Missing asylum seekers and mounting backlogs show a system on the brink – PAC report
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- Government has ‘no clear sense' of what it is
trying to achieve within the asylum system
- PAC warns systems have failed as inconsistent data
mean past mistakes are doomed to be repeated The Public
Accounts Committee (PAC) is issuing a stark warning as it
finds the asylum system is failing to cope in
the face of severe pressure. Major policy and operational
changes have been pursued without...Request free trial
- Government has ‘no clear sense' of what it is trying to achieve within the asylum system - PAC warns systems have failed as inconsistent data mean past mistakes are doomed to be repeated The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is issuing a stark warning as it finds the asylum system is failing to cope in the face of severe pressure. Major policy and operational changes have been pursued without a realistic grip on delivery risks, costs or system-wide impacts. In its report, the Committee urges government to set out a clear framework for end-to-end accountability for the asylum system and prevent further funding and capacity challenges. The PAC believes the system of monitoring failed asylum seekers needs a complete overhaul. The Home Office's statement to the PAC - that it only knows where the "vast majority" of failed asylum seekers are - is shocking and unacceptable. Further, the report highlights the fact that, of 5,000 people who claimed asylum in Jan '23, 41% were effectively “in limbo” – stuck in costly uncertainty in the system with their cases still unresolved. The report calls on the government to estimate how many failed asylum seekers are in the country and deportation timescales. It should also explain how it will trace those with whom it is not in active contact, how it will tackle illegal working by failed asylum seekers and sanction employers, and how it will manage barriers to progressing people's cases. Despite repeated attempts to reform the asylum system, many long-standing problems remain. In December 2025, around 100,600 people were claiming asylum, more than two times the number recorded in December 2019. In 2024–25, the Home Office and Ministry of Justice (MoJ) spent around £4.9bn on asylum, with spending on accommodation and support costing around £3.4 billion. A further breakdown of this spending can be found below. The government has committed to ending the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by 2029. To deliver on this ambition, the Home Office plans to scale up the use of large and medium‑sized sites, but past attempts proved difficult to implement, and acquisitions such as the HMP Northeye site and Bibby Stockholm were costly missteps. The number of asylum seekers housed in hotels by the end of September 2025 was approximately 36,300, though it is a welcome sign that this number appears to have reduced in the government's latest reporting. The Home Office must write to the Committee with a long-term accommodation strategy, and in particular how this is being developed in collaboration with local councils. The PAC's report identifies a recurring pattern across the asylum system. In the absence of a clear strategy, decisions around planning and resource allocation have been reactive and disjointed. Narrowly focused fixes used to respond to rising case backlogs and costs have shifted rather than addressed issues, creating pressure elsewhere in the system. The PAC is calling on the government to set out how it will work to create a single shared evidence base that will enable joint planning and decision making across Departments. The Home Office was unable to show the PAC that it has the commercial capabilities needed to manage asylum accommodation effectively. The need to "claw back £46m" from providers last year highlights weaknesses in its ability to prevent excess profits accruing for contractors. The Home Office should undertake a full review to assess whether current profit levels are reasonable and determine whether the contract models remain fit for purpose. It should also articulate a set of clear actions it will take to strengthen its commercial capability, governance and contract oversight. The Committee found no evidence that lessons from past mistakes are being used to clearly inform current actions. The government is at considerable risk of repeating past failures. A clear risk management strategy should be set out, to demonstrate how the government will respond if planned reforms are delayed or fail to deliver the expected improvements. This should occur alongside a system-wide data improvement plan. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “Our report provides an end-to-end snapshot of the entire asylum system, and its findings paint a disturbing picture - at the time of our inquiry, control of it had been all but lost. The focus on short term, reactive ‘fixes' has left the government chasing after pressures pushed from one part of the system to the next. There is no clear strategy uniting these efforts, and engagement across departments and with local authorities is patchy at best. Given senior officials' inability to articulate what the asylum system is collectively trying to achieve, it is no wonder such a directionless bureaucracy ends with people at the heart of it either left in limbo, or lost entirely. “The bungled approach to the Northeye site also speaks to a deeper issue of the Home Office's severe lack of commercial capabilities. It is indefensible that accommodation deemed unfit to house asylum seekers is now being looked at as part of plans to increase the UK's housing stock. If it is not fit for asylum seekers, why is it fit for our homeless population? Serious action is needed to prevent further costly missteps and put an end to the excessive profiteering practices displayed by some hotel providers.” PAC report conclusions and recommendations Government departments still do not have a grip on how they will manage asylum as an end-to-end system, or a clear sense of what they are trying to achieve. The Home Office and other departments continue to run the asylum system without clear end-to-end leadership, shared objectives or agreed accountability. Responsibility remains fragmented across the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and local government, and there is no shared outcomes framework to guide decisions or manage the trade-offs between competing priorities in casework, appeals, removals, accommodation and support. The individual departments point out that they operate under different pressures and budgets, which only underlines the problem. It is indefensible that senior officials still cannot articulate what the system is collectively trying to achieve, or how success would be judged. Efforts to improve one part of the asylum system often create pressure in another. For example, in 2023 the Home Office made nearly 76,000 initial asylum decisions - over four times as many as in 2022. But this created new pressure at the appeals stage, where limited legal and judicial capacity led to another backlog building. The creation of a new asylum group and associated cross‑departmental asylum system board may be a step in the right direction, and the Home Office has since set out the board's membership and escalation routes, but there remains no clarity over how it will exercise authority across departments, how decisions will be made, or how activity and resources will be coordinated in practice. Without clear accountability and shared, long-term goals, the government risks continuing to waste resources, repeat operational mistakes and pursue reforms without a common direction. Recommendation 1. The Home Office should, as part of its Treasury Minute response, confirm when it will have an agreed framework for how the end-to-end accountability for the asylum system operates in practice, and when this framework will be in operation to inform funding and capacity decisions. We expect the framework to be agreed with HM Treasury, the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) no later than the end of 2026. It should include details on:
The Home Office has yet to demonstrate that it has learned from previous attempts to reform the asylum system, putting it at continued risk of repeating past failures. Recent reform efforts give us little confidence that the Home Office has learned from previous attempts to restructure the asylum system. Too often, the Home Office has pursued major policy and operational change without a realistic grip on delivery risks, costs or system-wide impacts. The consequences are visible across the system today - for example, costly missteps such as acquiring Northeye, Bibby Stockholm and Scampton, which have now largely been abandoned. Furthermore, the NAO found that of 5,000 individuals who claimed asylum in January 2023, 41% were effectively “in limbo” — they were not granted asylum and their cases were still unresolved in the system. This includes failed asylum seekers, and those whose claims have been disqualified, suspended or withdrawn. Many remain in the UK for extended periods while awaiting deportation or without a final decision. This leaves a large cohort of people stuck in the asylum system for prolonged periods, creating uncertainty for individuals and driving up support costs. At the same time, pressures elsewhere have intensified, with appeals currently taking around 60 weeks to be heard. While the government has proposed further structural reform, including a new independent appeals body, which will be introduced through a phased transition alongside the existing tribunal, departments could still not explain how the new body will be resourced, how long dual running will last or how risks during this transition will be managed. They made repeated references to reforms being "in train", but provided little evidence of a firm grip on effective delivery. This lack of realism echoes previous failed initiatives and leaves the Home Office at continued risk of repeating the same costly mistakes. Recommendation 2. The Home Office should, alongside its Treasury Minute response, write to the Committee setting out how it will manage the risks if planned reforms are delayed or fail to deliver the expected improvements. This should set out the major risks to delivery, including:
Poor data quality and weak management information continue to prevent effective management of the asylum system and undermine Parliament's ability to assess performance. There is no single, reliable view of cases across the asylum system, with data spread across multiple systems, spreadsheets and local records. Basic information we would reasonably expect to see, such as the number of absconders or number of repeated appeals, is incomplete, inconsistent or simply unavailable. Officials were unable to provide key figures with confidence, and arrangements for assuring data quality were unclear. Although the Home Office provided some additional figures after our evidence session and highlighted ongoing work to integrate its data systems, these do not materially change the picture. This includes work to develop a new data “blueprint” inside the Home Office to create connectivity by migrating legacy and manual information into the new Atlas system. However, officials told us that some Home Office staff continue to operate off individual spreadsheets, resulting in multiple records and ongoing data quality issues. Departments still lack integrated, system-wide data and agreed performance measures needed to manage the asylum system effectively. Until these gaps are addressed, senior leaders cannot fully understand where pressures are building or assess whether interventions are working as intended, and Parliament cannot obtain robust assurance on progress or value for money. Recommendation 3. The Home Office should, alongside its Treasury Minute response, set out a system-wide data improvement plan that includes:
Planning for how resources are allocated across the asylum system is fragmented and often reactive, repeatedly shifting backlogs rather than reducing them. There is a recurring pattern in which delays are not fully resolved but instead shift from one part of the asylum system to another. For instance, recent increases in caseworking productivity have not been matched by sufficient capacity in the appeals system, creating new bottlenecks at this stage of the process. Although the Home Office has noted that the government has funded additional sitting days in the First‑tier Tribunal, this does not amount to a coordinated, system‑wide capacity plan. Long-term demand management remains underdeveloped, with planning often focused on short-term fixes rather than the needs of the system as a whole. While we welcome the recruitment of additional judges, the Ministry of Justice could not explain how this aligns with wider resourcing decisions or how competing pressures across the tribunal are being balanced. We are disappointed by the clear lack of coordinated planning and the extent to which departments are still operating largely in silos. Without joint planning, shared modelling and agreed performance measures, the reforms are unlikely to deliver sustained reductions in backlogs, costs or delays. Recommendation 4. The Home Office, working with the Ministry of Justice, MHCLG and other partners, should develop and share with the Committee, no later than by the end of 2026, its understanding of the current capacity gaps across the system, their underlying causes and its plan for addressing them. As part of this, the departments should set out how they are bringing together and building on their existing modelling and system‑design work to create a single shared evidence base that enables joint planning and decision‑making. The Home Office does not yet have a credible long‑term strategy for asylum accommodation and local authorities still lack a meaningful say over accommodation decisions. Asylum support costs rose to around £4.0 billion in 2024-25, driven largely by the Home Office's continued reliance on costly hotel accommodation. At the end of September 2025, around 36,300 asylum seekers were in hotels - 2% more than the previous year, although still 35% lower than the peak of around 56,000 in September 2023. Despite repeated commitments, including a pledge to end the use of hotels by 2029, the Home Office has yet to set out a credible long-term strategy to expand dispersal accommodation. We welcome some tentative signs of improved engagement with local authorities, but this remains inconsistent. The Home Office plans to scale up the use of large and medium‑sized sites, but past attempts have proved difficult to implement. It still lacks a clear understanding of the right incentives and support needed to deliver its approach to asylum accommodation over the longer term. Its revised 10-year accommodation strategy, originally planned for spring 2024, has also still not been published. Moreover, there is limited evidence that the Home Office fully understands the impact of its decisions on local services. This includes the additional strain placed on councils, such as Glasgow, by increasing numbers of people presenting as homeless after having left Home Office accommodation. While MHCLG outlined several initiatives under development, including capital funding for local authorities, these remain small‑scale relative to the wider challenge of a general shortage of social housing across the UK. Recommendation 5. The Home Office should, alongside its Treasury Minute response, write to the Committee setting out its long-term accommodation strategy. This should include details on how the intended mix of accommodation in the medium and long term is expected to change under different demand scenarios, and the latest trajectory for reducing the reliance on hotels. As part of this, it should explain how this strategy is being developed in collaboration with local authorities, including how it is considering the incentives and support that may be needed to increase the supply of dispersal accommodation. The Home Office has not demonstrated it has the commercial capabilities needed to manage asylum accommodation effectively. Managing asylum accommodation at scale requires strong in-house commercial expertise to oversee complex contracts, manage risks, and monitor provider performance. However, both the previous Public Accounts Committee and the Home Affairs Committee have repeatedly identified significant weaknesses in the Home Office's commercial capability, including weak contract oversight, limited specialist capacity and poor transparency about provider performance. But the Home Office still cannot demonstrate that it fully understands the levers and controls available to it — for example, are providers delivering what is required or can the Home Office effectively monitor and respond when performance falls short? The Home Office has highlighted steps it is taking to strengthen its commercial capability, including commissioning an external review of asylum accommodation and contract management arrangements, but it has not yet demonstrated that these weaknesses have been addressed or that it can prevent similar failures in future. It is also unclear whether risks are being shared appropriately between the Home Office and its providers, especially when assumptions on demand or delivery prove overly optimistic. While the Home Office asserts that it "clawed back £46 million of excess profit" from providers last year, we do not find this wholly reassuring. Rather than showing effective oversight, it highlights weaknesses in the original contract design and raises questions about whether the Home Office has the skills to manage these or future contracts in a way that prevents excessive profits accruing in the first place. Under the current system of cost‑plus contracts, permitted profits are in many cases excessive. However, when we suggested that excess profits clauses be applied either retrospectively or prospectively, there was clear reluctance to do so. Recommendation 6. The Home Office should, alongside its Treasury Minute response, write to the Committee sharing the full findings of its external review of its commercial capabilities and explain its improvement plan, including clear actions to strengthen its commercial capability, governance and contract oversight. As part of this, it should explain how it is applying these lessons to its approach to future acquisitions of large sites for asylum accommodation. Recommendation 7. The Home Office should undertake a full review of all hotel accommodation contracts to assess whether current profit levels are reasonable and whether the contract models remain fit for purpose. This review should set out how the department will use contractual levers, including break clauses and excess profit clauses, either retrospectively or prospectively, to address excessive profits and secure better value for money going forward. The system of monitoring failed asylum seekers needs a complete overhaul. The Home Office told us, in relation to asylum seekers who have been processed through the system and had their application rejected and appeals rights exhausted, it knows "where some of them are", but that individuals "not complying with their bail conditions" would be treated as absconders and that the department would "seek to trace them". The Home Office also admitted that it does “not count absolutely everybody out of the country” and therefore does not know with certainty who has left the country and who has not, while claiming that it knows where the "vast majority" of people are through its enforcement contact regimes. This is a shocking and unacceptable state of affairs. Recommendation 8. The Home Office should write to the Committee alongside its Treasury Minute response to this report with its best estimate of how many failed asylum seekers are in the country and what proportion it is actively engaged with. That letter should include:
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