A think tank has blamed “woeful budgeting” at the Home Office for repeated overspending on asylum support.
Over the last three years, the department’s initial estimated budgets for asylum, border, visa and passport operations amounted to £320m. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said it had ended up spending £7.9bn over the period, £7.6bn more than forecast. The IFS also warned the department had submitted figures it “knows to be insufficient” for this year.
The think tank said the higher spending reflected an increase in the number of people seeking asylum and the cost of housing people in accommodation like hotels. It said there was also increased spending on special visa and resettlement schemes, most notably for Afghanistan and Ukraine. However, the think tank said asylum costs had now been elevated for several years so higher spending was “entirely foreseeable”. A Home Office spokesperson said: “This government is determined to restore order to the asylum system so that it operates swiftly, fairly, and in the interest of taxpayers.
The department said the “costly” Rwanda deportation scheme had been scrapped and it was also “taking immediate action to clear the asylum backlog and reduce the use of expensive hotels”. Last month Chancellor Rachel Reeves put an estimated £6.4bn asylum overspend at the heart of a £22bn “black hole” in spending for this year which she said she had inherited from the Conservatives.
A Labour spokesperson accused the previous Tory government of having “covered up the true extent of the crisis” in the Home Office. They knowingly overspent on departmental budgets, covered it up, called an election and ran away from the problem, leaving a £22bn black hole in the country’s finances for Labour to clean up,” they told BBC News. The Conservatives have been contacted for comment. The Tories have previously insisted they were open about the state of the public finances while in power and disputed the idea of hidden overspends.
Source: BBC
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