The National Audit Office (NAO) has said short-term planning in the asylum system has created new backlogs - with large numbers of people waiting years for a decision
00:01, 10 Dec 2025
Years of short-term asylum planning have created new backlogs - leading to inefficiencies, wasted taxpayers' cash and harmed people's lives, a watchdog has found.
The National Audit Office (NAO) has called on the Government to draw up a cross-department plan to finally get the system under control. In a report published today, the NAO found more than half of a sample of 5,000 cases lodged nearly three years ago have yet to receive an outcome.
Human rights groups have branded the findings "shocking". The finance watchdog's chief Gareth Davies said: “Our analysis shows that the efforts of successive governments to improve the efficiency of the asylum system have often been short-term and narrowly focused, reacting to backlogs and rising costs.
“Successfully implementing the new asylum model recently announced by the Home Secretary will require effective action on the bottlenecks in the current system using better quality data and streamlined decision-making.”
The NAO said the Home Office had relaxed recruitment arrangements - meaning some people it took on were "ill-suited to making complex decisions on asylum cases". Its report found the current cost of supporting people seeking asylum is "disproportionately high" - totalling around £4.9 billion for 2024-25 driven by long delays and backlogs.
The NAO found that 35% of people in the sample had so far been granted protection, while around 9% were removed from the UK after their applications were rejected. But the claims of 56% of the people in the sample remain unresolved.
Enver Solomon, Chief Executive of Refugee Council, said: “These findings mirror what we see every day in our frontline services: an asylum system that is simply not functioning, where people wait months or even years for a decision, local councils are under-resourced, and costs keep rising. NAO's finding that more than half of people who applied for asylum almost three years ago still don’t have an outcome is shocking.
“We support people who have fled untold horrors in places like Sudan and Afghanistan and want nothing more than to rebuild their lives, but the delays, bottlenecks and system failures push them into uncertainty, ill-health and, too often, homelessness. This is harmful for people who come here in search of safety, and it places avoidable strain on local communities and the public purse."
And Sile Reynolds, from Freedom from Torture, said: “Today’s report by Parliament’s ‘value for money’ watchdog has a clear message to the Government: stop wasting time and resources on short-term, panic-driven system tweaks and focus instead on building a fair and effective asylum system.
"But this self-evidently sensible recommendation is unfortunately at odds with the Government’s approach to asylum reform."
And she added: "It is the men, women and children who have suffered the unimaginable horrors of torture and war who will pay the price for policy that is driven not by evidence but by politics.
“We can’t build a system that is sustainable or capable of inspiring public confidence by stripping away the fundamental protections that ensure survivors are never sent back into the hands of their torturers. We need an asylum system that treats people with dignity, gives people a fair hearing and ensures their protection needs are met promptly so that they can recover and rebuild their lives in safety.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Home Secretary recently announced the most sweeping changes to the asylum system in a generation to deal with the problems outlined in this report.
“We are already making progress – with nearly 50,000 people with no right to be here removed, a 63% rise in illegal working arrests and over 21,000 small boat crossing attempts prevented so far this year.
“Our new reforms will restore order and control, remove the incentives which draw people to come to the UK illegally and increase removals of those with no right to be here.”