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MPs have cast fresh doubt on the UK government’s approach to tackling a record backlog in asylum claims, criticising the “unacceptable costs of an inefficient system, a lack of safeguards for vulnerable people, and greater risk of flawed decisions”.
The Home Office’s bid to process claims more quickly risked “transferring backlogs to elsewhere in the system”, including to the courts, immigration enforcement authorities and local councils, said the House of Commons’ public accounts committee in a report released on Friday.
Dame Meg Hillier, PAC chair, said the delay in processing claims was “leaving tens of thousands of people in limbo at an unacceptable cost of billions to the taxpayer”. She added that “the compromises being made by the Home Office to meeting commitments are alarming”.
Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, has made ending cross-Channel migration into Britain one of his five policy priorities ahead of the next general election. As well as toughening up conditions for asylum seekers, he has pledged to eliminate a legacy backlog in claims built up by mid-2022.
Despite the government making progress in tackling outstanding cases, fresh claims have kept the overall backlog at near-record levels of 175,000 people in recent months. The Home Office is spending around £8mn a day accommodating more than 50,000 migrants in hotels.
Immigration minister Robert Jenrick has announced plans to cut the cost of housing migrants by ending contracts with 50 of the 400 hotels used by the government by the end of January.
Earlier this week, Jenrick said the plan would be possible because small boat crossings were down this year by around 30 per cent to date compared to the same period in 2022.
The Home Office had increased its recruitment of caseworkers to deal with asylum claims to 2,500 by the end of August.
But Hillier was sceptical the government would be able meet its commitments. “There is a lot of sound and fury on asylum issues. The prime minister says he will solve it all by Christmas. It’s looking very unlikely,” she told the Financial Times.
She added that if you took people out of hotels, and they then had to be housed by local authorities, “they may end up in the same hotels”.
The PAC report said the Home Office would need to have made around 2,600 decisions a week between July and the end of the year to meet Sunak’s pledge to clear the legacy backlog. The department has been falling short by around 1,000 cases per week.
The committee raised concerns over “the significant increase in asylum cases” being withdrawn for administrative reasons, potentially leaving genuine asylum seekers in permanent limbo.
The report also said the government was falling behind on its aim to find 350 beds a week in alternative accommodation. By April, it was finding just 48 a week and it said it was still well short of its target in July.
Longer-term plans to house asylum seekers in former military bases and on barges have been beset by legal challenges. Meanwhile, the Home Office was still paying for around 5,000 empty hotel rooms as a buffer.
The Local Government Association, representing councils in England and Wales, has warned it would be “extremely challenging” to find affordable accommodation for asylum seekers in communities given the UK’s acute housing shortage.
The Home Office said the government was working “to end the unacceptable use of hotels by moving asylum seekers into alternative, cheaper accommodation and clearing the legacy backlog”.
It also said it had speeded up asylum processing by “simplifying guidance, streamlining processes and introducing shorter, focused interviews”, reducing the backlog of cases by 35,000 as a result.
