What Britain’s asylum system really costs

Britain’s argument about asylum is often conducted through symbols: a small boat in the Channel, a hotel in a market town, a deportation flight stopped by a court. Each image is powerful. None, on its own, explains why the system costs so much or why successive governments have struggled to control it.

The clearest audited estimate is £4.9 billion. That is what the National Audit Office calculated the Home Office and Ministry of Justice spent on the asylum system in 2024–25. It is a serious sum and it is incomplete: some local authority costs are not fully captured, while separate expenditure intended to prevent irregular migration is outside the estimate. Equally, it is not the cost of immigration as a whole and cannot properly be presented as such.