Although the department has allocated £110 million for “asylum operations” over the last three years, a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) analysis revealed that real spending throughout that period has averaged £2.6 billion annually.
In addition to emergency and various forms of housing for asylum seekers, special visas, humanitarian protection, and resettlement programs, including those for Ukraine and Afghanistan, are all included in asylum operations. Among the main causes of the Home Office’s excessive spending were these elements.
Max Warner, an IFS research economist, stated that exceeding budget was “entirely understandable” in cases of “a one-off unexpected spike.
He additionally stated: “When it is happening year after year, something is going wrong with the budgeting process.”
The IFS accused the Home Office of forming a “bad habit” of presenting its first budgets to parliament at the start of the year knowing that the money would not cover all of the costs; instead, the Home Office would rely on extra funding from the Treasury’s reserve fund, which added up to £4 billion last year.
