Asylum

A claim is made, a first decision follows, a refusal can be appealed, and throughout that time a person may be receiving support. Each stage is counted separately, on its own basis, at its own moment. A figure from one stage tells you little about another.

Those five numbers cannot be added, subtracted or compared with one another. Three are stocks and two are flows; four are on the people basis and one, the appeals queue, is on the cases basis; and that one also comes from a different publisher on a different cycle. See flow and stock and people and cases.

Claims over time

What happens to a claim

Outcomes are counted on the people basis here. Withdrawals and administrative outcomes sit outside the decisions total rather than inside it, which is why grants and refusals sum to the whole.

A refusal at first decision is not the end. For claims made between 2007 and 2022, the Home Office's cohort analysis puts the grant rate at the latest outcome 8 to 29 percentage points above the initial rate for the same cohort, a gap the publisher attributes to appeals and reconsiderations. Claims reinstated after a withdrawal or an administrative outcome may also feed the later figure; that reading is this site's inference, not a link the publisher draws. That is a different cohort from the rate above, and cannot be added to it. Neither "almost all refusals are overturned" nor "a refusal settles it" survives contact with that.

The queue for a first decision

There is no such thing as the backlog

Three different queues get collapsed into one word. They are different sizes, they are counted differently, and they have been moving in opposite directions.

Someone saying "the backlog has halved" and someone saying "the backlog is at a record high" can both be right, about different queues. In the April to June 2026 quarter 11,596 asylum appeals were lodged and 8,709 were disposed of, so the appeal queue grows while the decision queue shrinks. Mean time to clear an asylum or protection appeal was 72 weeks in that quarter, from the Ministry of Justice's asylum and protection table. The bulletin's headline figure of 65 weeks is the chamber-wide one across every case type it hears, so the two are not the same measure and should not be quoted for each other.

Support and accommodation

93,293 people were receiving asylum support at 30 June 2026. Support means accommodation, subsistence payments, or both, so being supported and being accommodated are not the same count: 89,089 people were in accommodation, and the rest received subsistence payments only. Hotels held 16,021 people, around 17% of everyone supported.

These are stocks, counted on one day. They include people at every stage of the system, some waiting since well before the current year, and they are not a count of arrivals. See the full check on whether everyone in asylum accommodation arrived recently. They exclude unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, who are supported by local authorities and counted separately.

Small boats are a route, not the system

33,374 people were detected arriving by small boat in the year ending June 2026, against 85,891 people claiming asylum over the same period.

Small boats are most of the unauthorised arrivals the Home Office detects, but not all of them. Detected arrivals by every illegal route came to 38,086 over the same twelve months, the rest being people arriving by air without adequate documents and people detected inside the UK or at its ports. Detected means detected: the figure cannot count anyone nobody found, so it is a floor and not a total.

Most people arriving this way do claim asylum, so the categories overlap heavily, but they are not the same category. The figure is also published on three bases at once: calendar year, year ending and year to date. Those give three different numbers for what sounds like one thing. Route of arrival also does not determine the outcome of a claim.

Claims that rest on these figures

Each of these checks uses at least one figure from this page. They are the same figures, read against a sentence somebody is circulating.

• Most immigration is asylum seekers. Misuse: category confusion
• Everyone in asylum accommodation arrived recently. Misuse: stock read as flow
• Almost all refused asylum seekers are eventually recognised as refugees. Misuse: appeal success rate generalised to all refusals
• Falling net migration means the asylum system is shrinking. Misuse: one series read as a proxy for another
• A refusal means the original claim was obviously false. Misuse: a legal outcome read as a finding of fact
• The asylum backlog is one number. Misuse: distinct queues collapsed into one figure
• Small boat arrivals are the whole asylum system. Misuse: a route of arrival read as the whole system
• Asylum hotels cost £8 million a day. Misuse: a figure from a past year repeated as current, and hotels read as the whole bill

Every figure on this page

How every figure here is sourced and recorded.

This page was last reviewed on 27 July 2026. Its figures are not a live count; every one was checked against its source on or after 27 August 2026.