Shabana Mahmood is a really horrible person whose policies are cruel. She’s one of the worst people in the Labour administration and should be fired immediately.
Asylum seekers in the UK are generally not allowed to work while they are waiting on a decision on their claim. If they have been waiting for more than a year, then they can apply for permission to work.
As a result, they are reliant on the Home Office for housing and support as they cannot work to pay for accommodation.
Marley Morris, associate director at the IPPR, said there are “better ways of bring down” costs of asylum such as “speeding up asylum processing and appeals, reforming the existing asylum contracts”.
To fill you in on the financial situation. Last year supporting asylum seekers cost the UK taxpayer £4.3 billion (office of national statistics).
So in the grand scheme of things £12m a day is a lot of money even at a national level. The income tax contribution from the lowest 10% of workers isn’t quite enough to cover this cost (HMRC 2026 tax bulletin).
…so in simple terms all of the income tax paid by millions of workers in part time jobs is spent supporting asylum seekers.
Obviously this year’s figures aren’t out yet but they are expected to be a little bit below last year’s because Labour have not renewed the hotel contracts the Tories set up, have increased the speed of processing a lot, reduced the evidence needed for a successful claim, have worked with french authorities to reduce people trafficking and are returning people with no legitimate asylum claim (whereas the Tories did nothing).
The cost could be reduced to about half by providing larger more specialised facilities for single, male asylum seekers but that’s seen as a bad thing.