Home Office loses 21,000 asylum seekers in 5 years

MORE than 20,000 asylum seekers have gone missing in Britain over the past five years, the Daily Mail can reveal.

Figures obtained from the Home Office show that officials have been unable to locate at least 21,107 foreign nationals who claimed to be refugees.

The vast majority of those who have disappeared have no right to remain in the UK because their claims have been refused or withdrawn – and the true figure will be far higher as the data covers only the five years up to September 2023.

One senior Tory MP said last night that the details – obtained by the Mail using the Freedom of Information Act – showed that the asylum system needed a ‘total reboot’.

It comes a week after the Government finally began detaining migrants who have no right to be in the UK for removal to Rwanda. The Home Office’s programme saw an undisclosed number held in detention centres ahead of the first flights, which Rishi Sunak has said will begin eight to ten weeks from now.

The Home Office figures showed that 21,107 asylum cases were logged on a special database – known as ‘service to file’ – because officials did not know where they were and had no way of contacting them. Guidance for staff states that ‘service to file’ is used only ‘where a claimant’s whereabouts or place of abode is unknown’ and ‘every possible effort’ has been made to contact them. The document adds: ‘Service to file is the last resort and you must not consider it unless reasonable efforts have been made to serve the asylum decision to the claimant or their representative.’

Speaking anonymously, a civil servant familiar with the process said that migrants can be lost if they move to a new address or change lawyers without telling the Home Office.

‘If they knew where the applicant was, or could track them, they would not have served the decision to file,’ the source said.

‘A decision can only be served to file when an applicant doesn’t have an address on record, or that address is no longer valid, and when they have no legal representative. In practical terms, it means they don’t know how to find the applicant. They serve it to file only after checking all databases, addresses and so on, and still finding nothing.’

The 21,107 ‘service to file’ cases were either rejected, withdrawn or categorised in another way. The figure counts only the main applicant in each family, and does not include spouses, children or other dependants.

Three quarters of the total, 16,012 cases, were withdrawn or listed as ‘void’, the data showed.

Last November the Home Office’s second permanent secretary Simon Ridley explained to MPs that cases are withdrawn when ‘individuals do not show for an interview twice or if individuals do not respond to requests for questionnaires twice’.

Some 3 per cent of the total, 752 cases, involved asylum claims which had been refused – meaning the applicant is liable for removal from Britain.

The remainder were categorised as ‘other’, which could mean the claim had been rejected or the applicant had died or gone to another country.

In addition to the 21,107 cases, the Home Office granted the asylum claims of a further 1,159 people but could not locate them.

It is understood the true scale of the problem was not known until civil servants accelerated asylum processing last year. At that stage they began to realise they had no current address for thousands of people they needed to contact. Almost 9,500 migrants were found to have vanished from their last known addresses between January and September last year alone, when officials were pushing to fulfil Mr Sunak’s pledge to clear a backlog of cases.

Conservative MP Neil O’Brien said: ‘This again shows why we need to totally reboot the asylum system to stop people coming here in such enormous numbers.

‘We need a much simpler system without endless appeals. This would allow arrivals to be detained, processed and – where appropriate – removed.’

He added: ‘People spend years and years lodging appeals. The numbers are so high that they cannot all be detained. And eventually it becomes impossible to track them down after they vanish into the black economy.’

Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK which campaigns for tougher border controls, said: ‘This is the kind of information the Government should be publishing regularly as a matter of course so people can make informed judgments about the state of our asylum system.’

Enver Solomon of the Refugee Council said: ‘It’s hugely concerning to see the Home Office losing touch with so many people. This is a direct result of having chaotic systems, with applicants made to wait months and even years in the system without any updates.’

A Home Office spokesman said last night: ‘It is inaccurate to suggest that all individuals within this cohort have gone missing. While some asylum seekers have left the UK, others will have withdrawn their applications, pursued another for permission to stay, or made contact with us again.’

‘Vanish into the black economy’