the site closes or a source is withdrawn;
• • once you submit a location you cannot delete it yourself. If it is wrong, or includes personal information about you, email contact@migrantsnearme.com and we will review it. If you delete your account, we keep it without your username and the link to your account;
• • you give us a free, permanent, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to publish, edit and keep it on the site and in our records, and to include its facts in the information we share under “Reusing our information” below. You keep any rights you have in it.

Do not include personal information about private individuals in a submission.

You do not need an account to vote, and votes are never shown with a name. To stop automated and repeated voting, we keep a few technical details with each vote, such as a scrambled (hashed) form of your network address and a device identifier. If you vote while signed in, or sign in later on the same browser, your votes are linked to your account until you delete it. Limits apply to how often a location can be voted on, and we may discard votes that look automated or abusive. Our Privacy Policy explains what is stored.

You are welcome to reuse our information for non-commercial purposes, such as research, teaching and campaigning, as long as you credit us. Journalists are welcome to report our figures and findings, with credit.

Our own work, meaning the facts we have compiled and the text we have written, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). Credit "Migrants Near Me (migrantsnearme.com)", with a link to the page you used and the date you used it. The information changes, so the date matters.

This licence does not cover:

• • text written by others, such as quotations from news reports, official documents and reports by other organisations. These stay under their owners’ terms, so follow the source links;
• • anything that describes a crime, an arrest, a charge or a conviction, or that names or could identify a person other than in an official role, wherever it appears on the site, including the incident, news and timeline sections. Please do not copy this into other datasets;
• • text written by users, such as the descriptions in submitted locations, which we publish with their permission but do not offer for reuse;
• • map data and map images, which belong to their providers (map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence);
• • the site’s name, logo, design and code.

Commercial use, for example selling the information, including it in a paid product or service, or adding it to a commercial dataset, needs our written permission. We do not currently offer commercial licences or data feeds.

If you are a journalist, a researcher or a charity and need the information in bulk, email contact@migrantsnearme.com and tell us who you are and how you will use it.

Donations are voluntary gifts towards the cost of running the site, such as hosting, archives and domain fees. They are not payment for goods or services, and they give the donor no say over what the site publishes.

Migrants Near Me is not a registered charity, so donations are not eligible for Gift Aid.

Payments are handled by PayPal under PayPal’s own terms. You can cancel a monthly donation at any time in your PayPal account. If you donated by mistake, email contact@migrantsnearme.com and we will do our best to help.

To report a listing, a username or anything else on the site that you think is illegal, harmful or wrong, email contact@migrantsnearme.com with a link or the name of the location and what the problem is. You do not need an account. A person reads every submission before it is published, and we remove anything we believe is illegal or breaks these terms.

If you are named on the site, or a listing is about a property you own or manage, you can ask us to correct it or remove it in the same way.

We aim to reply within 14 days. If we remove something you submitted or close your account and you think we were wrong, email us with your reasons and we will look again and tell you what we decide.

The site links to sources and services run by others, including the documents behind each figure, map providers and PayPal. We are not responsible for their content or for how they handle your data.

We provide the site with reasonable care and skill. We cannot promise that it will always be available, complete or free of errors, and much of the information comes from sources we do not control, so check the cited source and its date before you rely on it.

We are not liable for loss of profit, business or opportunity, or for loss that was not a reasonably foreseeable result of something we did wrong. We are not responsible for the content of other websites.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to exclude or limit. Your legal rights as a consumer are not affected.

We may change these terms when there is a good reason: a change in the law or in a regulator’s guidance, a change in how the site works, a mistake to correct, or abuse to deal with. The date at the top of this page shows when they last changed. If a change reduces the rights of account holders, we will tell them by email or by a notice on the site at least 14 days before it applies, and you can delete your account before then if you do not agree. A change never takes back a licence already granted, whether the one you gave us for an earlier submission or the Creative Commons licence for material already published. We may also change or remove parts of the site.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring a claim in the courts where you live.

Questions about these terms: contact@migrantsnearme.com.