Background to the report

Asylum is a form of protection available to anyone at risk of serious harm in their country of origin, through conflict or persecution. As a signatory to the Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol on international refugee prevention, the UK is committed to not returning individuals to a country where they face persecution.

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The number of people seeking asylum represented around 11.4% of overall immigration to the UK in 2024 and around 0.16% as a share of total UK population in mid-2024. Since the second half of 2021, there has been a notable increase in the number of people seeking asylum in the UK.

While volumes of asylum claims represent a relatively small proportion of overall migration, the current direct cost of supporting people seeking asylum is disproportionately high (£4.0 billion in 2024-25), driven by long delays and backlogs. Delays also have wider negative consequences – for vulnerable people, for community cohesion, and for local authority housing. Delays make it harder for the government to deliver a system that is fair, well managed and resistant to abuse.

In June 2023 we examined the Home Office’s asylum and protection transformation programme and concluded it was crucial that all parts of the end-to-end asylum system (including all relevant parts of the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and local authorities) worked together to manage demand effectively. 

Scope of the report

To achieve value for money in its management of asylum, the government needs to coordinate and manage across the complex end-to-end system. To scrutinise the government’s progress effectively, Parliament also needs an understanding of that end-to-end system, its resources and capabilities, its costs, and the legal and practical constraints on making changes to it. We therefore set out to create a systems map of the overall asylum system. This report draws on that work to cover:

  • definitions, roles and responsibilities of different government departments and public bodies, policy and financial context
  • our observations about the key enablers needed for value for money in the asylum system and the challenges the government faces
  • a factual summary of what the government is currently doing and its latest proposals related to each of these challenges
  • international comparator analysis on how other countries manage their asylum systems

Video summary

Ruth Kelly, the report’s director, summarises our findings and introduces our interactive data visualisation.

Data visualisation

We have mapped out the asylum system end-to-end in our interactive data visualisation. It shows:

  • how people’s claims move through the system, what happens at each stage and where delays can occur
  • how people are accommodated and supported while their claim is being processed
  • the state of the system at a recent snapshot in time, including workload and where there are case backlogs
  • the estimated costs across the whole system
  • our overall observations about key enablers, challenges in the current system and what the government is doing
View data visualisation

The data visualisation is not fully accessible. If you need the information in a different format, contact us on +44(0)2077987264 or enquiries@nao.org.uk

Concluding remarks

The system for processing asylum claims needs to be efficient, resilient to fluctuating demand, and demonstrably fair – otherwise it puts at risk not just public money, but the life chances of people seeking asylum and the government’s duties to them and to UK citizens.

However, without a whole-system view and clear, agreed outcomes there has been no firm basis for the government departments and other bodies in the system to work together in pursuit of an efficient and sustainable system.

Our analysis shows how efforts to improve the system in recent years have often been short-term and narrowly focused on one area of the system in reaction to large backlogs and sharply increasing costs. Increases in speed of processing have sometimes come at the expense of the quality of decisions, and improvements in one area have shunted problems elsewhere.

There has also been no realistic approach to the fact that in a significant number of cases it is not possible to return people whose claims have been refused. As a result, the system has incurred significant costs –  primarily on accommodation and support – that might have been avoided.

In the course of our system analysis work we have been encouraged by many examples of officials taking action to address the root causes of quality failures, understand and model parts of the system to improve productivity, and work across organisational boundaries. But these changes are somewhat piecemeal and not yet fully embedded. Moreover, the system is still hampered by a lack of robust, interoperable data to support high quality decision-making at each stage.

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Publication details

Press release

View press release (10 Dec 2025)

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