What is the Asylum System for?

The purpose of a system is what it does

Political obedience resulting predominantly from consent…not only allows the social contract…to be virtually open-ended in scope, but actually thrives on its ceaseless enlargement.

-Antony de Jasay, The State

Asylum is a big issue in UK politics. In 2023, something like 84,000 asylum-seekers (not including Ukrainian refugees and family reunions, who took the number to just over 140,000) came to the country. After appeals, it can be expected that roughly 60% of these people will be granted the outcome they seek (for the last ten years this has been the average rate), which is obviously to be granted leave to remain. As of June 2024 there were 224,742 cases ‘in the system’, meaning people who were waiting for a decision and those who were waiting for the outcome of an appeal having been initially refused asylum, alongside the 41,200 people in the country who had come to claim asylum, been refused, and exhausted all avenues of appeal, but were still here for some reason or other.

It is apt to use of the word ‘system’ to describe this. An elaborate administrative apparatus has had to be set up to deal with all of these people and the baggage, so to speak, both literal and metaphorical, which they bring with them. But what is the purpose of this system? What ends does it serve? What are we doing this for?

The English operational research theorist and cyberneticist Stafford Beer (one of the most sinister figures of the twentieth century, though that is a story for another post) was wont to remark in speeches that The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. This has become a fairly well-known phrase and internet meme, often deployed by critics of the ‘deep state’; it is really a value-neutral observation to the effect that, in seeking to understand a ‘system’, it is better to begin with what it appears to be achieving rather than looking at the motives, ideologies, and rhetoric of those engaged in it. This is because any ‘system’ as such is not the product of one mind, or one desired outcome, but really a product or amalgamation of many minds coming at the issue from myriad angles and with myriad desired outcomes - and any effect it produces will necessarily consist of consequences that are both intended and unintended or accidental. Instead of asking what the system is intended to achieve, then, it may be more productive to simply examine it as a Martian would and look at what it actually does achieve, and go from there.

This exercise is I think revealing. What it reveals is that the problem facing the UK, and indeed most European countries, with regard to immigration in the round is not that our elites have come to believe in ‘open borders’, but that the system produces an outcome far more malign and stupid than that. The concept of ‘open borders’, if realised, would pose problems of its own. But they are not really our problems. Our problems are far worse.

In this post, then, I would like to spend a little bit of time discussing a single case, decided in 2022 in the Administrative Court, which I came across recently in reading for a bigger project and which helps us to hold this issue of ‘the purpose of the system’ up for examination. My intention in doing so is not initially to suggest improvements in the law or offer a philosophical analysis of what is taking place. Rather, my aim is really just to let the facts speak for themselves. The value of doing this, as I will then show, is that it helps us to better discern what is really going on - to, as I have said, look at the system and its purpose as a Martian would.

The case is R (MG) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC 1847 (Admin). It concerned a near-fatal series of stabbings that took place in the Park Inn, a hotel in Glasgow city centre, on 26th June 2020, when an asylum seeker from Sudan who was being housed at the hotel, Badreddin Adam, went on a knife-wielding rampage and wounded six people before being shot dead by police. One of his victims, a fellow asylum-seeker anonymised as ‘MG’, was a national of the Ivory Coast who suffered severe injuries (and indeed subsequently had to have his pancreas removed). In this case he (unsuccessfully) sued the Secretary of State for the Home Department on various human rights grounds - the main one being that, in failing to ensure that residents at the hotel were protected from violence, she had violated the so-called ‘low level systems duty’ of adopting effective administrative measures to safeguard life arising under Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Here, I will confine my remarks mostly to the judge’s statement of facts (the actual judgment, in the end, was a perfectly sensible application of the existing law) because they so strikingly illustrate the strangeness of the position in which we have found ourselves.

The first thing to observe is the existence of a veritable industry that has arisen around the asylum system in the UK. The judgment of Johnson J pithily describes the legal and commercial bases for this. First, s. 95 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 requires the Home Secretary to provide accommodation and financial support to asylum seekers who would otherwise be ‘destitute’ while they wait for a decision on an asylum claim. There is also a further Russian-doll style requirement under s. 98 to provide accommodation and financial support to people who are waiting for a decision on eligibility for s. 95 support; I suppose we will at some point also have to fund a scheme to provide support for people who are waiting for a decision on s. 98 eligibility too. (I know an old lady who applied for s. 98 asylum support….) As it happens, there is actually a third category of support, under s. 4, though the judgment does not mention this, for people who have had an asylum application refused and are awaiting deportation or the outcome of an appeal.

Second, an ecosystem of private providers has arisen in connection with these duties. In order to fulfil the s. 95 and s. 98 (and s. 4) requirements the government enters into ‘Asylum Accommodation and Support Services Contracts’ (AASSCs) with certain service providers - Serco (for the Midlands, East of England and North West), Mears Group (for the North East, Yorkshire and Humberside, Scotland and Northern Ireland), and Clearsprings Ready Homes (for the South and Wales). These providers do very nicely out of these arrangements - the Home Office spent something between £4bn-£5bn in FY2023/24 alone on ‘asylum support’ in general, of which the lion’s share will have been taken up by AASSCs. And they are not the end of it: on top of this, the government also has an ‘Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility Contract’ (AIRE) with Migrant Help, a quote-unquote, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, ‘charity’, under which the latter provides information, advice and assistance to ‘service users’ (i.e., people waiting to have asylum claims processed) and a ‘safeguarding hub’ to help provide support to ‘vulnerable’ such service users in return for an initial estimated fee of £235 million. I use the phrase ‘initial estimated fee’ advisedly - the initial cost-estimate for AASSCs was £4bn spread across 2019-2029; but that figure now represents roughly their annual cost. So the value of the AIRE contract could in fact be much higher than £235 million.

As of December 2024 there were 109,100 asylum seekers being housed through s. 4, s. 95 or s. 98 support in the country. These people all have to be accommodated somewhere, and there is already a housing shortage in the UK, so it turns out the solution is…hotels. But (I really mention this as an aside) it is interesting the extent to which this practice skyrocketed during the first lockdown. This, as the judgment makes clear in MG, was really the trigger for the shift to using hotels en masse:

In March 2020 restrictions were imposed on freedom of movement because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to reduce movements and the impact on local authorities those who had their asylum claims decided, and would not ordinarily continue to be eligible for accommodation, remained accommodated by service providers. This was part of a broader ‘Everyone In’ campaign, which aimed to ensure that emergency housing was available for those who would otherwise be rough sleepers. This resulted in a substantial increase in the accommodated asylum population, with a commensurate drain on available accommodation. As a result, the defendant [i.e. the Home Secretary] sought to use hotels to ensure there was sufficient capacity.

I was unable to find figures on the level of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers prior to the first lockdown, but we can assume it was very low - by the end of March 2020 (i.e. when the first lockdown was in full swing) the number was 1,200. At the material time, though, when Adam went on his rampage, the number had swollen considerably, although the judgment is a bit ambiguous regarding the figures (it cites 5,000 beds across 50 hotels, but it is unclear whether this refers to one provider or all providers). In any event the number as of 30th September 2024 was around 35,000. Lockdown, in other words, played an important role in the story of how ‘asylum hotels’ arose in the first place - a fact that, as with so much about that period, has been entirely consigned to the collective memory hole.

What is life like in an asylum hotel? The judgment reveals an odd sense of entitlement among the ‘service users’. Bearing in mind that these are supposed to be refugees fleeing torture, genocide and civil war, and that they were provided with full board accommodation in a not-terribly disappointing setting (the Park Inn has since been rebranded, but it certainly doesn’t seem to have been a mere flop-house), the comments provided in evidence in MG do not demonstrate the existence of a huge degree of gratitude among the newcomers for having been given safe haven and financial support. ‘There were complaints about the quality of the food,’ we are told, and service users were annoyed the hotel doors were locked at 11pm. ‘Welfare teams were in each hotel and met with each service user each day to check that they were well, eating and had access to any necessary hygiene products’, but one man who gave evidence on behalf of the claimant said that he was ‘unhappy that he was told that he could take drinking water from the tap (which he thought was undignified), rather than being provided with bottles of water’ and that he ‘made many complaints’. The service users apparently ‘felt like prisoners who were not being listened to’.

What, though, about the backstories of the chief protagonists? Mr Adam, the eventual knife-attacker, had left Sudan in January 2017, going from Libya to Italy, then Germany, where he claimed asylum. He then left Germany in May 2019 and went to France, then to Ireland, and then to Belfast. He was eventually arrested in December 2019 attempting to go by ferry from Belfast to Scotland, whereupon he claimed asylum. He was provided with accommodation in Belfast and support under s. 95, but then absconded to England where, in February 2020, he tried to claim asylum again (in Croydon of all places) using an alias - but this was discovered through a biometric check. He was transferred to the Park Inn in Glasgow in April 2020.

His claim for asylum seems to have rested in his having once been ‘arrested’ in Sudan and hit on the head. And there was plainly something not quite right about him psychologically - he was by all accounts constantly complaining of either health problems or noise. But he was also, equally plainly, a bit of a chancer. Whatever had happened to him in Sudan, he eventually applied in May 2020 to return there voluntarily. And by the middle of June he was complaining that he could not afford a ticket to London to get the documents he needed from the Sudanese Embassy in order to get home. This does not on its face sound like the behaviour of a man with a bona fide claim to be a refugee.

And the backstory of the claimant, MG, likewise does not reveal facts that on their face leap out as being worthy of an asylum claim. We are told that he came to the UK in December 2019 and was given an asylum screening interview in June 2020. Apparently he ‘had never been exploited or had reason to believe that he was going to be exploited’ and ‘had said that before he came to the UK his father had sent some men to beat him up and that they then ran away’. This, it appears, was the basis for his plea for asylum - a sad story, perhaps, if true, but not exactly suggestive of a reason for being granted permanent residence in the UK.

The timelines in respect of both men are in any event revealing. One of the elementary legal provisions from which the framework of the modern asylum system springs is Article 31 of the Refugee Convention 1951. It reads:

The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened […] enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence.

The crucial point here is that one is entitled to make illegal entry and be treated as a refugee if one has ‘presented oneself without delay’ to the authorities and has ‘show[n] good cause’. Mr Adam, it will have been noted, never ‘presented’ himself at all - he only applied for asylum after he was discovered on a ferry going between Northern Ireland and Scotland. And it is rather doubtful that he had ‘good cause’ for being present; he’d already been granted asylum in Germany. MG, meanwhile, hardly appears to have presented himself to the authorities ‘without delay’, there having lapsed six months from the time of his arrival in the country to his asylum screening interview (although it may perhaps be granted that the system is achingly slow). And could he really be described as having ‘come directly from a territory where his life or freedom was threatened’?

What eventually happened, at any rate, was that whatever was wrong psychologically with Mr Adam manifested itself on the 26th June 2020 in a stabbing spree in the hotel. Having started to make disturbing comments about needing to stab people, he later apparently seized a steak knife from somewhere and began attacking his fellow residents (including the claimant), staff, and then the police themselves when they were summoned. He was eventually himself killed.

And, as is the way of things, there followed a review, or more accurately two reviews. The first is a so-called Fatal Accident Inquiry, the Scottish equivalent to an inquest, which is shortly to begin (a mere five years after the incident itself) after an initial referral by the Scottish Fatalities Investigation Unit. And the second was a a review by the then-head of Asylum Operations for UK Visas and Immigration, a certain Heather Laing, who interviewed various service users and reported the usual ‘key findings and recommendations’. These included giving hotel staff in asylum hotels training ‘that would enable them to identify if a service user’s mental health was deteriorating’ in order to make reports to Migrant Help’s safeguarding hub, and ‘increasing the areas in Scotland in which asylum seekers can be accommodated’ - presumably to reduce reliance on hotels across the board. In a classic specimen of modern day managementspeak, she also advocated that there be adopted ‘a person centric view of interactions across the system’ to identify ‘patterns of conduct that may be indicative of behaviours that may be cause for concern’.

What, then, would our Martian friend make of all of this? How would he, she (or they) describe what is going on?

Well, the position seems to be: basically anybody from anywhere in the world can pitch up in the UK and make a prima facie claim for asylum in more or less any circumstances whatsoever (for example, after having been arrested on a ferry). Once they have done this, there has to be a lengthy process during which the bona fides of the claim are ascertained, and during which the person receives financial support, the necessities of life, and accommodation (with financial support, the necessities of life, and accommodation being provided while they wait for a decision to be made about their eligibility for these ‘services’). All of this is, naturally, at the British taxpayer’s expense. Eventually it may be the case that an asylum claim will fail - but after that deportation will not necessarily follow, and in any case further support will be given until such a time as it takes place.

Because there are too many people availing themselves of this ‘service’ (in this case the word seems entirely appropriate) for us to physically house, we, rather than placing a cap on numbers, then pay a premium rate to house the excess in hotels, while investigating whether we should ‘increase the areas’ across the country in which housing can be sourced. And we don’t turn these people away if they are dangerous or mentally disturbed (or possessing criminal intent) - indeed, we presume that even if they are dangerous or mentally disturbed this should be identified so that they can be safeguarded as ‘vulnerable’. And when they end up doing dangerous things, rather than interrogating whether we ought to be allowing anybody to pitch up in the country and claim asylum willy-nilly, we sit about asking how we can better make ‘interactions across the system’ more ‘person centric’ so that we can ‘identify patters of conduct that may be indicative of behaviours that may be cause for concern’ after we have accepted somebody as a ‘service user’.

Would our Martian describe this as a regime of ‘open borders’? It doesn’t seem like the appropriate expression. Open borders, which is to say freedom of movement between jurisdictions, is one thing. And I think in a way it would be preferable to the system that has emerged, if subject to the proviso that non-citizens are not entitled to welfare. (That would at least result in a self-selecting cohort of immigrants who are likely to be economically productive.) What we have is something very different, which is to say a system which advertises to the world something like the following: come to the UK so we can take on responsibility for your problems and your subsistence. Come to the UK so we can provide you with a basic level of social security. Come to the UK so that we can try, in our own haphazard and ramshackle way, to regulate you and whatever issues you might have. Come to the UK to be managed.

The borders, it is important to emphasise, are in other words still there. We don’t have too much of a problem identifying a very large number of people who come to the country each year and who are then parsed into ‘the system’ when we could just as easily deport them. It’s just that we seem to want more and more people to come within the borders so that we can manage them. It is as though the modern welfare state, imbued with its managerial ethos, and having saturated its supply of domestic recipients, has decided that it is going to try to provide its services to an international market instead. It is not a system of open borders at all, then - it would be much more accurately labelled a system of open management.

There is something bleakly amusing in this - a sort of gallows humour of the ‘better to laugh than cry’ variety. How many problems have been created because of a simple failure to draw a clear line between those who should be entitled to live in the country, and should be entitled to welfare, and those who should not? Why are we incapable of solving problems, in preference to merely managing them in perpetuity? The closing statement of Heather Laing’s report, cited in the judgment, nicely illustrates the grim irony at work:

Whilst the context for [the events on the 26th June 2020] was the experience of asylum seekers in Glasgow during COVID-19, it is clear that there are systemic issues to be addressed. Due consideration should be given to publishing [my] recommendations. It would be prudent to revisit the recommendations [of earlier reports conduced before the lockdown] and any relevant recommendations from the other lessons learned that are underway and bring them together to form a single programme of work that is managed through the Partnership Board.

It is not clear what is meant by the ‘Partnership Board’ (the report, it turns out, was never published), but the import of the statement is clear enough: the person who is in charge of making recommendations regarding the ‘systemic issues’ raised in respect of this case does not particularly want to solve, but manage them. And it is significant in this connection that she herself appears so wedded to the concept of management that she is incapable of communicating coherently, or cogently, beyond the confines of what a manager would be expected to say (‘any relevant recommendations from the other lessons learned that are underway’; ‘patterns of conduct that may be indicative of behaviours that may be cause for concern’). This is, I’m sure you will agree, ridiculous stuff - but it is pointedly ridiculous. It reveals the quintessentially managerial nature of the exercise and the ‘leadership’, if I can call it that, within the system as such.

Our Martian friend, then, would have to say that, since the purpose of a system is what it does, and since what the system apparently does is to realise a project of open management, then that is its purpose. The system is for providing welfare to those who come to the UK to seek asylum, and for managing their problems in perpetuity - in short, for governing them. What insights does this yield?

No doubt there are many reasons for this state of affairs having arisen - economic, philosophical, political, moral, theological, even psychosexual. But I come back once again to the subject of the consequences of political modernity as such. The modern State, quintessentially, governs in the sense that it modulates, or regulates, the temporal forces which are at work within its domain. Shorn of any spiritual or theological grounding, it becomes a matter of what Strauss calls ‘political hedonism’ - the maximisation of utility through politics. This sounds grand, but in practice it simply tends to end up meaning that the State engages in the careful and continuous management of different interests, needs, desires and conflicts so as to make some claim to be better than any other alternative. The modern State bills itself as the solution, in other words, precisely to the existence of a lack of homogeneity of preference.

This, perversely, means that the modern State not only tolerates but actively desires a certain, optimal level of heterogeneity and conflict so as to put itself in a position to manage the consequences, since that is its raison d’etre. It ideally keeps such heterogeneity and conflict in a kind of inverse, mutant form of Pareto efficiency, wherein the State achieves the minimum level of utility necessary to ensure that every single individual in society would, on balance, prefer the State to exist than for it not to. Everybody miserable but nobody quite miserable enough to prefer anarchy.

And in this respect what I have called the State’s drive to exert ‘mastery of the world itself’ takes on a different aspect. Since the purpose of the State is to govern, and since there are no principled limits on the scope of this ambition, then we should expect nothing less than a desire to govern more and more people, in ever greater variety and ‘diversity’ and - ideally - with ever greater need for governance in light of their ‘vulnerability’ and specific needs. This simply means there are more problems to manage - and, since management is the stuff of modern government, then all’s the better for it. And it also means that governing ‘the world’ quite literally takes on the meaning of bringing ‘the world’ within the State’s embrace so as have more and yet more to manage. The more diverse, and the more problematic, the better - at least to the optimal level I earlier identified. The purpose of the asylum system, in other words, would seem to be to service an urge that runs very deep in our governing arrangements: the impulse, ultimately, to govern the world as such. It represents the desire to bring all, literally all, to the crucible of the State’s management function - and thereby bind the State and the world in unity.

This is the true meaning and import of open management. And through identifying and naming it, its purpose begins to be revealed. The borders, then, are not really the issue. The issue sprouts from deeper roots which tap down into origins of modernity itself: the will to govern, and the unmooring of the state from its proper grounds. The purpose of the system is what it does, and what the system does is manage. That is its purpose, because that is the State’s purpose: it is what it is for.

There is no easy remedy to this problem: it is the central one of political modernity. Stated crassly, it ends with the end of modernity itself. But in the meantime we might at least start asking ourselves, and our politicians, whether what we really want is management - or for problems to be effectively solved.