The Home Office has admitted it has lost track of migrants with no right to be in UK – but doesn’t know how many – in what MPs have called a “shocking and unacceptable” indictment of the asylum system.
MPs on the public accounts committee (PAC) have called on the government to tell the public how many failed asylum seekers are living in the UK, what they plan to do to trace them, and how they will be deported.
In a damning report on the state of the asylum system published on Friday, MPs said the Home Office was still focused on “short-term fixes” to rising costs and asylum backlogs, and had no “credible long-term strategy” for how it would drive down the billions spent on housing migrants in hotels.
Referring to failed asylum seekers who had exhausted their rights to appeal, Home Office officials told PAC that they know “where some of them are”, but some “not complying with their bail conditions” would be treated as absconders and that the department would “seek to trace them”.
The Home Office also admitted that it does “not count absolutely everybody out of the country” and so does not know who has left the UK – or who still remains. Officials said they knew where the “vast majority” of failed asylum seekers were, but the PAC condemned the situation as “a shocking and unacceptable state of affairs”.
The Home Office does not publish figures on the number of failed asylum seekers it has lost track of but ministers admitted in 2024 that more than 5,000 were missing. At the time, 5,598 asylum seekers who had had their claims withdrawn were still in the UK but had lost contact with the Home Office.
MPs also criticised the Home Office’s ability to get value for money for the taxpayer when managing asylum accommodation contracts. The report said: “While the Home Office asserts that it ‘clawed back £46m of excess profit’ from providers last year, we do not find this wholly reassuring. Rather than showing effective oversight, it highlights weaknesses in the original contract design.”
The report calls for a full review of all hotel contracts to assess whether profit levels are reasonable. Asylum support costs rose to around £4bn in 2024-25, with £2.1bn spent on hotels, according to figures shared by the National Audit Office. The number of people housed in Home Office hotels has declined since the end of 2023, with 20,885 asylum seekers living in this costly accommodation as of March 2026. This is down from 56,042 in the peak of September 2023. More people are now living in dispersal accommodation, such as houses of multiple occupancy in communities. The government is also relying on large sites, such as former military bases, to provide extra housing.
Despite the progress made, MPs on the cross-party committee said there was no “credible long-term strategy to expand dispersal accommodation”. They warned against plans to scale up larger sites.
With increasing numbers of people presenting homeless to councils after being evicted from Home Office accommodation, pressure is being moved on to local councils instead, the report said.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the PAC, said the committee’s findings “paint a disturbing picture”. He said: “The focus on short-term, reactive ‘fixes’ has left the government chasing after pressures pushed from one part of the system to the next. There is no clear strategy uniting these efforts, and engagement across departments and with local authorities is patchy at best. Given senior officials’ inability to articulate what the asylum system is collectively trying to achieve, it is no wonder such a directionless bureaucracy ends with people at the heart of it either left in limbo, or lost entirely.”
He also criticised the Home Office’s handling of a former prison site, in Bexhill, East Sussex, which had been earmarked for migrant accommodation but will now be redeveloped for housing. Sir Geoffrey said: “It is indefensible that accommodation deemed unfit to house asylum seekers is now being looked at as part of plans to increase the UK’s housing stock. If it is not fit for asylum seekers, why is it fit for our homeless population?”
The government has said the site would be made into a housing development by Homes England, in partnership with the council and local community.
The shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, said: “This is what happens when a government scraps every removal mechanism it inherited and replaces it with next to nothing. Over 73,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the Channel under this Labour government and the apparatus to remove those with no right to stay is collapsing,” he added.
Max Wilkinson, Lib Dem home affairs spokesperson, said the report exposed the government’s “failure to fix the broken asylum system left by the Conservatives”.
Steve Smith, CEO of the migrant charity Care4Calais said: “This report reaffirms what we already know. Labour has sped up initial decisions, but poor quality decisions means they’re shifting people from one backlog to another, with the number of appeals soaring. We have tens of thousands of people who are literally stuck in limbo, and for whom the state still needs to provide support to prevent destitution. In order to fix the system, the Labour government needs to invest in the appeals system, including increasing access to legal support, alongside good-quality initial decisions that provide protection to those who need it.”
Imran Hussain, director of external affairs at the Refugee Council, said the report’s call for a more effective asylum system “must make the government rethink its unworkable plans to undertake repeated reviews of refugee status every 30 months, which would be a bureaucratic nightmare and harm efforts by refugees to integrate and find work.”
A Home Office spokesperson told The Independent: “Asylum claims are down, hotel use is falling and immigration enforcement activity is at the highest level on record with the largest number of raids and arrests ever.
“We’ve tracked down and removed nearly 70,000 illegal migrants and foreign criminals since the government took office – a 41 per cent increase. Any asylum seekers who break their bail conditions by absconding will be tracked down and arrested.”
