Rishi Sunak’s government has no strategy for accommodating asylum seekers and has not learnt sufficiently from failures in Britain’s immigration system, according to the outgoing chief inspector of borders.
David Neal told the Financial Times that ministers in successive Conservative administrations had obstructed the oversight role of the inspectorate and presided over a system that created a tragic “waste of human capital”.
“There is no asylum accommodation strategy” at the Home Office, which had led to major problems of inadequate facilities across the asylum and immigration detention estate, said Neal in his first interview before stepping down next month.
“They don’t identify the lessons, they don’t learn the lessons,” said Neal. “The Home Office doesn’t want to change.”
Neal has for three years run the independent inspectorate for borders and immigration, one of the most highly charged policy issues in the lead-up to the next election.
Ahead of the vote, which is expected this year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to “stop the boats” bringing migrants across the English Channel.
Under Neal’s watch, which has seen five home secretaries and six immigration ministers, the asylum system has struggled with a swelling backlog of undecided asylum cases and successive scandals about dire conditions at some migrant reception and detention centres.
It has also been hit by growing public frustration about the tens of thousands of asylum seekers being housed in hotels at a cost to the taxpayer of up to £8mn a day. According to the latest Home Office figures, the cost of the UK’s asylum system ballooned to £3.96bn in the 12 months to the end of June 2023.
Neal — who previously led the 1st Military Police Brigade, a policing division of the British Army — accused the government of stifling the inspectorate’s work, including regularly delaying release of its reports, redacting parts on opaque national security grounds and “obstructing” access to contracts between government and companies that run services at sites.
Some 13 reports that Neal has submitted to the Home Office since April last year have yet to be made public, including the inspectorate’s annual report for 2022-23.
“There are lots of things that are not going well within the system. It’s a really toxic area. That’s probably why they want to have control of the release of all reports,” he said.
Neal also said he was concerned that the asylum estate was not being expanded quickly enough to meet what is expected to be vastly greater demand once the government’s Illegal Migration Act comes into full force.
Under the legislation, anyone entering the UK via irregular means, including on small boats, would no longer be permitted to claim asylum and would be detained until removal to a safe, third country.
Although it passed into law in July last year, the legislation has not been implemented in full because of the government’s failure to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Neal noted that only a few hundred new accommodation spaces had been created around the UK since last July.
Neal said that while conditions at some asylum sites — including the scandal-ridden Manston detention centre in Kent — had improved since he took the helm, people were still being held in poor conditions at others.
Citing his 26 years of army service, Neal called on the Home Office to put officials on the ground across the asylum estate to “check, check and check again” that things were working as they should and that contractors were complying with standards. “It’s not rocket science,” he added. “Dull is good.”
He pointed in particular to the former air force base at Wethersfield in Essex, which has been converted into accommodation for single men since July 2023 and where more than 500 asylum seekers are “marooned on an island in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do”. Five people at the base had attempted to take their own lives, he said.
“What I see, all the time, is waste of human capital,” Neal said, referring to migrants who waited months or years for an asylum decision, without being able to work or fill their time with meaningful activities.
“It’s a tragedy to see the waste of humankind, when you see doctors, when you see people who are clearly good people, who can’t get on with their lives.”
Neal said relations between the inspectorate and government had improved since James Cleverly became home secretary in November, describing a “change of tone” compared with some of Cleverly’s predecessors who refused to meet him.
Neal also praised the government for reaching its target of recruiting 2,500 asylum caseworkers and for almost entirely clearing the so-called legacy backlog of claims dating from before June 2022.
However, in the rush to clear the backlog, he said the government did not know how many “poor decisions” had been made, which would likely re-emerge as appeals in the future.
He also criticised the government for cutting the inspectorate’s budget by 5 per cent since 2023 to £2.1mn, even as the Home Office’s headcount had jumped 88 per cent since 2008. “We’re suffering the death of a thousand cuts,” Neal said.
A government spokesperson said the Home Office had a “clear strategy to provide sufficient accommodation to asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute”, noting that it continues to “meet all statutory and regulatory requirements and residents have access to health and social care services, including mental health support”.
“We’ve made significant progress moving asylum seekers out of hotels by introducing alternative accommodation, maximising space, and clearing the legacy backlog,” they said.
“It is right that we take time to carefully consider independent reports. We continue to support . . . inspection activity and are committed to implementing recommendations.”
