The National Audit Office has this morning published a report on the Home Office’s asylum and protection transformation programme. It is not pretty reading. Asylum support costs have soared to an astonishing £3.6 billion this year, double last year’s amount. Sunak’s target of clearing the ‘legacy’ asylum backlog by December 2023 may well be missed without further fairly drastic action, as I have repeatedly suggested was the case. And the ‘new’ backlog is anticipated by the Home Office itself to reach 84,000 by the end of this year. Almost all of whom, according to the Illegal Migration Bill, will never have their asylum claims considered and must be supported pending their supposed removal to Rwanda.
We’re not writing it all up as a full blog post. It’s just too tiresome at this point because we’ve already made these points over and over again. There’s a press release, summary and full report you can check out, and I picked out a few passages on Twitter:
