The top mandarin at the Home Office gave the game away. At a somnolent session of the Commons home affairs committee, Sir Matthew Rycroft revealed that Labour had dropped a key pre-election pledge, made just 72 hours before polling day. Instead of moving all asylum seekers out of hotels ‘within 12 months’, as the party had promised, it would take up to five years.
‘The overarching aim continues to be to exit hotels by the end of the Parliament,’ Sir Matthew told MPs last month. The permanent secretary’s casual use of the term ‘continues’ suggested a process potentially concluding in the summer of 2029 had always been the plan – but it was a well-kept secret if it was: that date had never been publicly mentioned before.
In opposition, Labour had calculated that dispensing with hotels could be done in a year by stopping the costly Rwanda scheme. They would use the money saved to recruit over 1,000 Home Office asylum caseworkers and a further 1,000 staff for a new returns unit to resolve cases more quickly. In government it is proving to be a lot harder.
The number of people in hotel accommodation has risen from almost 30,000, just before the general election, to more than 38,000 at the end of last year, with three more hotels being used now than there were last July – 216 across the country.
One of the key reasons for the rise is that more people are claiming asylum in the UK than ever before. Last year there were a record 84,000 applications relating to 108,000 individuals. There are no official figures yet for this year, but judging by the number of small boat arrivals the flow of new claims is likely to have continued. About 95 per cent of those who cross the Channel illegally apply for asylum; by early March almost 4,000 had made the journey, well up on previous years, despite the appointment of the first Border Security Commander and strengthened ties with transit countries.
The second problem preventing the government reducing its reliance on hotels is on the dysfunctional asylum system itself. Although the Home Office has ramped up the number of decisions it makes about whether to accept or refuse a claim, to around 3,000 per week, a growing number are subject to appeal.
Analysis by the Refugee Council shows that the number of outstanding asylum appeals is almost six times greater than it was in 2023, with nearly 42,000 cases unresolved at the end of last year. In the final three months alone, 12,000 appeals were lodged. Without a tribunal or court decision, asylum seekers remain entitled to Home Office support and accommodation, including, if there isn’t a place anywhere else, in a hotel, at a cost of £105 per night.
That’s why tackling the backlog of asylum appeals has now shot up the government’s agenda. Ministers are hiring more judges to hear cases, boosting the number of days courts and tribunals can sit and, crucially, increasing legal aid fees to address a chronic shortage of lawyers prepared to take on immigration and asylum work – one of the main causes of delay.
These are welcome developments but they will take months, if not years, to bear fruit. A 24-week limit for appeals to be heard, which is apparently under consideration, would encourage the judiciary to prioritise asylum cases but it will be meaningless unless there is sufficient capacity in the system. Rushing through cases to hit an arbitrary deadline will lead only to poor decisions, further legal challenges and claims for judicial review.
A better way to reduce the appeals backlog would be to improve and invest in the process before cases get through the tribunal door. The most recent inspection of asylum case-working, published last year, suggested this was a significant weakness. It highlighted a series of problems including the absence of ‘routine quality assurance’ of interviews with claimants and decisions. These, the report noted, had been ‘sacrificed for increased productivity’.
David Neal, who was then the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, said with remarkable prescience: ‘This has the potential to add to the appeals queue as a result of poor-quality refusals, and to further prolong the length of time a claimant’s life is put on hold.’
Was the Home Office listening? If not, it must heed the advice now, by focusing on getting asylum decisions right first time. A cadre of experienced caseworkers should conduct spot checks, looking for mistakes and correcting clear errors at an early stage, and, where decisions are contested, a new ‘light touch’ review procedure should be introduced, involving independent mediators, to filter out cases before they go to court.
When an asylum claimant does bring a legal challenge, immigration judges should be able to preside over cases from the same country ‘in bulk’ – just as the Court of Appeal sometimes hears criminal cases together if the underlying issues are the same. The facts of each appeal will of course vary, but there will be common themes which can be more swiftly dealt with. In the longer term, a senior former judge, Lord Sumption possibly, should be appointed to recommend other ways of streamlining the process.
When it comes to Britain's borders, the government’s main objective is to significantly reduce small boat crossings – to neutralise it as a political issue and restore a sense of control. Second on the list is moving asylum claimants out of hotels. It’s now becoming clear that the expanding backlog of asylum appeals is blocking progress on that front, which is why fundamental reform is urgently needed.
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