Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 19 January 2026. Today the Committee returns to one of its most high-profile areas of scrutiny: the asylum system. In 2024-25, the Home Office directly spent around £4 billion on asylum support, including £2.7 billion on accommodation, while more than 109,000 asylum claims were lodged—the highest number on record. In November ’25, the Government announced an entirely new asylum model, alongside plans to reduce costs by £1 billion per year by ’28-29. Previous PAC reports on this subject have highlighted recurring issues, including the absence of sustained whole-system oversight, weak financial management and the risks of short-term interventions that do not consider the system-wide impacts. Persistent backlogs also remain a challenge, leaving individuals in the system for extended periods and, in turn, driving cost increases and creating uncertainty for local authorities, as well as asylum seekers themselves. Today, we will therefore be looking to test the Department’s readiness to implement the new system model, and assess how Government are addressing fundamental barriers and building system capacity. We will also be looking to examine how Departments are improving data quality and collaboration across the asylum system, and to evaluate the realism and value for money of savings plans and accommodation plans. We are very pleased to have a very senior panel with us, starting with the permanent secretary for the Ministry of Justice, Dr Jo Farrar. We also have the second permanent secretary from the Home Office, Simon Ridley. Perhaps each of you could introduce yourselves and your teams.

I am Jo Farrar, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice. Thank you for inviting me here today. I am here with Emma Churchill, who is the director general for policy in the Ministry of Justice. We are also joined by Josh, who is a director in MHCLG and is responsible for this policy area.

I am Simon Ridley, second permanent secretary at the Home Office, and I am here as accounting officer for the migration and borders system, which obviously includes asylum, in the Home Office. I am joined by Rannia Leontaridi, who is the director general for the new asylum group.

A warm welcome to all of you, but especially to Dr Rannia and Josh, as I believe this is your first time in this Committee. I also extend a warm welcome to our guest Member for today’s session, Paul Kohler, who is joining us from the Home Affairs Committee. You are very welcome, Paul. Let us make a start—and that falls to me. Simon, how will you ensure that the implementation of the new asylum model takes a whole-system approach, rather than repeating the reactive fixes to parts of the system seen in recent years?

The first thing to say is that in this role—accounting officer for migration and borders—I have responsibility for the whole of the migration and borders system. As you say, over the last few years there have been some significant policy shifts, not least, and totally explicably, as a result of the general election. The work we had been doing on the partnership with Rwanda, third country removals and the Illegal Migration Act was not taken forward by the current Government, and we have been implementing a series of changes, on a systemic basis, since then. The first thing to say is that we have learned a lot of lessons from work we have done before. For example, we cleared an initial decision backlog in 2023, but for a number of reasons, including that of the previous Government’s policy, the asylum backlog grew back. None the less, we had established new practices in the asylum decision making team, which we have continued into backlog clearance this year. As part of that, we have been working much more closely with colleagues in the MOJ and elsewhere in Government, because we are very clear that clearing the initial decision backlog is not the end in itself, but part of the system. To get the whole system under control we need to look at it in that way. As well as building on lessons learned with Dame Antonia Romeo as our permanent secretary, we have put in place—as she has set out for this Committee—a lot of changes that we are making in the Department as part of the future Home Office, to improve how we clarify and strengthen accountability and how we focus on financial efficiency delivery. All of that is to make sure that we can introduce changes to sharpen those accountabilities. We have made organisational changes in the Department, and the most important one of those for this hearing is the creation of the new asylum group, which Rannia is coming in to lead—

We will come on to that.

That puts Rannia in the position where, as well as the formation of that group, we have moved more of the operational functions of the asylum system, and the policy and commercial capability, into Rannia’s group. She continues to develop that so that she can lead across the system, not only in the Home Office, but more broadly with the Ministry of Justice, local authorities and elsewhere.

Those were really helpful opening remarks. I have just one simple question, before I hand over to Rupert Lowe: do you know what the backlog is today?

We do. The last published figure in September 2025 was—Rannia, do you have those?—80,000. That number had come down significantly by the end of September and continues to do so. For example, we have far fewer cases in the system; at the end of September 2025, 16,593 cases that had been in it for over a year, compared with 30,637 a year earlier. Those numbers continue to fall.

How often do you publish those figures?

We publish figures quarterly in our immigration statistics, so the next quarterly publication will be on 26 February, which will have data up to the end of December.

I think my question is for Simon Ridley. From your CV, Simon, I see you have been involved in other national challenges such as covid-19 and the Brexit situation. You have been doing this since ’23, so you obviously have a great deal of knowledge about it. I read the Report—I am not quite sure I understood fully your response to the Chairman—and the NAO states: “To achieve value for money in its management of asylum, the government needs to co-ordinate and manage across the complex end-to-end system”—

Sorry to stop you, Rupert, but will you tell us the paragraph number.

It is in the “Summary” of the NAO Report, paragraph 5.

Okay, thank you.

In my experience of running businesses, they do not work when they are in silos. It strikes me that government is operating in silos. Furthermore, it strikes me that this is now a national emergency. I would like to know, as part of the Committee, what exactly you will do to ensure that all Departments work together, that there is a cross-governmental approach to this national crisis, and that the Committee can feel that there is something being done to deliver value for taxpayers’ money.

Thank you, Mr Lowe. The first thing to say is that we welcome the Report, not just in the Home Office, but more broadly in Government, because, as you say, it looks at the issue in a systemic way, not just at a specific reform or issue. Secondly, I am really conscious that the asylum system has been under enormous pressure for a long time. A set of changes and issues that took place at the end of the last decade and through covid meant that the Government have been spending far too much on the asylum system. We have been working incredibly hard over recent years to bring those costs down. In the last financial year and into this one, we have saved £700 million against Home Office spending, and we have significant targets in the spending review. We will only meet those if we are working in an end-to-end, systemic way. We must get the right balance between clarity about accountability for delivering change and the collaboration that is needed. One internal change we have made is to create a specific asylum group, which Rannia is leading. Rannia is building the capability that we need in the Home Office and boards, and the governance that we need across Whitehall to work with other Departments. We will only solve this problem if we can address the pressures in Home Office decision making in the appeals system and address the wider legislative and legal frameworks that enable people to frustrate the system and frustrate removal. We have moved more resources into removals through immigration enforcement. We have been driving up removals and will continue to do so. We also need to work with people beyond Government, local authorities being a prime example.

So you have a plan for the justice system to work with the Home Office and local authorities? You are telling me that all that is under way and that there is a blueprint for that, and it is going to be delivered on behalf of the British people?

Yes. To take the appeal system—on which Jo and Emma may wish to say more—we have approached this in stages, so that we can make progress in the short term but build a long-term sustainable solution. In the Home Office we are already supporting the MOJ—including financially—to increase capacity through both judicial recruitment and by increasing capacity in the legal aid system. There are changes through the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 that put statutory timetables on hearing appeals. We are doing a lot of joint work to implement that, including by improving data sharing. Through the statement made by the Home Secretary in autumn, we have committed to long-term sustainable reform through a new appeals body. That will require legislation and further change. We can build the capacity in the short term to meet the immediate emergency pressures we have, but we need to build a longer-term sustainable solution.

I think that must be a priority. What concerns me is that when I use my parliamentary office to ask questions of the Home Office on these issues, on virtually every occasion I get: “The Home Office does not hold the information sought in these questions at the level of granularity requested.” That is for questions about information packs, recreational activities provided, cleaning services, furnishing and decorating, and antisocial behaviour. I get that as an answer to a whole raft of my questions, but it worries me that if you do not have the granularity of data, you will not be able to manage the situation. That pertains particularly to the contractor and subcontractor contracts that you have with groups such as Serco, Mears and other national providers that are providing asylum services to you. I have been to see the Minister, asked many parliamentary questions and have drilled down, and I find contracts where hotel rooms have been fully paid for—the entire hotel has been taken—yet it is half full. There is a lack of knowledge and understanding of these complex contracts within the Home Office and other ministerial Departments. From the taxpayers’ viewpoint, if the private sector is indulging in very complex contracts—which you are signing but which are not fit for purpose—then taxpayer money is going to be massively wasted. I would like to know if we can have complete transparency of what is in those contracts. When I ask the questions, I get a redacted version.

Okay, I think we have got the message.

It’s very important. We have got to have transparency on this if we are to get to the bottom of it, and I don’t think we have transparency. We haven’t got transparency because very often the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

Can I come in from Ministry of Justice? You are asking about the whole system—we can talk about the detail maybe a bit later—but just to support what Simon says, we recognise that there needs to be a different approach, not just to asylum but to the whole criminal justice system, and the way that we work together and lead that system as a collective and not as distinct processes. That is not to take away from staff, who work really hard on the frontline of various parts of the system. We should thank them for everything they do, but as leaders working across the system, it is really important. That is why we welcome the NAO Report, which is one of the first to look across the system. That is extremely helpful. My role as permanent secretary of MOJ is to make sure that we jointly own the system. We use data together, so we have shared management information and can take decisions that we all agree with and all take stewardship of the system. We will be doing more thinking about how we do that and how we continue to do that. There are some good examples—Simon has already mentioned some of them today. You will pick up on some of the work we are doing around digital and data and the new appeals body that you will want to talk about, as Simon said, around judicial recruitment, which shows much better join-up across the system. I feel confident that we are entering into a different way of working, which I hope reassures the Committee. But I am sure you will want to pick up on some of the detail as we move through.

Chair, if I may, I will give a very short response, because we might come back to some of these things that Mr Lowe mentioned. As we have talked about at this Committee, and indeed others, there have been significant challenges with how the accommodation system has developed over many years. It was built on contracts that were signed in 2019. The use of hotels came much later and was not at that point intended. We have done a lot in the Department to strengthen our contract management and commercial functions to support the scrutiny of that, and as a result we have got money back for the taxpayer. The Home Affairs Committee did a very long report on all these issues, including the detail of the contracts. There is one thing we have been doing in recent months. The permanent secretary requested an external review of our commercial functions in this area, so we can get further challenge and make sure we continue to develop our capability as best we can.

Rupert might want to come back a little later. We must make a bit of progress and then come back. Catherine is next.

Just listening to the opening comments from Simon and Jo, there does seem to be great store set by the new asylum group and what it will be able to achieve. It would be really helpful to understand in a bit more detail what that group’s specific role and responsibilities are. How big a group are we talking about? What does it look like in practice? And in what way does it differ from the asylum taskforce that came before it?

I will say something and then Rannia might want to follow. On the way we were organised prior to last summer, there was a DG-led group called the customer services group that was responsible for our large caseworking operation. It was responsible for passports and visa services as well as resettlement and asylum. There was an enormous focus on the need for asylum reform, to bring down costs, to meet the Government’s priority to exit hotels. We decided that we needed to have a group that was entirely focused on the challenges in the asylum system to clarify accountability. We have also brought a number of other teams into that group so that it has now got the operational teams responsible for all of the end-to-end of the asylum system, so all of the intake units where asylum seekers come in and apply for asylum through to the handover to immigration enforcement for removals. As well as the operational teams, we have also brought in policy teams and a larger commercial team so that those functions are there. The asylum group is responsible for meeting our asylum objectives: exiting hotels, hitting the savings targets and implementing the changes in the Home Secretary’s statement. Alongside that clarity of accountability, we also need to build the governance and mechanisms to manage supply and demand and to have wider cross-system governance. Rannia can say more about all of that.

I am hoping that Rannia will be able to paint a clearer picture, because it sounds like a whole Government Department from what you have just described.

The Home Office is a big place.

Yes, but it is hard to understand exactly what this group is going to do. Rannia, can you explain?

I came into the Department two months ago. I found the NAO Report incredibly helpful because it started talking about the complex system that asylum is and reflected the challenges and the opportunities that I have ahead of me. My responsibility is to manage the asylum system end to end. As Simon said, that means from people entering the country and requesting asylum, through all the processing centres around the country that we have dealing with the decisions, to looking after the contracts for the accommodation that asylum seekers move into and how that proceeds in the future. For all that to happen, I have responsibility for the policy and the strategy. When we look across the asylum system as a whole, it is the first time that we can see this end-to-end approach. The team to manage that is around 10,000 people, the majority of whom are in operations, and of course we manage a significant number of large contracts. To address the question of how we manage across the whole of Government, I did two things upon my arrival. First, I focused on the internal governance of the Department. I have a line of accountability building assurance from the top to the bottom so that I know people’s responsibilities, the risks they manage, the assurance they need to put in place in terms of quality, the speed of decisions and so on. For the first time, we built a board across Government that we call the asylum system board, which met earlier in the month. Its responsibility is to bring together relevant Departments—the ones represented here, as well as No. 10, the Treasury and others—to agree to common priorities, risks and challenges, manage the trade-offs and understand the decisions we need to make, very much as you would do in a systems approach to leadership, as Jo said earlier. We have the usual ministerial or Cabinet Office committees that we will use for escalation, such as the newly created border and security committee.

That is really helpful; thank you. That created a clearer picture, but clearly there are big challenges for the Home Office, which makes up the vast majority of the group. The job of co-ordinating with the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is really important and one of the aspects highlighted by the NAO Report as lacking. It would be good to hear from you how cross-Government co-ordination is going. Do you have the levers and budget to influence what is happening not just within your group and the Home Office, but right across Government, to make sure that all the right levers are pulled?

The board that we put together across Government was pretty much an inspiration that came from the NAO Report. We have the financial capacity to deliver the outcomes that Ministers expect of us. We have significant work to do in some areas, as the NAO highlights, including data, exiting hotels and managing speedier as well as high-quality decisions, but I am absolutely clear that we can jointly achieve that by bringing together the Departments. There are good examples of where the predecessor to this—the taskforce, as we called it—came together for a specific purpose in assessing large sites and co-located departments within the Cabinet Office to try to do that. We saw some significant progress, which I am sure we will talk about later, on how you manage large sites: how to consider the planning, the money, the people, the kind of issues you face around social cohesion and so on. That was the predecessor to what we are trying to achieve here. We will update and continue to learn lessons as we progress, and I hope that the board is and does what we expect it to be and do.

That is really helpful. Q12        [1]Mr Betts: I think this question is probably to Jo Farrar, but you will no doubt tell me if that is the right person to go to. There have been a lot of concerns about the efforts to reduce the number of people in the asylum system, particularly at the first stage, and to get decisions on initial applications made quicker, but that has pushed a greater number into the appeal system, where there have been blockages. The Government have indicated that there will be a new independent appeals body. Could you tell us a bit more about it? Will the Ministry of Justice be responsible for that body?

It will be a Home Office body, and Simon might want to tell you a bit more about it. If it is helpful—because it will not come into force straightaway—I can tell you some of the things that we are doing in the Ministry of Justice to speed up the appeal system, and then maybe I will hand over to Simon to tell you a bit more about the new body. We recognise that, as cases come downstream, we need to put greater investment into judicial recruitment, for example. We were just talking about the Home Office power to give funding to other Government Departments, and we were really grateful for £29 million from the Home Office, which has allowed judges to sit to hear cases for an additional 6,400 days. We are putting a lot of investment into judicial recruitment, because we recognise that the new body will not come into place straightaway, and, even if it does, all cases that are lodged will need to be heard by the judiciary. We have already introduced 61 new fee-paid judges and 25 salaried judges, and they began sitting in this quarter. Recruitment started for up to another 70 fee-paid judges in September and for 30 salaried judges in October. They will all begin sitting this year, and application numbers for those posts have been healthy. We are putting a huge amount of effort into judicial recruitment. We are also working with retired judges to see who can come and sit in the asylum tribunal, and are generally authorising other judges to sit in a different tribunal so that they can come and work in the asylum tribunal. There is a lot going on in terms of judicial recruitment—and also productivity, which I can talk about a bit later—in view of the fact that, even though we are having a new appeals body, it will not come into force straightaway and we will still have this backlog.

Perhaps Simon Ridley can tell us when it will come into force.

Exactly as Jo says, all the work that the tribunal is doing is absolutely vital, but the Government have made the judgment that we need to build more and longer-term sustainable capacity to manage asylum appeals in the long term. We will require legislation to set up the new body, so the ultimate timetable for change will be dependent on the timetable for that legislation and then recruitment. There will be a really important phased transition from all the work the tribunal will be doing, for a good period of time before we have the new body up, but we do not have a precise delivery date for the new body at the moment; it is dependent on a number of things that we need to pin down.

Can you give us any indication of when you would like it to be in place?

We would like it to be in place as soon as possible, but there are a set of decisions that need to be made about the timetable for legislation and the time that legislation will—

Are you already planning for it? Are you thinking about how you will recruit the staff for it?

Yes, absolutely. We are doing all the planning work in parallel, both for the body and for the recruitment. We will need to set the body up in accordance with the Cabinet Office public bodies rules, and we need to get the independence from the Home Office right in the short term. The other thing I would say is that the creation of the body is critical in terms of capacity, but there is also a set of other changes that we are working through on the policy side to make sure that all issues and submissions are brought forward as far as possible, so that we can get out of recurring appeals and further submissions, which lead to the process taking much longer. We want to tighten the end-to-end process, as well as build the capacity.

So work is going on. What is the timescale to get that work in place? Presumably, you are going to make appointments for those who are going to come in and run the new bodies, when they are created.

Yes. As you would expect, we have built a programme team in the Home Office, which is working on all these issues and working to Ministers. It is designing the operational planning, the organisational planning and the necessary legislation. We will need to get decisions on those and move them all forward in parallel over the coming months.

You have talked about getting a more streamlined approach to appeals and getting all the information at the beginning of the process. Will that not need legislation as well?

Yes. As the NAO Report sets out, we need to look at this end to end. To the Chair’s first question, one of the reasons why I am more confident that we can get to a set of sustainable reforms that look at this as an end-to-end system is the fact that the asylum and returns policy statement, which the Home Secretary published at the end of last year, looks at the system from end to end. It is not just a plan for a set of discrete reforms in parts of the system; it is about how we reduce inflow and make our processing, through both Home Office decision making and the appeals system, quicker, both by looking at how we can bring information and claims forward as well as building capacity, all the way through to a lot of ongoing dedicated work to increase the number of returns. That end-to-end thinking is underpinning what we are doing. A lot of it will need legislation, but not all of it; some will need primary, some will need secondary, and some we are getting on with.

The Permanent Secretary just talked about how cases already in the existing appeals system will stay there. How do you deal with cases in the existing system where they then lodge a further appeal or want to put a new application in? Do they stay within the existing system, or do they go into the new system, when it is established?

We are in the process of designing what will need to be a phased transition from the tribunal through to the new body, in terms of both the timing of that transition and which cases will transition in which way. That is work that we are doing.

Yes, we need to work quite a lot of this through. We know that there will be a considerable period of dual running, during which both the new body and the old system are running in parallel, but some of the ways that they work together, and when cases pass from one system to another, need to be worked through.

The board that Rannia was talking about earlier—which she is going to chair, and of which we will be members from different Departments—is an excellent example of the kind of detailed planning that cannot be done just within one Department. It needs to be done collectively across Departments because, as the Home Office proceeds with the work to establish the new independent appeals body, we will have to work together on a plan of transition. As Jo was just saying, we expect a very considerable period of dual running, because it will be the case that cases that have been lodged with the first-tier tribunal will stay with the first-tier tribunal. We do not anticipate a big-bang transition—a single day when cases cease to be lodged with the first-tier tribunal and all of them start being lodged with the new appeals body. We imagine that we will want to start slowly with the new appeals body, with an increasing number of case types being heard over time. That will work only if there is detailed joint planning across the two Departments to work through case types and volumes.

We need slightly shorter responses; otherwise, we will be here until midnight. The NAO has done an excellent comparison with various European countries and how their systems work. Reading that, I cannot see that any of them allow the amount of multiple appeals that we do in this country. I just wonder whether, with this new body, you are going to take any statutory measures to try to reduce multiple appeals. What I have in mind is this: you beef up the legal aid system so that appellants can get their case right, and all the evidence assembled, first time. It seems to me that, if you did that, you would eliminate a lot of the multiple cases. There will still be a need for further appeals where the rules change, countries change and so on, but it seems to me that you need to cut that number down.

Particularly on legal aid, we recognise that the legal aid system is going to think carefully about the new appeals body; we are working closely with the Home Office on that. We are already thinking quite carefully about legal aid—how we monitor the number of providers, and how we provide the right advice in the right places so that we minimise the number of appeals—so I completely take your point, Chair. Those are some of the things—we have had a hearing on legal aid—that you know we have been thinking about anyway. I don’t know if Simon wants to pick up the first part.

Very quickly. As I said, we are also looking, in policy terms, at how we make sure that all matters are dealt with up front in a single appeal, so you cannot make a set of appeals on different matters in series, and if things are brought up late there will need to be a very strong justification for that.

You mentioned a board. I cannot see any reference to a board here; this is something that is not in the Report. Could we have some detail about who is a member of that board? Could you submit that to us as evidence, perhaps? I appreciate that it might be new, since the NAO Report, but could you give us some clarity on the board?

Not now, but if you could let us have a note, please, Simon, with the composition of the board, its governance arrangements and what it is actually intended to do, that would be really helpful. Simon Ridley indicated assent.

Thank you. Tris, you read my mind; I was going to ask for that later. A warm welcome to our guest, Paul Kohler.

Thank you, Chair. I want to ask about value for money. As 80% of the costs of asylum are on accommodation, I want to focus on accommodation, relying not just on the NAO’s analysis but on its previous report on accommodation contracts. In that previous report, it said, with wonderful understatement: “Data from suppliers suggest that hotels may be more profitable than other forms of accommodation.” As we have discovered, they can be up to eight times more profitable because they are cost-plus contracts, so the higher the base cost, the higher the permitted profit. What is the Home Office doing to move on from those cost-plus contracts?

The Government is really clear that its priority is to exit hotels, and that is where we are focused. As you know, at the peak back in July 2023, 400 hotels were in use; we are now under 200. One of the ways we made the £700 million saving that I mentioned earlier was by coming out of hotels. Alongside that, as we have discussed before, we have put a lot more capacity into our commercial teams and contract monitoring teams on the asylum contracts to strengthen the way we work with our providers and the way we make sure that we are getting the best value for money from the contracts we have. Last year, we clawed back £46 million of excess profit, as well as about £28 million on other contractual matters. We are tightening up how we manage the contracts at the moment, but fundamentally—to answer your question—we need to exit hotels.

That is not going to happen straightaway. The contracts’ break clause is coming up in a couple of months. Are you thinking about exercising the break clause then and renegotiating new contracts on hotel accommodation?

We are focused, as I said, on exiting hotels. That will take us back to the core contracts as they were in 2019. There is a break clause in those contracts, as you have said; that is in September this year. If we are going to exercise the break clause, we do not have to do it at that point. The break clause is any point after September—

Indeed; it is a rolling one.

We will be able to exercise it at any point after September, with nine months’ notice, up to 2029. We will focus on exiting hotels. We are continuing to work with our suppliers. We are also—

Your suppliers have a huge incentive not to go out of hotels, because they make so much profit from them. As much as you want to work with them, there is a real issue here.

Rannia may want to say more, but they are working very closely with us on the work that we are doing.

I am sure that is what they are saying, but they have no desire to succeed, do they?

We are getting the number of hotels and the costs down. The Government are really clear that that is our policy direction and one of the priorities we have for the asylum system. We will work with our suppliers and others to deliver on that. We are also engaging the market in terms of future accommodation needs, but our focus is to get out of hotels precisely to drive down those costs.

But the numbers in hotels are not going down, are they? You have got out of a number of hotels, but the numbers—

Numbers in hotels are going down. To the point that the Chair made earlier, the last published figure was September 2025; the next published figure will show a reduction in the numbers in hotels.

The numbers in hotels went up from 2024-25, didn’t they?

Yes, but the numbers came down and then went up a bit again because we unfortunately had an unacceptably high number of arrivals through illegal migration.

The point I am trying to drill down into—

We are doing a number of things to reduce our reliance on hotels: increasing the utilisation rate in other accommodation, moving into some large sites and doing a number of things to bring down the—

But the point I am trying to drill down to is that you are not going to get out of hotels any time soon in reality. You have contracts that were wholly inappropriate with providers keeping asylum seekers in hotels making huge excessive profits. Why are we not exercising the break clause and bringing in new contracts for the hotels?

Hear, hear.

May I add one clarification? We can exit hotels without exercising the break clause. We can exit hotels any time without exercising the break clause.

But you are not going to be able to, because you are not going to get enough dispersal accommodation. You are going to have hotel accommodation, so you need to change the contract. That is the crucial thing.

We are, obviously, focused on exiting hotels. We are also increasing—as I said, we have increased—our commercial capacity and capability to manage our contracts more tightly and increase the value for money we can get from them. We are looking, in a number of ways, at how we can broaden the way we deliver asylum accommodation. We brought a fourth supplier in for some of what we are delivering, but we need to work with the contracts we have in the short run and we will make decisions about the break clause when we are in a position so to do. In the meantime, nothing stops us reducing—

Why not renegotiate a new hotel contract? Exercise the break clause and do a new hotel contract. You know that the permitted profits are obscene when asylum seekers are in hotels because the base cost is so much higher and the permitted profit is so much higher. Surely you need to renegotiate the contract, and you could do that straightaway by exercising the break clause on the current contract.

We are really focused on how we can get the best value possible from asylum accommodation and make the savings that we need to, which we have successfully done in the last couple of years. We are very focused on getting out of hotels so that we can reduce the challenges of asylum hotels, including the cost.

You have repeated that a number of times, but why not renegotiate the hotel contract?

We are working with our suppliers to make sure we can get the best out of the contract that we have. We can exercise the break clause if that system is—

The cost-plus contract is not good value for money, is it? It gives them obscene profits when people are in hotels. Why have Clearsprings profits gone up from £6,000 to £300,000 per employee in a couple of years? It is because they made obscene profits because the cost-plus contract is not appropriate when so many people are in hotels. What I do not understand is why you do not move the contracts? You are not going to get out of hotels any time soon.

Our priority is to get out of hotels as quickly as we can, and to continue to manage the contracts that we have with our—

I am going to stop you there, Simon, because we are not getting clear answers to Paul’s very good questions. Can you give us an absolute assurance that you will look at every single hotel contract? The point that Paul was making was that you are going to need some of them in the run-up before you get rid of all hotels. Can we have an absolute assurance that all hotel contracts will be looked at for value for money, and that a notice will be served so that you can renegotiate those contracts? I do not want the Committee to be sitting in a year’s time with some dreadful case where somebody has made an obscene profit because you have not reviewed it.

We are looking at all our contracts with our suppliers of hotels, and working with them on that—so yes, I can assure you of that. We have an external review of our commercial and contract management capability on asylum, which the permanent secretary asked for, and we will be responding to that. We are making sure that we exercise the excess profit clauses that we have in the current contracts. We clawed back £46 million last year, and we are looking at how we take that forward. We are looking at what the contractual options are for the future. We are also seeking to get out of hotels—

Can I just stop you there? The excess profits clause that you have in these contracts will enable you to do a retrospective look at some of these profit levels.

Yes.

Good. We are getting somewhere.

But, Chair, the point is that because the base cost is so high, they are permitted huge profits on those contracts. Can I check that new contracts that we negotiate will not be cost-plus contracts?

You have asked that question before. Yes, we will make sure that we are looking at the most value for money contracts—

Not cost-plus?

—because we are clear that the contracts signed in 2019 were not signed with the use of hotels in mind.

Can I bring Clive in on this?

I think a very simple question has been asked: that new contracts would not be on a cost-plus basis. You did not say there would not be; you said you would look at it.

We need to do the necessary market engagement and develop the contracts we need for the future of the accommodation system. We are not going to sign contracts that do not offer the taxpayer value for money. As accounting officer—

But you have done it in the past, haven’t you?

Contracts signed in 2019—

Simple question, again: do you accept the cost-plus basis for contracts is not good value for the taxpayer?

That is, in general, true—yes.

So why would any new contract have a cost-plus basis to it, then?

As I say, I do not expect that it will do.

You do not expect it will, but can you give us an assurance that it will not?

I can give you an assurance that we will sign contracts that will be value for money for the taxpayer, which makes it very unlikely. But we have not at the moment developed all that—I do not have a thing that can tell you whether I will or will not recommend the signing of.

Why not?

I am not disagreeing with—

Simon, you can hear the dissatisfaction of the Committee. We will look at the transcript and your replies very carefully, but I suspect that we will come back to this in our report. Lloyd has indicated he wants to ask something on this same subject—or is it different?

We are looking at the best way to move the site on to get—

We have not yet. It is still in the Home Office’s ownership, but we are looking at the best way to move it on to get the—

We have done lots of work on that; we have not yet moved it on.

The Bibby Stockholm, as you know, successfully accommodated a number of asylum seekers—

I think that is a matter of choice. It was used as alternative accommodation. It was successfully in operation—

We are now looking at all the options we have to exit hotels as quickly as possible, so that is the priority.

No, that culture has changed, and that is a different point. We—

As you know, the NAO and others have done a number of reports into large sites very specifically, and on the previous programme in general. We have learnt a number of lessons from those reports and put a large number of changes in place, in terms of a number of things. First, in terms of the skills we have in the Department. In terms of work we are doing on large sites at the moment, as Rannia mentioned earlier, we have got an explicitly joint, cross-Government taskforce that brings in teams from not just the Home Office, but the Ministry of Defence, MHCLG to support on planning, Cabinet Office property experts and others. We are spending much more time, when we are looking at sites, doing prior due diligence on them to make sure we do not repeat some of the mistakes we made on previous large sites. That does not mean that large sites cannot bring value as a good alternative means of accommodation, other than hotels, for a whole series of reasons.

Yes I can, because we have learnt a number of lessons across the Department and we have put a number of processes and new capabilities in place, as I have just described, in response to the NAO Report and other reports on this, as well as our own internal work. If I may, those are two very different issues. There were a set of challenges around Bexhill, which was a site that we bought and did not subsequently use. There were a whole lot of things we put in place in terms of how we do our due diligence and how we identify sites we could use that are very different from how things were done then, including in terms of how long it takes us. The Bibby Stockholm was a site that we paid for and used as we intended to use it throughout its duration.

There were a few weeks lost at the beginning, that is correct, but it was used as asylum accommodation in the way it was intended until the end of the contract.

Simon, you can see why this Committee is sceptical about Home Office procurement efforts, including in property. When we did the RAF site in north Lincolnshire, I said that, if we had produced the sort of assessment that the Home Office produced, we would be so far adrift that we would have been sued for negligence. Northeye, which Lloyd referred to, was one of the worst pieces of property advice that I have come across on this Committee, and procedures were not followed; so you can see why this Committee is very sceptical on Home Office procurement so far. That is why we have been so critical about the hotels issue. I was disappointed that you were not able to answer Lloyd’s question on Northeye, because I would have thought that was about the first question this Committee was likely to ask this afternoon—indeed, had it not been asked by Lloyd, I was going to ask it. Could we have a note on the Northeye situation? On this Committee’s general theme of, “If you are going to fail, fail fast”, surely you would want to get rid of that site and recoup at least some taxpayers’ money as soon as possible?

Yes, it is not that I cannot answer; it is that we have not yet got the rights to—

We are many months on from that dreadful hearing, our report and the acceptance of the Treasury minute; I would have thought you would have an answer by now, so I would be grateful for a note on that.

Moving on to unresolved cases and prolonged delays, the NAO Report showed that more than a third—41%—of asylum cases looked at in its sample were effectively stuck in limbo, with no action taken and no progress made on their claims, and they were not being removed from the UK either. That is a sample size of 5,000. What is the actual number? How many people are effectively stuck in limbo in the system right now?

It depends on exactly what you mean by cases that are in limbo.

The definition that the Report uses, at the bottom of paragraph 2.12 on page 27, is that the cases “remain open but are not awaiting an appeal decision or the outcome of further submissions to the Home Office. These claims are not being progressed, and the individuals involved have not been removed from the UK.”

Can you give me the reference in the Report?

It is page 27, paragraph 2.12. Effectively, the NAO had to pull together a sample to try to understand better and dig a little deeper. I am curious to know whether you have a number that you are able to furnish the Committee with for how many people are currently effectively in limbo.

There are a number of cases that have been awaiting an initial decision for a long period of time, which is 16,500. There are a number of people in the appeals queue, which Jo or Emma may want to say more about and then you are right that there are a large number of people who are failed asylum seekers in the country. I do not have a number with me that adds all those up, I’m afraid.

Can you share one with us in a note?

Shall I talk a bit about asylum appeals? They are not particularly the cases you were talking about, but we know that there is a rise in caseload for asylum. If we take that there were 27,000 in April ’24, it is now 70,000—that is the number of receipts we have into the system.

So it is not those individuals that the NAO is referencing?

No, not particularly, but we know that is a real issue, so we know we have around 70,000 waiting.

We recognise the number that the NAO came up with; we worked closely, so we know there are roughly 224,000 individuals. They come from a mixed bag of cases: some of them are appeals and some of them are further submissions. I am happy to look at the breakdown. Some of them are cases that have been stuck in the system with delays that pertain to bad health or cases that cannot be progressed; that makes up the 224,000.

Is that today?

This is from the point in time that the NAO Report was done. We will publish further statistics so that you can defer that number later on. However, one thing I would say is that, as we progress first decisions speedily, we always go back and look at the backlog to see which ones have the ability to progress further through that backlog, especially where we have further submissions or delays that are technical in nature.

You mentioned there was a large number who had been waiting a long time. What is a long time?

For some people it can be years, where people can just continue to bring subsequent further submissions. Because of the backlog in appeals, it is currently taking somewhere over 50 weeks for an appeal to be heard at the moment—somebody will give the precise number—

Sixty.

Rannia is saying it is nearer 60 weeks. So, if you keep putting further submissions in, you can be stuck in the system for quite a long time. That is why we need to increase the processing and throughput.

You mentioned earlier the changes that are being introduced, and the new board. How long will it take for those changes to impact that group of people who I would refer to as effectively in limbo? How long will it take for you to unlock some of those cases?

Some of the things we are doing now will start to make a difference to some of those cases—as we increase judicial capacity, we will be able to bring more cases through more quickly—but it will take a long time for us to build all the reforms into the system to deal with the number of people that has been allowed to build up over past years.

I will bring in Paul in a second, but this is sort of self-feeding, isn’t it? You get huge delays in cases, which means that they can come back for an appeal on the basis that they have a settled life in this country. Isn’t it in everybody’s interest that these very long-delayed cases are prioritised, in particular?

Yes, and that again comes back to the philosophy behind both what we are doing and what the NAO sets out in the Report, which is that we need to address all these issues in parallel. We need to increase the speed of our decision making, build up capacity so that we can get more throughput, and keep increasing the numbers of removals that we can make. But we will need to make a set of operational, capacity and policy changes to address that. In the meantime, yes, we need to bring the oldest appeals through the system as quickly as we can and get people to bring forward new evidence.

You have side-stepped into appeals and reforming the appeals process, but can I take you back to Sarah’s question? On page 27 of the Report, paragraph 2.12 talks about the 41% of people in the sample who were not awaiting an appeal, had gone through the process and were simply in limbo. No matter what you do to the appeals process, 41% of people who have gone through the process and are not waiting for an appeal are still simply out there. What are you going to do about that? That is what we are asking about, not the appeals process.

Where people are failed asylum seekers, we are increasing returns. We are increasing our illegal working visits, and we are increasing the arrests we are getting from those visits. We have increased returns, overall, by 23% in the 16 months from July 2024, over the period beforehand, and we are continuing to use the powers that we have to facilitate both voluntary returns and more enforced returns. The number of asylum cases that have been removed has gone up considerably.

Can we have the figure for those who are in this limbo at this stage? An increased percentage of returns does not mean much if you are not returning many in the first place. We need to see how many are in that group and how big the problem is. In the NAO’s sample, 41% were simply in limbo, so we are asking how many are in that group. You must have that figure—I am not saying at your fingertips.

We would rally against the 224,000 number—

No, that was a different figure.

I am just making sure that we are not talking at cross purposes. We will make sure that we get you the appropriate number.

Thank you very much, Paul. I think that Clive wanted to come in. After that, we will take a break.

Going back to those people who have finished in the system—they have no more appeals in and they are not going to be accepted as asylum seekers—do you know where they are, physically?

We know where some of them are. Some of them are in our asylum support system. But some of them are not in asylum accommodation; they are elsewhere in the country. We have a number of reporting mechanisms, where people stay in touch with the Home Office and immigration enforcement, but not everybody complies with that, so, where people are not complying with the reporting regime, we seek to trace them.

What happens when you trace them?

Then they come back into the reporting regime, and we seek to remove them.

What happens when they do not report?

Where people fall out of contact, they are not complying with their bail conditions; they are absconders, and we seek to trace them. We do that either through our routine Immigration Enforcement work or through a specific team we have.

This is running in circles, isn’t it? You trace them again, they disappear again, and then you trace them again.

We bring a number of them into detention and remove. That is what immigration—

But if you cannot remove them, what happens then? I am trying to get my head round the system.

There are lots of different categories of people in this group. Through a number of mechanisms, we seek to remove people who do not have a right to be in the UK. We do that through reporting mechanisms and Immigration Enforcement—either agreeing a voluntary removal or bringing somebody into detention and enforcing removal. Where people are not in contact with the Home Office, we sometimes identify them through illegal working visits. We are doing more illegal working visits year on year and increasing our arrests. Sometimes people are identified by the police; the police get in touch with Immigration Enforcement and we seek to remove those people. Then there are obviously a large number of people who we are maintaining contact with through the contact regime.

What happens to the people who are arrested for illegal working?

They are arrested for illegal working. If they do not have a right to be in the UK, they are brought into detention and they are removed.

And if you cannot remove them at that point?

If we cannot remove them at that point, we set bail conditions, and the nature of that contact will depend.

We could probably go on pointing out the holes in that for quite a long time. When we had a hearing about visas for health, care and other workers who had come to the end of their visa time, and we asked how you knew whether they had left the country, the answer was that you went to airlines and asked them. Is that the case with failed asylum seekers—that you go to airlines and ask them whether they have left?

We collect lots of data on passenger information, which enables us—

That is the only way you know whether someone has left the country, unless you actually deport them or they agree to go through a system of yours.

People either go because they choose to go—they agree voluntary removal—or because we enforce their removal.

So you don’t actually know who is in the country or not, do you?

It is possible for an individual to be outside the country without having told the Home Office.

And inside the country without you knowing.

Well, that is the nature of illegal arrivals. If somebody gets clandestinely into the back of a lorry—

But once they are here, and they have gone through your system, you do not know whether people are here in the country, do you?

As I have said, it is possible for somebody to enter the country illegally. That is precisely why we are making all the changes we are—

I am not talking about entering; I am talking about leaving. You do not actually know who has left, so you do not actually know who is here—who has left and who hasn’t left.

Again, at the moment, we do not count absolutely everybody out of the country. We do know where the vast majority of people are, because we have contact regimes: they stay in touch with us and we stay in touch with them. That is how we are managing—

I wonder whether we could have a little note on what “the vast majority” actually means.

It means the very vast majority of people.

It would be helpful to have a note on the numbers. Thank you.

I think we have had a good session to start with. We are going to take a five-minute break. To warn everybody, microphones will be on—sound travels. The clock is now almost at 4.45 pm. Shall we try to be back here by about 4.50 pm, to conclude the session? Sitting suspended. On resuming—

Welcome back to the Committee’s hearing.

I have some questions on capacity at the appeals stage. The Government’s commitment to clear the backlog has ended up shifting the pressure to the appeals stage. Ms Churchill, could you walk the Committee through the actions you are taking to improve judicial availability and capacity?

I am happy to make a start on that. There are a few things that we are doing to get cases heard faster through the system. First, on judicial capacity, we have been taking action to recruit into the first-tier tribunal of the immigration and asylum chamber. We have just completed one round of recruitment, which has led to the recruitment of an additional 25 salaried and 61 fee-paid judges. That takes us from a baseline of around 389 salaried and fee-paid judges at the end of 2025 and towards the 460 who will hopefully be sitting at the beginning of this financial year in March 2026. We have also launched two further rounds of recruitment for salaried and fee-paid judges. We do not know how successful those recruitment campaigns will be yet, but we are hoping that by March 2027 we will have a total of around 550 judges. As the Permanent Secretary mentioned earlier, in addition to that, the Senior President of Tribunals has organised for a number of retired judges—and I think that 24 of them are currently supporting hearings in the chamber. They have also authorised some judges who primarily sit in a different chamber but who are also authorised to sit in the immigration and appeals chambers—and I think there are around 60 of those. That is quite a significant increase in judicial capacity. There is also the question of ensuring that no tribunal time is wasted. In addition to the increase in judicial capacity, the Courts and Tribunals Service is taking a range of other steps, including increasing the number of cases heard remotely. The Committee will probably know that some cases are heard remotely within each centre, but the tribunals service also operates a virtual region where if a case is being heard remotely, people can be anywhere in the country. That currently has a sitting day profile of around 1,000, but we are working to increase that capacity and think we should be able to double the volume of appeals heard each day in that virtual region. Secondly, the Courts and Tribunals Service is looking at increasing the use of float lists. The Committee will be aware that courts and tribunals hold lists whereby if a case suddenly falls for some reason, an additional case can be dropped in at short notice so that that judicial time is not wasted. Finally, we have been looking at the prioritisation of cases through the system. We have been running pilots where additional administrative and legal officer resource is ringfenced to prioritise the progressing of supported appeal cases through the system. That is a forerunner to the new 24-week statutory timeframe which we will implement this spring, and which was legislated for last year. That requires us to resolve cases with individuals in supported accommodation or non-detained FNOs within a new statutory timeframe of 24 weeks. That is just a selection of the things that we are doing to try to get cases through the tribunals faster.

On the recruitment, it sounds like you have been reasonably successful in hiring more paid judges. In figure 6 of the NAO Report, we are told that one of the issues is poor incentives compared with competing tribunals. Have you had to do something differently to attract judges to these jobs, and away from competing tribunals? Is there an impact on other tribunals, as a result of your success?

I think the two most recent rounds of recruitment, which I have just talked about, were specific recruitments to the immigration and asylum chamber. Sometimes the first-tier tribunal will run a generic competition for judges to sit across any chamber, and once they have been appointed, the Senior President of Tribunals will decide which chamber to appoint them to. However, because we very specifically needed additional capacity in the immigration and asylum chamber, those two recruitments were specific to that chamber for the purpose of getting that resource in the right place. Also, as it happens, I think it is a bit faster to run recruitments when you are recruiting to a specific chamber.

From the recruitment that you have done, have you modelled what that does to the appeals backlog? For example, do you know where that backlog will be in a year or two?

We have not done a full job on that modelling. Obviously, we can see that, as the amount of judicial capacity increases, it increases the number of cases that you can get through, and we would expect the number of disposals to increase—we can see that. Of course, we do not know the other variable factors, one of which is the number of receipts coming into the tribunal at the same time. Secondly, as we reflected earlier in the hearing, the Home Office is working to establish the new independent appeals body at the same time. As we said, we have a lot of detailed planning work to do with the Home Office to work out the timeframe of that new body, as well as which new cases and what volume of new cases the new appeals body might pick up, instead of them going into the tribunal. Because of all those variable factors, I cannot clearly say to you, “We have drawn the line, and we can see that it does this.” However, we obviously know that increasing judicial capacity, as I have talked about, increases the number of disposals over time.

Would you be able to walk us through what implications you think there are for judges of the new asylum model?

The new asylum appeals body?

Yes.

When the new body is established, as we have been saying, we will need to work with the Home Office to establish what types of cases it will start to hear, and when. Those cases will then go to that body and not into the first-tier tribunal, as they currently do. Over time, the caseload of that chamber is going to decrease. We have not quite modelled that through, but given the size of the current backlog and caseload in the first-tier tribunal, we expect that caseload will still exist for several years, and the judiciary who are part of that chamber will continue to hear them.

We are actually really pleased that the application numbers have been healthy. We have announced a different system, but we know that there will be some dual running for a number of years. We have been really pleased with the amount of interest in immigration and asylum appeals, and work in that area. It is really encouraging. Q77        [2]Blake Stephenson: Finally, are you doing anything specific to avoid delays in the appeals system, such as ensuring that people have the right advice and access to legal aid, so that there are not undue delays in the system?

Yes, we are working really hard on legal aid. We are monitoring the number of providers, and we have increased the fees for immigration judges[3]—we have already rolled out the measures we need to uplift those fees. We are also looking at things like accreditation funding, which providers would normally pay for, and we are looking at paying for that. We are hoping that the changes we are making to legal aid will also help to speed cases through the system. Q78        [4]Matt Turmaine: I just want to come in very briefly on the recruitment issue. Congratulations on recruiting these additional people. Can you tell us where they are coming from? Are they coming from other parts of the judiciary, or are they new recruits? Are they coming from somewhere else?

The judges I was just talking about are judges being recruited to sit primarily in the immigration and asylum chamber. They will probably not be people who are already authorised by another chamber—I just mentioned that the Senior President of Tribunals was ready for those ticketed in other chambers to sit in the immigration and asylum chamber, and that is already happening. I think these will not be people who are recruited from one chamber into another, if that makes sense—they will be new into the tribunal system, and they will be legal practitioners.

The NAO Report makes it clear that there are multiple appeals, and that you do not necessarily know how many times any one individual has appealed. Will the new system eliminate that? Also, I cannot see, if you have multiple appeals and do not know how many times an individual has appealed, how you can make sure that the next appeal is heard efficiently, because you will not know what happened in the previous appeal.

You are right that, in the current system, we do not know whether someone has appealed. That is part of the problem with our systems not integrating properly with the Home Office’s systems. A bit later, we might come on to our work to ensure interoperability between the systems. In preparation for the new 24-week statutory timeframe, we have had to do that job of better integration between our systems so as to identify cases that are in supported accommodation and cases of non-detained FNOs. As the Committee probably knows, that is not something we can do automatically at the moment; it has to be done through manual processes. Work is going on to better link up the systems digitally. I am afraid that I do not know whether that will help us on the question of repeated appeals within the current first-tier tribunal, but the systems that the Home Office will need to establish for the new independent appeals body will be separate systems. Again, we will have to make sure that the interoperability is there. I do not know whether Simon or Rannia wants to say anything about their work and reflect on the new body.

As you probably know, our end-to-end system for asylum data is called Atlas. It is unique in that it offers a pen picture of each individual, and their history as they pass through the asylum system. That picture will know whether the individual has passed through appeal and so on. As we join our systems through the new API, we should be able to have shared information with HMCTS to say that a particular individual is in supported accommodation and that this is the history as it goes through, not necessarily for judges to see how many appeals have been done, but we will know internally how many they have done.

You have had problems with the Atlas system, with migrating data from the old system to the new database. Can you give us an update on that and tell us when it is likely to be functioning properly?

Everything has migrated to Atlas—it is operating, and right now it is the only operational system in decision making. We are working to improve some of the join-up with some of the operations, so that it is end to end, in terms of both who enters the asylum system and how they exit. We are also making great strides in developing future linkages on the system with local authorities and police. It is not perfect in the things it can do, but it is a system orchestrator that gives a pen picture of the individual. Right now, everything has migrated on to it.

That is what it should do. When will it do that?

It does it now.

It does it now—

Have you migrated all the information on to it?

The previous case information database—CID—is now a legacy system, and we have closed it down. Of course, there is an ongoing programme of continuous improvement for Atlas. It is worth saying that Atlas is not just an asylum casework system; it covers all our immigration casework. That is one of its strengths, so that we can integrate our system, but ongoing continuous improvement is needed for any system of that sort.

I will come back to the issue of information in the system. One of the fundamental problems appears to be that it just is not there in many cases. One suggestion that has been made is about having a unique identifier for asylum seekers, so wherever they are in the system—in passage through from different Departments and agencies—that individual can be identified. When are we going to get that in place?

In the current system, the moment an individual asylum seeker starts going through the asylum system, they get their own number. That number exists. The problem is not that they do not have a number to pass through the system; it is the fact that the systems are not connected. It is not currently connected to HMCTS, as I said, or to the police and so on. But the number that an asylum seeker is given when they start their case exists.

We are working towards integrating with the Home Office by spring, so that we can use that to introduce the 24-week statutory timeframe. That work is going well so far. We are hoping that the join-up between the Home Office and HMCTS system will be in place by spring.

This year?

This year.

Why can’t it be the same identification number for the police, local authorities and every other part of Government?

I did not say it can’t be; I said that it is not right now. It is not ready.

When will it be done, then? Is it the intention?

That is the intention. The intention is to create a new blueprint for how we create the data system inside the Home Office to ensure that we have not only connectivity, but that everything goes from manual to Atlas.

That is all right for the Home Office; we are now talking about outside, in other parts of Government. If the Ministry of Justice can get the same system that the Home Office has for providing an identification number to asylum seekers, why can’t that be rolled out to the rest of Government in a reasonable timeframe?

We are. To your point, we completely agree that we need to have consistent data that we can share with other organisations. That takes a lot of time, investment and those sorts of things. We are doing that with MOJ at the moment. We are increasing the data sharing that we do with other local partners, but all of that is not automatic at the moment. We do not have a timescale currently for rolling that out to other partners, but we are absolutely committed to continuing to improve and increase the data sharing that we do.

I was not talking about the whole of the data. There is a lot to do, and we will come on to one or two of those examples. But just an identification number is not difficult, is it? Having the same identification number for the same person when they move through different parts of Government is not difficult, is it?

As Dr Leontaridi has said, we have that identification number. What we need to do is—

But it is not used elsewhere in the system, is it? The Ministry of Justice is going to adopt your identification number, but nobody else is—why?

It has been quite complex to integrate the two systems. It is not entirely simple because we were operating different systems, so you have to help those systems to talk to each other and share data to be able to use one identifier across the systems. You say it is not that difficult; it is actually quite difficult—it needs money and a focused effort. We are confident that we will get there by spring. It is not an overnight fix. I am sure that the Home Office is working with other partners.

I am sure they are, but could they tell us when for the other bits of Government that need joining up?

I do not have a timeline for that right now.

I think that is something we might ask you to develop for us. There is an awful lot of data that just is not available, or information that you do not have. Rannia, you said you have come in new to this—presumably one of your objectives is to try to start making the system more effective and efficient by having this data? The NAO Report is quite staggering: the Home Office could not give data on the “number of people in the asylum system who were not receiving any form of state support”, “the Home Office could not provide data on the outcomes of further submissions”, and the Home Office did not have, “complete data on the number of people who had absconded from the asylum system, or the total number of people currently subject to some form of enforcement action, or on all unsuccessful removals and their causes.” There is a lot of stuff that you do not know, isn’t there?

As we have said a number of times, we have a lot of data on individuals. The challenge is joining that data up between different systems and managing it through time, because people move between different bits of our system and other systems, and they move in and out of contact. We absolutely agree that there is a lot to do to continue improving the strength of the data we have. We have built a single system to enable us to start doing that, and there is a lot more work to do.

We have operational data. The problem we sometimes face is the ability to give assurance for the data to be released. With operational data, people know what they are dealing with as they explore asylum cases, and I think it is this next stage about assurance for release.

If you come back to us in a year’s time, would you be able to answer all these questions that you cannot answer now?

I would expect that we will have made a considerable amount of progress. There are things we had not done a year ago that we have done now. I do not think we are saying the Department would have sorted out every data issue—

No, but you are telling us you have already got the data—you just cannot release it because you cannot be certain about its accuracy. Hopefully, in a year’s time you will be certain about its accuracy. Is that not the intention?

The intention is to continue to improve all of our data, exactly as you say. Whether we will have done all of that for everything we have in a year is unlikely, given the huge amount of information, but there is a lot that we have done in the last year as we have rolled out a number of programmes across asylum and immigration.

In a year’s time, is there any chance you will be able to tell us what has happened to people whose claims have been refused but who have not been removed?

I think we will have improved our data systems, the reports we can run and the security of our data quality. We have done that in a number of areas, but precisely what we will have in place in a year, I cannot tell you now. However, we have a large programme of work to continue improving our data.

On the board you set up, and all the other things you are putting in place, surely one of the objectives must be to set targets for when you are going to get all this data so that you can actually run the system properly.

And it is. One of the things we put in place is a group of data analysts across Government to enable us to join up data. It is a sub-group of the board that will help and has already started working with the MOJ. That is the ambition: as the programme goes on and the board progresses, the analytical work underneath it—that underpins it—also progresses.

Are you getting full buy-in from all the other parts of Government to enable that to happen?

Yes, and there is also a lot of capability across Government enabled to do that.

Thank you, Clive. Just before I bring in Paul and Matt, on a very simple point of information, Simon, in relation to my previous question—I hope for a yes or no answer—the NAO Report, page 31, paragraph 2.22, says, at the second bullet point, “staff were continuing to refer back to the closed Case Information Database (CID) system” that you said Atlas has replaced, “and there was evidence of case identifying numbers from that system still being used”. Can we be assured that that is not now the case?

Yes—

Yes is all we need.

The database is closed. Some people still operate off spreadsheets; this is one of the data issues we have, so we end up with multiple records. That is one of the important data quality and data cleansing exercises we need to do, but yes—the database is closed.

This is probably a really naive question. We already have unique identifiers that we use across Government—NHS numbers, NI numbers. Why not give them one of those?

Because some people do not have a right to work, and all sorts of other issues. We give everybody an identifier as they come in. When someone is granted asylum, they get status through an e-visa, so we have ways of identifying people. As people come into the asylum system, they are likely to go in multiple different directions and have different rights, so we use an asylum number, and that is what we build our system on.

I thought you might say that about NI, which is why I said NHS number as well. Surely they will all, at some point, be able to use some aspects of the NHS. Why can they not just be given that number? We already use that number across different parts of Government to identify people, don’t we? Why not just do that?

People come in for very different lengths of time and have different rights. We just give them an asylum identifier so that we can move them through the system. Some people we are aiming to turn around and remove as quickly as possible.

Ideally, at some point, we will want to join up all these numbers, but that would be a longer and more complex process. At the moment, it is simpler to use the Home Office immigration identifier, which will make sure we can track them through the system.

What about the electronic identifier?

I slightly doubt it; it will probably be different. However, the Government are thinking about all these things. At the moment, we have no plans. Eventually, it would be great if all of our systems could talk to each other so that we would not need to worry about the number and could join up all of this data, but that is a little way off yet.

I also want to ask about improving data quality and collaboration. Rannia and Josh, what steps are you taking to ensure timely and accurate sharing of data with local authorities—including about safeguarding and the details of people moving in and out of asylum accommodation?

We have multi-agency fora where we come together and discuss the data we have with local authorities. We have been working on the premise that we will be able to join local authorities with Atlas in future. We have made progress in creating tools. One is the place-based visibility tool, which gives councils regular and accurate updates of the population in their areas. That is not specifically individual by individual, but on the breakdown those councils have. We have also been updating our safeguarding tools for the contract that we had and the safeguarding framework. Internally, we understand the responsibility of the suppliers as opposed to the Home Office for safeguarding. We share data relating to children as they are handed over to local authorities through the national transfer scheme. Josh may wish to add a bit more.

The one thing to add is that we published the national cross-Government plan for homelessness in December. It included a Home Office commitment that, within two days of any newly granted refugee at risk of homelessness receiving notification that their asylum support will be discontinued, the asylum provider will notify the local authority. That has been welcomed by the local authority sector, which has been worried about people coming out of asylum support without enough notice and falling into homelessness.

When is that starting?

I will turn to Rannia for the implementation date. The commitment that it will happen was made in December.

We have not agreed an implementation date yet.

Do you have any understanding of the costs associated with implementing that?

Not right now.

We already have a lot in place, which is how we will do this. We obviously write to individuals when their asylum claim is determined. That is shared with suppliers. We have put in place 50 officers who are working regionally in our accommodation to support people and facilitate their moving out if they are granted asylum and to try to minimise the number who go into homelessness and maximise those who find a sustainable route out. Those are the delivery mechanisms we will use and are already funding and putting in place.

I should add that over the last couple of years the 50 asylum move-on liaison officers have supported 18,000 asylum seekers to move through the system after they were granted asylum.

What are the views of the local authorities at the multi-agency forum you have with local authorities? Are there things that they are asking for—or that you are considering at the moment?

Simon may want to say more on this. We have the asylum and resettlement council senior engagement group, which works jointly with MHCLG. That is senior officials and CEOs. I have not personally attended yet. One of the things we are discussing with them is the case of public protection. The Home Office is jointly putting some work in place with the local authorities to ensure that police forces have information, as well as the local authorities, on the kind of individuals that exist in their area. That is something that we have started working on. I think the local authorities and police forces are very keen to progress, and that is something we are taking forward in the next couple of months.

That sounds very interesting. Do you have a sense of how long it will take to complete that process?

It is work that we have started. Over the last two years, we have increased the amount of information that we can share. I think it is probably fair to say that local authorities want us to share more information more rapidly, particularly about individuals as they move between different parts of our accommodation. I think it is going to be an ongoing thing that we build up over time. There were some issues with data sharing that we need to manage our way through.

There always are—thank you. Finally, why do you think that the sharing of data with local authorities has historically been so inaccurate or unsuccessful?

If I go back to when I started in this role, there was a really difficult relationship—and in some ways a bad one—between some of what my office was doing and local authorities, as we were not sharing enough data. Over the last two or three years, we have sought to build more governance between us to share more information, and we are working very closely with MHCLG. To start to establish a better relationship and way of doing this, we now have monthly meetings at a regional level with councils, the Home Office and our providers about the accommodation in an area, which has moved a long way. We are now seeking to develop that around information about people, so that we can better manage some of these safeguarding issues that we are talking about. That is a different challenge with data sharing, but we now have the relationships and trust to do that.

To bolster that, I have sat on the liaison group, or the asylum and resettlement council engagement group. I do not want to speak for the Local Government Association and the local government sector—they can speak for themselves—but I think they will tell you that, over the last two or three years, both the spirit and content of the relationship with the Home Office have seen a significant improvement. They will always say that there is more to do, but they will report that it has got better.

Can I just ask you a question on this, Simon? One of the problems with dispersal sites has been that the Home Office has not consulted with the relevant authority at an early enough stage, and that has been an ongoing problem. Can we be assured that that is now being addressed?

Yes—at a systemic level, absolutely. As I say, we have monthly meetings and we share the data about the accommodation at a local authority level. We have various tools and assessments, where we assess the amount of dispersal that we are seeking in a local authority area, and that is based on a range of different criteria about the accommodation that they have already, such as social factors and access to public services. Through that, we have managed to increase dispersal. There are still cases where we procure accommodation that a local authority would rather we did not, and there are still cases where we do not get the precise individual consultation quite right. Equally, I was talking to a chief executive earlier today about something completely different, and they were really pleased that we had agreed not to procure some accommodation in their area because of its very specific location.

The question was about dispersal sites. You might identify a large military base, and decide that it is going to be a dispersal site, but you might not go and discuss it with the local authority at an early stage—Northeye is a typical example of that, as we heard in our hearing. Had the local authority been consulted at an earlier stage, it might have made life a lot easier for you.

Apologies, Chair; I was talking about dispersal accommodation, which is the housing around the place that we are looking at. Where we are doing specific work on large sites—Rannia can say more—we engage with the public service providers and local authorities as we move towards a site, but I suspect that it is definitely not as early as they would always like. We have learnt a lot from some of the unsuccessful cases we talked about earlier, as well as some of the more successful cases, such as Wethersfield, but those tend to remain quite challenging conversations.

Rannia can say more, perhaps. As I have just described, we have implemented a lot on how we engage with local authorities on accommodation. We are where we work on individual large sites—we do when we are moving towards using them. We engage with public service providers in the area, as well as the local authority. We are doing that around Crowborough at the moment. That does not prevent some protest about us wanting to use that, but we are doing our engagement in a different way—

I will have to look at the precise recommendation you are talking about, but I can tell you that we are increasing the amount of engagement we do on accommodation on a day-by-day basis.

May I come in? I do not know whether you are referring to what we call our asylum accommodation plans, the plans that we do jointly with the local authority. We do not publish them—the common understanding between us and the local authorities is that they will not be published—but those plans give us the ability to understand how much, potentially, we can expand within a local authority or not. That is the work we have been doing. I can come back on big sites as well.

We are engaging in a much deeper way, month by month, with local authorities about asylum accommodation. We are sharing more data and we are working closely where we seek to implement a large site specifically.

We have instituted a new way of looking at the large sites going live, which is a gate process. That means a couple of things. First of all, before we take a decision on a site, we will do a lot more detailed examination of the site—due diligence, engineering works, or, in the case of sites previously used by the MOD, understanding what the site may have, because that could be old ordnance, and so on. At the same time, we are trying to understand multiple routes to planning, so that we know early on our ability to utilise the site and how that stacks up. Armed with that information, we progress to the stage of checking on accounting officer assurance, as well as ministerial decisions, and then we make the decision to go live. It is a lot more orchestrated and staged than we have done in the past, as I understand it.

The current process will definitely make sure that that does not happen.

No.

I will say something very quickly, because it largely repeats things we have already said, and Josh might then want to say more. On the work that we are doing, we have established regular discussions that include suppliers, strategic migration partnerships and local authorities to look at what our plans are for expanding—where we are expanding—dispersed accommodation, based on a number of factors. That enables local authorities to engage with the plans and the need, but we are then also looking at different ways of delivering accommodation, building on lessons we have learned from some of the work that we have done through Afghan resettlement and other migration programmes run by MHCLG.

We are building on the lessons of the local authority housing fund, which has been very popular with local authorities as a way of delivering accommodation for both domestic temporary accommodation and Afghan resettlement. There is some money set aside from MHCLG to do a similar kind of fund for asylum accommodation. The way that would work is that it would be capital funding for local authorities, which can then go and buy housing that, in the short term, can be leased to the Home Office or Home Office contractors as asylum accommodation. In the longer term, it can then revert to local authority ownership and act as social housing or temporary accommodation. It is bolstering the existing dispersed accommodation model, but it takes a different approach in a way that leaves a lasting asset with the local authority.

On the particular programme that I was talking about, we have not yet done it. We announced that we were going to put funding towards it back in July, and we have had really good conversations with lots of local authorities about how to design it. Is your question more broadly on how local authorities feel about asylum accommodation in general?

As we discussed earlier, I hope the local authority sector would say—and I think they would—that, in general and on average, things are in a better place than they were two to three years ago. As Rannia and Simon have said, there remain some frustrations around whether they always welcome the asylum accommodation being put into the place where it arrives, but I do not know whether Rannia or Simon want to add to that.

We have a systemic approach to it. Sometimes it works well, and sometimes, on the individual cases, it works less well. We sometimes do still surprise local authorities with things that they would rather not have heard at the last minute, and sometimes we can alter our course. Also, this is about continuous, ongoing engagement and data sharing, and that is what we are seeking to do.

Very briefly, Simon, can you just give an update on Crowborough and your negotiations with the local authority?

We are working locally with service providers and the local authority with the aim of using Crowborough as a large site for asylum accommodation.

Thank you. Chris Kane—you have been very patient.

Simon, can I ask you a quick question? You mentioned a few minutes ago that when you are engaging with local authorities, it is definitely not as early as they would like, and I suspect that there is a bit of tension when you do. When you say that it is definitely not as early as they would like, do you think there is still work to be done on how early you engage in finding common ground for what is acceptable to both the Home Office and local authorities?

As I said, I think we are moving in the right direction. Sometimes the things that the Home Office wants to do are not things that the local authority is going to want us to do. I think we have a better approach to it and that we have a better set of relationships, but there is more we will need to keep doing to work with partners.

Sometimes they can get surprised. They can get very late notice. It isn’t just not quite as early as they would like it; it is sometimes incredibly late in the process when they get knowledge of it.

Sometimes it gets to local authorities late. We will seek to improve how we engage as we do it. We need to balance that with the sort of delivery requirements we have.

As a former local council leader—not having direct experience of this, but having spoken to councillors who have—I know that sometimes it is not just that it is not early; it is that it is ridiculously late before they hear what is happening. Do you think that there is an understanding in the Home Office that even if it is difficult, or local authorities do not necessarily want to engage in the way you would like, that is not a reason to keep them in the dark until very late in the process?

I appreciate that. I think we are doing that better than we were a couple of years ago.

One of the things that we are doing in the gated process that I mentioned before is looking at social cohesion. We cannot do this alone without local authorities, so this is part of that process.

Josh, can I ask you a couple of questions? Paragraph 1.13 in the NAO Report says, “Actual spending by local authorities on supporting people seeking asylum is poorly understood.” Again, with my former council leader hat on, I think that is a very good and accurate statement. What are you doing to improve the visibility of actual costs for local authorities?

The amount that we know is driven by the degree of the reporting burden that we put on local authorities. At the moment, we ask local authorities to report on asylum seeker costs through two reporting lines. One is when we break out how much of children’s social care costs are due to asylum. The other is where we ask local authorities to report on where they provide some services directly to adult asylum seekers. We know those amounts. We know that in the children’s social care system for the last financial year, it was £564 million, and for support for adult asylum seekers, it is £121 million nationally. We know that beyond that, there are other areas of spending that local authorities report on where they do not break out how much of it is going to asylum seekers—for example, education services or homelessness services. At the moment, there are no plans to demand more reporting burdens on local authorities. That is something that Ministers could consider.

Why is it that the burden always has to rest with local authorities? Why can the burden not rest with you to get that information? In terms of what is happening with education, language support, integration services and social care—the Report goes into this—you used the language “reporting burden,” but the burden rests with local authorities. How can we change it so that the burden does not rest with local authorities when they are already stretched almost to breaking point with what they can afford to do?

I think that ideas are welcome. How are central Government to know how much an individual local authority—

Giving them more money to employ people to do the reporting burden. The reporting burden is left to be delivered by an increasingly dwindling number of people who can deliver it. You could fund the reporting burden itself with additional people. Could you not do that?

In theory, that is something that you could do. Then it would be a question for Ministers to consider whether it is the best use of the funding that we give to local authorities, and the funding they raise themselves from taxpayers, is on more reporting as opposed to frontline services. That is a choice.

Is it not incumbent upon you to understand that burden without giving local authorities the additional burden of reporting? You talk about the burden of reporting; why do we not talk about the burden of gathering information?

We could call it gathering.

Then it would put the burden back on you, and not on local authorities. I am just trying to investigate why we are not looking at that.

I am not sure how central Government can know how much a local authority is spending on, for example, education services for asylum seekers without asking the local authority. Unless there is some way of not getting the local authority to do it, we are putting a reporting or gathering burden on—

My experience of working in local government is that national Government are very good at placing burdens and responsibilities on local government, but not at following that up with the resources to deliver on those burdens. The disconnect between what you are asking them to do and what you are giving them the funding to achieve almost gets to the heart of the question, in a broader sense. I am looking at the reporting requirement just now, but you are giving them additional things to do. Local government is the coalface of service delivery in a lot of these instances. What are you doing to make sure you give it the resources to meet the burden?

Overall, on how central Government are giving local government enough resources to do what it needs to do, as this Committee will know, in the spending review there was a settlement that gave £5 billion of new grant funding over the next three years to the local government sector. That means core spending power will go up over the course of the spending review. You know all these figures. Is the question specifically—

The question is this. In effect, you are giving them something to do—to deal with the asylum system—but you do not understand how much it is costing them to deliver all the associated services. You think you have an idea, and you have a broad idea. But, as the Report says, when you start interrogating that, you realise you do not have that full system, so the money that you are offering does not cover the costs to local government. We are trying to interrogate how we ensure that local government gets the funding it requires to do the job properly and adequately.

Overall funding to local government is set to increase in line with the spending review settlement. Not only will the overall amount of money going to local Government increase, but the distribution of it will change. Ministers are really clear that the local government funding system of recent years has been broken because, as you say, funding and need have come apart. That is why they are putting in more funding. The way we distribute funding between local authorities will also be revolutionised and swung much more towards looking at population projections, thus reflecting the impacts of migration and deprivation.

I think we have to be careful here. We are getting way beyond the scope of this hearing. Can we bring this more towards immigration, please?

Thank you for that, Chair. My question is specifically about immigration—

We have had two or three.

I will move on. We have the costs of dealing with people when they are going through the system, but when they have left the system and have had a response, how are you ensuring that local authorities have adequate information and resources to manage the impact on homelessness in their areas of people being granted asylum? That is another question for Josh.

As we mentioned earlier, there was this really important commitment in the December national housing strategy—the national plan for homelessness—which is that when anybody is granted refugee status and asked to leave asylum accommodation, the asylum provider will tell the local authority within two days that that person is going to arrive into the local authority homelessness system. That is something local authorities have been calling for for a long time, because they worry about people coming out of asylum accommodation and falling into homelessness. There are also the measures that we talked about before, with asylum move-on liaison officers being placed into the 50 most affected LAs. On top of that, we saw from the spending review last year that there was £3 billion of investment over the next three years in homelessness for local authorities.

As a Scottish MP, I am always interested in how we talk about taking ownership of this when there are devolved nations involved. Perhaps this is more of a question for Simon than for Josh. How are you ensuring that the joined-up approach—the joint ownership of the problem that we heard Jo talk about with justice—is UK-wide and not just about England, given that you are dealing with a devolved situation?

Rannia may want to say something about broader engagement with the devolved Administrations. We are doing a number of things, in the same way as I have talked about engagement with local authorities, in terms of how we are discussing asylum and accommodation in Scotland and Wales. To the funding point, the Home Office gives various grants, and we do that in Scotland and Wales as well as in England, in terms of a fixed grant for every—

It is the ownership part. I am trying to ensure that you are sorting out this problem at a UK-wide level, with robust interactions and connections with the devolved nations as you are setting up within England. It is about giving me a sense that you are looking at this as a UK-wide problem in the way you are tackling it and putting measures in place, and that there will not be an imbalance between what is happening in the devolved nations and what is happening in England.

I do not think that there is. Rannia mentioned some of the senior groups that we have on asylum with local authorities. Those include local authority chief executives and other representatives in Scotland and Wales. All the work that we did on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children jointly with the DfE we also did with local Government and representatives of Scotland and Wales. Where we are doing things on asylum and immigration at a UK level, because it is not devolved, we engage the devolved Administrations.

In terms of that migration of people who have come through the system and are presenting as homeless, they can go to Scotland in a different way than in England. Glasgow has been pretty vocal over the last few months about how it faces a disproportionate share of people who are presenting as homeless after they have been through the system. How are you ensuring that the systems that you are putting in place are mindful of the fact that in Scotland, there is a different approach to how we deal with homelessness, and that the protections baked into the system in England are not the same? I will ask Simon, but maybe Josh also has an opinion.

This is devolved stuff and, as you say, the homelessness rules are different in Scotland than in England in terms of access to temporary accommodation. That is precisely to your point, and it is why we need to engage the devolved Administrations—the chief executives of Glasgow and elsewhere in Scotland—to understand those issues and seek to manage them as best we can.

Do you think that you are?

Well, there are issues that we cannot immediately solve, in that the homelessness rules are different, so the pressures will fall in different ways and the costs might be different. What we can do is to make sure that we understand where the accommodation is and how we can use the support that we can put in place, such as those Home Office officers supporting move-on, to recognise the differences in devolved Administrations and manage that as best we can.

There is a disproportionate number of people arriving in Glasgow to present their homelessness claims, compared with other local authorities in the UK. Are you looking at Glasgow and Scottish cities to ensure you are giving them additional resources to offset the difference in legislation, which is perfectly permissible and allowable within the devolved situation in this United Kingdom?

We need to manage the asylum system and move-on in a way that is consistent and value for money across the UK. Rules and impacts are different in different parts of the UK through the choices of those nations. We need to work with them individually, but we are not giving additional grants in Scotland at the moment.

I am not necessarily saying that they will get additional grants. I am looking for assurance and I am not quite getting it. You are pushing this, and the Chair wants to move on, so let me try one last time. Do you think that the Home Office, and indeed all of this joined-up approach that you are trying to look at, should be not an English approach but a UK approach? Shouldn’t you have the data and structures to ensure that the nuances of devolved legislation—which is how we have chosen to set up our United Kingdom—are feeding into the system, and then make the necessary allowances to deal with that?

We are putting in place the engagement in the same way, understanding the issues where they are different and discussing those impacts where they are. I would hope that that will collectively give us the opportunity to address specific issues where they arise. I am sure that there is more that we can do—as there is in the wider range of engagement work that we are doing.

My questions will be on the cost savings promised in the spending review, and then I will dig into the detail beneath that. The spending review announced £1 billion savings per year up to 2028-29. A footnote to table 5.8 of the comprehensive spending review says that the “Asylum support cost forecasts contain some inherent uncertainty.” Based on that, the IFS has said that there is chronic under-budgeting in asylum main estimates. Do you agree with the IFS? If so, what inherent uncertainty have you presented to the Treasury, and what consequences might that have for future budgeting of that £1 billion?

Perhaps I can separate a couple of issues. First, the spending review talked about a saving of £1 billion by 2028-29, so that is the annual saving at that time—it increases between now and then. That is our goal. The spending review also provided money to support asylum reform, with some of the things we have been talking about today being some of the ways in which we will need to make savings. You are right that for the last few years asylum funding has tended to come through reserve claims at supplementary estimates, which is not the optimal way to manage departmental budgets. That is for a set of historical reasons, in the main. Last year we moved all the funding into the Home Office’s main estimate, which then puts the Home Office in a position to manage those budgets, and as I said, in ’24-25 we saved £700 million and hit our budget of £4 billion. We are making further savings this year. We have got the financial management part of this under much more control in the last 18 months than it was previously. In terms of the inherent uncertainties, there are many—that is not unique to asylum, but there are some specific ones. We do not control the number of people who come into the system, yet we have a series of statutory duties and responsibilities. We do not always control the time that people spend in the system, because some may leave early, some may appeal and some do various other things. All of that is why the systemic approach that the NAO set out, which we have been discussing today, is important. We now have a fixed budget for asylum, and we are seeking to manage within that.

You have mentioned a whole-systems approach today. I think quite a lot of the answers I am getting are Home Office-specific, so I just want to probe you on the whole-systems approach that you mentioned. Are these savings based on a whole-systems approach, or are they savings that they have been identified just from the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office?

The savings I am talking about are savings on the Home Office budget. As the NAO Report says, the vast majority of direct asylum costs and spend are in the Home Office—accommodation, support for unaccompanied asylum seekers and so on. Some of that money, as we have just touched on, we pass through to local authorities, both by supporting councils with more people in accommodation and by supporting councils that take unaccompanied children into care. I am talking mostly about those savings. You are absolutely right about two things. The first is that where we make savings, that could push costs into other areas, whether the appeals system, homelessness or others. That is why it is really important that we are continuing to work together.

The Report says at paragraph 1.12 that there is no cross-Government budget, and at paragraph 2.5 that no one accepts responsibility for governance. Would you accept that because you are the one making the savings, it is a Home Office responsibility to co-ordinate this whole-systems approach?

It is absolutely true that different Departments have separate budgets for these various things. I am the accounting officer for the migration and borders system in the Home Office, and therefore those Home Office costs are my responsibility so that I meet the accounting officer tests and report on them. As part of that, it is really important that I engage with the MOJ, MHCLG and others where it would be possible for us to impose costs on others as we made our own savings, and to make sure that we do that in a way that is best for the taxpayer.

I have three further small points. One of the areas where we will see success is clearing the asylum backlog. Figure 6 in the Report indicates that you have a 35% attrition rate in staff. Can you provide us with detail on the total headcount within the Department over the last five years, and also the attrition rate? My concern is that your attrition rate has actually gone up, and that you are losing staff.

I do not have the past five years of staff numbers with us. We built the asylum decision maker team up to 2,500 as we went through 2023—to clear the backlog—and much of 2024. That number has come down a bit, but partly because we have got on top of the backlog and partly because we are quite rightly increasing our productivity. I do not know whether Rannia has the latest, but we see relatively high attrition in these teams—it is a difficult job. We have built up expertise post the recruitment in 2023 in our management and in our teams to enable a much more sustainable performance, which is what we have seen.

Moving on to transformation programmes, in 2.30, it indicates that major transformation programmes have been delayed and that there are reactive fixes—also highlighted in the Home Affairs Committee report. Do you have a programme grid for change and deliverables to reform technology and transform processes within your Department, or is that an inaccurate review of that internally?

Short answer: yes, we do have a programme of change for technological change in the Home Office, which goes far beyond asylum—

Is there one specifically for your area of—

Yes, and there is a thing called the migration and borders transformation board, which manages our technology change programme for me and the executive committee, in terms of making sure that we are managing within our budget and our timescales, and managing the challenges and contention in that. That is for all of migration and borders, so the e-visa and the ETA transformation programme went through that, alongside changes we are making to Atlas and everything else.

Okay, but the NAO Report said that major transformation programmes are delayed. Interestingly, perhaps that board needs to be held more accountable.

It is worth saying two things. One is that a lot of technology programmes were delayed—the closing down of the case information database was later, which was under a programme that has now closed it, but much later than it had intended. Some of that is about tighter portfolio management and project management. Some of these programmes take quite a long time from inception to completion, and we have seen huge amounts of new change come in and out of the system—for example, the Illegal Migration Act required a lot of technology change, which came into our programme, delayed other programmes and then was not taken forward, because of policy change post the election, quite correctly. We need to manage such things. Some programmes are delayed, but do we have a system to manage our change? Yes, we do.

Lastly, you referenced earlier in an answer to Paul, that an external review of contracts and asylum was taking place. I am interested to know with whom, when that will be published, and whether we can see it in the public domain. Obviously, I am reading that the Home Affairs Committee report on asylum accommodation: paragraph 174 states that you have “never presented a clear strategy for the long-term delivery of asylum accommodation”; and in paragraph 175, a senior manager indicated that there has never been an overarching strategy, telling inspectors, “It was a culture of ‘just do things’”. That is from a neighbouring Committee. Can you tell me what mix of accommodation you want to see in five years’ time? Obviously, you want to get rid of hotels, but what is the ideal end point for the Home Office? What mixture do you want to see?

As we have said before, a series of changes over time were made as circumstances changed. What we want to do now is to set out a more sustainable approach. The first thing we need to do, as a priority, is to come out of hotels, as we have talked about, and the Government are crystal clear about that. We are doing the work, as discussed briefly earlier. Beyond that, on precisely what the long-term accommodation model should be, so that we can make sure we get the best support in place—whether that is commercial with private sector providers, with local authorities or with anyone else—that work is under way. As I think the permanent secretary told the Committee in a previous hearing, we have commissioned a bit of work on commercial procurement from one of the non-executive directors in another Department to provide that analysis and assurance to us.

Lastly, I asked that question because, in paragraph 25 of the Home Affairs Committee’s report on the management of asylum, it has done a cost equivalence that compares hotel costs with medium and large-scale accommodation, which has indicated that it is more expensive to be housing individuals in medium and large-scale accommodation, if you take into account capital costs and other requirements as well. You have a savings target, yet I have not heard your aspiration or where you want to be in five years. You want to close hotels, which is aspirational, but you are looking at moving them into potentially more expensive accommodation. I am trying to square the circle. How are you going to make savings, if you are moving people into more expensive accommodation?

There are a number of ways in which savings can be made, and we are pursuing change in all these areas, as set out in the autumn statement on asylum and returns. We make savings by having fewer people in the system and less intake, which is done by reducing people who come here illegally or who apply for asylum, having come here through other means. We need to increase the speed of throughput, and that is why we are doing our work on initial decisions and appeals. We need to increase returns, so that we are taking more people out of our accommodation and shrinking the population—that is one way in which we make savings. The second way we make savings is by utilising our estate as efficiently and effectively as we can. For example, we will increase utilisation rates, reduce voids and speed up how we move people around the estate, which we do so that we can be as efficient as possible. As you say, the other factor is cost per bed across the estate. Dispersed accommodation is much cheaper than hotels or large sites. It is possible that large sites could cost as much, or conceivably more, than some hotels, and those numbers move around. However, there are advantages to large sites that might make them a value proposition, and that is the work we will do. We will make the savings through a number of different things, not just through the cost per bed.

You have stated there that hotels are cheaper than large-scale sites.

I said they can be.

I would like to see your evidence base for that, because what I understand from the Home Affairs Committee report is the complete opposite—that large-scale sites are much more expensive than hotels.

There are ranges to both, and it depends how long one uses a large site for and how many beds it has. There are different—

Two things. Absolutely, those Reports influence our thinking and we have learned a whole number of lessons about how we can set up large sites in the most value-for-money way, and avoid some of the things that we got wrong last time around. It is possible—and in some cases I am sure—that some large sites will be more expensive than hotels, but that does not mean that we should not do them. There are lots of other advantages to large sites.

It is getting pretty late, and I want to bring in Rupert. Can I just have a note on this question? You did not give a very convincing reply on the attrition rate of your staff at 35%, which is mentioned in figure 6 of the Report. Can we have a note on your retention and recruitment of asylum staff?

Yes.

This has been a very interesting discussion today. I have a very simple question to all of you collectively. Given the damage to Britain’s local communities of the hotel policy, and given the fact that those people who have been damaged are paying for it, will you collectively, across all Departments, commit today to publish more transparently and regularly on the costs around housing tens of thousands of illegal migrants at the taxpayer’s expense?

I think those costs are reported through our annual report and accounts. We will continue to report on the costs of the asylum system, and we are seeking to bring it down.

I have not found it to be transparent myself as an MP, and it has been difficult. We live in a high-trust society, and a lot of the people coming here are not from high-trust societies. I do not think that your short-term, reactive fixes are going to work, so we need absolute clarity on what you are doing, and we need to reassure the taxpayer that it is being done quickly and efficiently.

We are really clear that we need to exit hotels; the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have set that out, so that is a priority for us, and we are working to do that. We have a savings target on asylum, and as I was just saying to Mr Osborne, we are committed to meeting it.

Thank you very much, Rupert and everybody else; this was always going to be a difficult hearing. We are grateful to our witnesses. We were not necessarily going to get the answers that we wanted, and we will look at your evidence very carefully to see where we need to make recommendations in our report. The uncorrected version of the transcript will be available in the next few days. Again, many thanks to you all—you are all busy people.

Sorry; I just have a point of clarification—this is my fault. Earlier in the hearing, when I was talking about uplift of fees for immigration legal aid, my team think I might have said, “for immigration judges”. Can I just clarify that?

I did not hear that, but we will look at the transcript and make sure that it is corrected. Thank you very much for that, Permanent Secretary. Thank you all very much.   [1] Letter from the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice relating to the Committee’s evidence session on 19 January 2026 on an Analysis of the asylum system, 30 January 2026 [2] Letter from the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice relating to the Committee’s evidence session on 19 January 2026 on an Analysis of the asylum system, 30 January 2026 [3]  [4]