How UK’s spending on refugees has shot up 100-fold in charts – as figure hits £3.6billion
Net migration soared above 600,000 in 2022 for the first time on record. From them came almost 75,000 asylum applications - the greatest total in nearly two decades. A glance at the public finances shows the Home Office has lost control.
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The National Audit Office (NAO) – the Government’s spending watchdog – has warned plans to reform the asylum system were not on track amid spiralling spending.
A total of 606,000 people migrated to the UK last year, more than any other on record. By the end of March 2023, roughly 173,000 asylum seekers were awaiting an initial decision, with the Home Office providing accommodation for around 109,000 of them.
Housing these arrivals is becoming increasingly difficult by the day. With existing migrant camps overflowing, thousands are being lodged in hotel rooms. A recent Select Committee heard that this policy alone was costing the taxpayer £5.6million a day.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s Illegal Migration Bill – currently making its way through the Lords – includes provisions hoped to ease some of this pressure by making it easier to send back those who enter the country illegally.
But the NAO says urgent action is needed – aid spending on refugees was 115 times higher in 2022 than it was a decade earlier.
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A look at the accounts of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office shows £3.69billion went towards providing asylum seekers and refugees in the UK with food, accommodation and other basics last year.
This is a 350 percent increase on 2021’s tally and orders of magnitude beyond the £32million spent in 2013.
The European migrant crisis in 2015 – primarily driven by Syrians fleeing the raging civil war in their home country – saw costs swell to a then-record £410million in 2016.
By the end of that year, the asylum backlog was still below 25,000, and costs levelled off until 2020.
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The Government has been attempting to reign in aid spending since the pandemic due to the blow it inflicted on public finances.
As a “temporary measure”, it was announced in 2020 that Official Development Assistance (ODA) would be reduced from 0.7 percent to 0.5 percent of the country’s Gross National Income (GNI), and would remain at this level until at least 2027/28.
International aid rules allow for the cost of housing refugees for the first year to come from this budget.
Although aid expenditure did fall 21 percent to £11.4billion in 2021, the share of ODA taken up by looking after domestic refugees shot up. It accounted for just 3.2 percent in 2016, hitting 28.9 percent in 2022.
The NAO singled out delays in asylum decision-making as one of the key reasons driving up costs. This prevents would-be refugees from gaining the right to work and secure private accommodation in the UK, in turn clogging up temporary accommodation facilities.
The proportion of cases taking over six months to process hit 75 percent in the year ending March 2023 – affecting 129,000 people – compared to just 41 percent over the same period in 2017.
The Home Office forecasts its asylum reform programme to cost £430million, and yield savings of £15billion over the next decade. The NAO said the case supporting this was based on “highly uncertain assumptions”.
