Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 6
Seventy-Sixth Report - The Asylum Transformation Programme
Published 27 Oct 2023
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee The Asylum Transformation Programme All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
The Home Office failed to convince us that it understands the full implications of its programme on the wider asylum system, affecting the ability of others to plan. The current business case for the asylum and protection transformation programme is incomplete and unrealistic. The Home Office acknowledged that it has not looked broadly enough at the impact of rapidly clearing its asylum backlog, and that its business case ignores the challenges and costs that bodies such as Immigration Enforcement and the courts will need to overcome to avoid creating new backlogs. The Home Office will not be updating its business case until early 2024, at least six months later than it had told the NAO and after the date it expects to have made decisions on all of the older, ‘legacy’ cases. This delay means other organisations in the wider asylum system cannot make informed plans and makes it more likely that new backlogs will appear elsewhere in the asylum system. Recommendation 6: The Home Office should publish its updated business case so the intentions and impacts of the Programme are clear and transparent to Parliament, the public and other organisations. In its Treasury Minute response, the Home Office should set a date by which this business case will be published. 8 The Asylum Transformation Programme 1 Working through the backlog of asylum decisions
From: Public Accounts Committee, Seventy-Sixth Report - The Asylum Transformation Programme (HC 1334), 27 October 2023
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 14 February 2024 (deadline 27 December 2023).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees with the Committee's recommendations on the asylum backlog, the streamlined process and local authority engagement, and disagrees with those on hotels, safeguarding and publishing the Programme Business Case.
- On the backlog, the government agrees with the recommendation, describes it as implemented and says the legacy backlog target has been met; it says flow claims "will be prioritised from 2024 onwards".
- On hotels, it disagrees with the recommendation to set out how and by when it will stop using them, but says it has "plans in place to close over 50 hotels before the end of January 2024" and will keep modelling assumptions "under regular review".
- On local authorities, it agrees, with a target implementation date of "iterative to December 2025", and says pilots with London, Wales and South West England will run between January and March 2024.
- It disagrees with publishing the Programme Business Case, stating that "it is not standard practice" to do so, and offers a private meeting with the Committee once HM Treasury approves it, which it anticipates by "the Summer of 2024".