What would it look like if we had an honest debate about asylum? How would our national conversation sound if it was grounded in reason rather than hysteria? The answer to that question lies in this morning’s National Audit Office (NAO) report on the asylum system. It reveals a profound truth which no-one likes to concede: That the primary responsibility for the chaos in the asylum system lies not with refugees, but with government.
The NAO is one of the last great British institutions, the kind of thing that reminds you of what there is to be proud of about this country. It’s an independent parliamentary body responsible for auditing government departments and public bodies. It approaches its job thoroughly, empirically, without partisanship, and on the basis of expertise.
The report it has produced this morning is therefore like an artifact from another world – a benign and rational Star Trek universe where political discussion is grounded in reality instead of blithering Farage-inspired nonsense.
The story that it tells is one of profound dysfunction. This is not because of asylum seekers themselves. Despite the wall-to-wall press coverage they receive, they remain small in number and would be perfectly manageable if we adopted a sensible level-headed approach to doing so.
They represented just 11.4 per cent of overall immigration to the UK in 2024 and just 0.16 per cent of the total UK population. And yet the current cost of the system for the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice that year stood at around £4.9bn. The reason for this is incompetence, inadequacy, political expediency and the mutilated incentive structure of Westminster culture.
The fundamental problem with asylum is that there is not, and has not ever been, a whole-system view. The Government has never established a set of clear and agreed outcomes which the various government departments all accept and are working towards.
So what happens? There is a press scandal about one part of the system – the use of asylum hotels, say, or the number of new arrivals. The Government then decides it has to do something, so it implements a change in that part without a clear view of the likely effects on the other parts. This then causes problems in these other areas, leading to a further deterioration in the asylum process as a whole. They then learn nothing from this experience, stumble along blindly a little longer and wait until the next press scandal, at which point the cycle begins again.
In December 2022, for instance, former prime minister Rishi Sunak set a deadline to clear a part of the asylum decision backlog. He actually did this very effectively, with the Home Office making four times as many initial asylum decisions as it had a year previously.
This has a series of consequences which were perfectly easy to predict but which the system did not see coming. Namely, there would be more refusals and more approvals.
The increase in refusals meant there would be more appeals against the initial decision, which led to more pressure on tribunals, which was a problem because we anyway did not have enough judges. Solving one backlog merely created another backlog in another part of the system, run by a different government department.
The increase in approvals meant there were more people coming off Home Office accommodation assistance, which led to an increase in the number of people presenting to local authorities as homeless and requiring support. Again one backlog created another, in a different department.
These are the kinds of problems you spot if you have a whole-system approach. But we don’t. We have an utterly amateurish procession of let’s-just-survive-the-day generalist ministers responding to whatever little made-up scandal the right-wing press invented this morning, presiding over a siloed system spread across isolated government departments, each with competing objectives.
Even if they did know what they wanted to do they would not be able to do it, because the data they use is so inadequate.
Astonishingly, there’s no unique asylum case identifier shared by the Home Office, the court system and local government. This is such a rudimentary failure it really defies description. The returns process on a pair of jeans you buy online works at a higher degree of operational sophistication than the British asylum system.
There’s no reliable system for data sharing between the Home Office and the courts. There’s no standardised information flow between local authorities, the Home Office and accommodation providers, so councils often have no idea when someone has moved into their area, or out of it.
On a very basic level, the Home Office simply has no idea what is going on in its own system. It cannot provide information on the number of asylum seekers who do not receive state support, or data on the outcome of further submissions in tribunal cases, or the number of people who have absconded, or the number subject to enforcement action, or on unsuccessful removals and why they failed.
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They simply have no idea what is going on because they have never bothered to behave with any degree of seriousness. They operate according to data which is either not-fit-for-purpose or simply non-existent. They act like a man who insists he can solve a complex engineering problem before he replaces the lightbulb.
The asylum issue is complex. It cannot be solved. But it can be competently managed in a way that commands support from the majority of the population: showing a mixture of compassion and control. This is not beyond the wit of man. But if we ever want to reach that stage, we need to be clear about what is going wrong, why it is happening and who is responsible.
We need the clarity that comes from NAO reports, not the fevered belligerence that comes from hysterical politicians. The press and the political party leadership would rather we took the latter route. It is up to the rest of us to insist that we take a former one.
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