PAC: Asylum system: Doubts and concerns raised around Government’s approach to backlogs

- Current plan’s impact on vulnerable people not thought through and could lead to serious consequences

- PAC highlights huge challenge in clearing backlogs and unacceptable costs of inefficient processing of asylum claims 

The Home Office faces a huge challenge in clearing asylum system backlogs by December. In a report published today, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) expresses a number of doubts and concerns about the Asylum Transformation Programme, including on its work to clear a backlog of cases, the unacceptable costs of an inefficient system, a lack of safeguards for vulnerable people, and greater risk of flawed decisions on people’s asylum claims.

The PAC’s inquiry heard that the Home Office is “maximising the use of hotels” by making more people awaiting a decision share rooms. This plan, making potentially vulnerable people share rooms with someone they may never have met, has not been thought through and has no adequate safeguards. The Home Office struggled to explain to the PAC how people would be assessed for suitability for room-sharing, or how past trauma or risk would be considered. Implementing this plan in its current form could have serious consequences.

The Home Office’s failure to process asylum claims efficiently has led to unacceptable costs to the taxpayer. No credible plan exists to end the use of hotels to accommodate people waiting for a decision, at a cost of £2.3bn in 2022-23. Surprisingly, the inquiry heard that the Home Office is paying for in excess of 5,000 empty hotel beds as a ‘buffer’, while at the same time struggling to procure larger-scale accommodation.

The Prime Minister has committed to clear a backlog of 91,000 ‘legacy’ asylum decisions by the end of 2023, representing 52% of the total backlog of people awaiting a decision at June 2023. Around 2,600 decisions a week would need to be made between July and December 2023 to meet this commitment. This is 900 more than the 1,700 decisions the PAC’s report finds were made in the first week of July. Even if it successfully clears the ‘legacy’ cases, there are still expected to be over 80,000 ‘newer’ claims waiting for a decision.

More broadly, the Home Office does not understand the full implications of its programme on the wider asylum system. Its incomplete and unrealistic business case ignores the impact of a rapid clearing of the asylum backlog on Immigration Enforcement and the courts, and risks simply transferring backlogs to elsewhere in the system. The focus on streamlining decision-making may also inadvertently lead to more flawed decisions, or the withdrawal of genuine asylum claims.

Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “The backlog of people waiting for a decision on their asylum claim is leaving tens of thousands of people in limbo at an unacceptable cost of billions to the taxpayer. But the compromises being made by the Home Office to meet its commitments are alarming, and some could have grave consequences.

“Addressing the backlog at pace is of course desirable, but not if the Government’s approach is to do so by simply shifting pressures onto other parts of the system, by risking more flawed decisions or genuine asylum claims being withdrawn, or most seriously by putting the safety of vulnerable people at risk. The Government must lay out a realistic and detailed plan for transforming the asylum system in its updated business case, or risk making a bad situation worse.”

PAC report conclusions and recommendations 

Despite the Home Office’s confidence that it will clear the backlog of asylum decisions by the end of December, it still faces a huge challenge to do so. At 30 June 2023 there were around 175,000 people awaiting a decision on their asylum claim. Around 91,000 people (52% of the total backlog) had been waiting for a decision for at least a year, having made an asylum claim before the Nationality and Borders Act came into force on 28 June 2022. These people are part of the ‘legacy’ backlog of decisions, which the Prime Minister has committed to clearing by the end of 2023. The Home Office told us in July that it had stopped all its other recruitment programmes so it can hire more caseworkers to make asylum decisions, and that it aimed to have 2,500 caseworkers by September 2023, up from nearly 1,600 in July. The Minister for Immigration subsequently told the House that the Home Office had reached 2,500 caseworkers by 1 September 2023. However, it takes around a year for new caseworkers to be fully productive so the promised new staff might come too late to meet the Prime Minister’s commitment to clear the legacy backlog by the end of 2023. The Home Office would need to make around 2,600 decisions a week from the start of July to the end of December if it is to meet this commitment, 900 more than the 1,700 that it told us it made in the first week of July. Even if it is successful in clearing the legacy cases, the Home Office still expects there to be more than 80,000 ‘newer’ claims waiting for a decision.   

Recommendation 1: The Home Office should update the Committee, as part of its Treasury Minute response, on its progress in increasing caseworker numbers and decisions and clearing the legacy backlog. It should also set out how it intends to reduce the backlog of newer claims that it has allowed to build up.

The focus on streamlining decision-making may inadvertently lead to more flawed decisions, or the withdrawal of genuine asylum claims. The Home Office is now collecting more detailed information through a questionnaire for people from six countries where most claims result in asylum being granted, in the hope that it will be able to make decisions quicker and without lengthy interviews. The Home Office worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to reform its asylum processes, but we share the UNHCR’s concern that the poor design of the new questionnaire may affect caseworkers’ ability to make the correct decision on a claim. We also note the significant increase in ‘administrative’ decisions, where claims are withdrawn either by the claimant, or directly by the Home Office if someone has not complied with their requirements. We are concerned about how the Home Office will assure itself that it is not incorrectly withdrawing genuine asylum claims, should the significant number of withdrawals persist.

Recommendation 2: Alongside its Treasury Minute response the Home Office should write to the Committee setting out:

• The number of administrative decisions made each month since the introduction of its streamlined asylum process;
• How its internal quality assurance arrangements have changed to reflect the introduction of the streamlined asylum process, what these arrangements have shown about quality of decisions made under the process, and how learning from this has been used; and
• What further evaluation of the streamlined asylum process is planned, in particular to ensure that the Home Office makes the right asylum decisions.

The Home Office does not have a credible plan for ending the use of hotels to accommodate people waiting for a decision and the unacceptable cost this creates. The Home Office spent £2.3 billion on hotels in 2022-23 to accommodate people waiting for their asylum decision. In April 2023, there were 48,000 people waiting for a decision while living in hotels. To reduce its reliance on hotels the Home Office has sought ‘dispersal accommodation’ in local areas. But while it initially hoped to find 500 new beds every week, it found, on average, just 48 new beds a week in the year to April 2023. The Home Office has struggled to procure larger scale accommodation and has now told us it is “maximising the use of hotels” by increasing the number of people who share hotel rooms, though it could not set out how much money this would save. We were surprised to hear that the Home Office is paying for in excess of 5,000 empty hotel beds as a ‘buffer’ in case its initial accommodation sites, such as Manston, cannot cope with the number of people arriving. The Home Office has told us that to plan effectively it needs to estimate future demands on the UK asylum system, and that it uses several ‘scenarios’ to model how many people will arrive in the UK. However, it told us that it does not have a date for when it expects to stop using hotels under these scenarios.

Recommendation 3: The Home Office should, as part of its Treasury Minute response, set out how and by when it intends to reduce its use of hotels, and when it intends to stop using hotels altogether, under its different planning scenarios about the number of people applying for asylum.

The Home Office is failing to engage meaningfully with local authorities on decisions that affect their residents and already strained public services. We have previously reported that the Home Office has not adequately engaged with local stakeholders on asylum accommodation. This continues to be the case. The Home Office acknowledged that its letters about maximising the use of hotels were to inform local authorities of its decision, not to consult them. It has also sent contradictory letters to councils about how much accommodation it intends to source in local areas, and it seemed to have no practical solutions to progress its ‘place-based-approach’. Worryingly, the lack of coordination between the Home Office and local government means the Home Office is competing with councils and their partners to secure accommodation, driving up prices and exacerbating the homelessness challenges that local authorities already face.

Recommendation 4: The Home Office should, as part of its Treasury Minute response, set out how its ‘place-based approach’ will give local authorities a meaningful say on the use of accommodation in their areas, and what specific actions it will take to improve its relationships with local authorities.

The Home Office does not have adequate safeguards to protect against the risks of vulnerable people having to share accommodation with strangers. The Home Office has written to councils informing them that the number of people staying in hotels will double. It plans to achieve this by making people share rooms. The Home Office said an assessment would be carried out before people are moved into shared rooms, but it struggled to explain what that assessment would consider other than language and nationality. There was no clarity on whether the Home Office planned to consider the trauma that people claiming asylum might have faced and, while the Home Office said it would review health records when we asked about mental health, we are concerned that it does not have a robust process in place to make sure sharing arrangements will be safe. If the Home Office implements room sharing without proper safeguards there could be serious consequences.    

Recommendation 5: The Home Office should, as part of its Treasury Minute response, set out in detail the measures it will take to identify any vulnerabilities individuals waiting for a decision have, and how it will manage the risks to the individual that these may present.

The Home Office failed to convince us that it understands the full implications of its programme on the wider asylum system, affecting the ability of others to plan. The current business case for the asylum and protection transformation programme is incomplete and unrealistic. The Home Office acknowledged that it has not looked broadly enough at the impact of rapidly clearing its asylum backlog, and that its business case ignores the challenges and costs that bodies such as Immigration Enforcement and the courts will need to overcome to avoid creating new backlogs. The Home Office will not be updating its business case until early 2024, at least six months later than it had told the NAO and after the date it expects to have made decisions on all of the older, ‘legacy’ cases. This delay means other organisations in the wider asylum system cannot make informed plans and makes it more likely that new backlogs will appear elsewhere in the asylum system.

Recommendation 6: The Home Office should publish its updated business case so the intentions and impacts of the Programme are clear and transparent to Parliament, the public and other organisations.

In its Treasury Minute response, the Home Office should set a date by which this business case will be published./ENDS