UK wasted £38 billion on migrant arrival programmes, Oxford report finds

Poor co-ordination and 'crisis mentality' criticised for hindering community integration

A lifeboat crew rescues migrants in the English Channel. A report has found that the UK wasted £38 billion over a decade on migrant welcoming schemes. PA

Britain has wasted more than £38 billion ($51 billion) on its welcoming schemes for migrants over the past decade, a report has found.

The programmes to adjust and integrate migrants had been “poorly co-ordinated and driven by a reactive crisis mentality”, Oxford's University’s Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity research project found.

The Future of Welcoming in the UK report disclosed that the overall costs of supporting newcomer communities from 2014 to 2024 totalled £20 billion over 26 funding streams, but came to £38 billion when adjusted for inflation.

At least 54 migrants dead in shipwreck off Yemen

Read More

This major overspend came from finding accommodation for asylum seekers who had fled Afghanistan, Syria, Hong Kong and Ukraine.

The report was critical that after “front-end welcoming” during the first months after entering the UK, there was “little focus on longer term integration” that included broader community consent for migration.

Migrant communities were targeted by hard-right anti-immigration groups in Britain last summer with a series of riots that shocked the country.

Anti-migrant protesters in Epping, south-east England, this summer. Getty

It was therefore important for the British government to understand that welcoming schemes support “continuing local consent for migration, which is vital for mitigating tensions”, the report said.

It also highlighted that migration brought both costs and economic benefits. It said a net increase in migration of 350,000 people would reduce the UK’s net borrowing by £7.4 billion by 2028.

The report proposed a new model for welcoming migrants, changing from a crisis-led provision to “proactive interventions to build up social infrastructure”.

“The sums that the UK has spent on asylum accommodation over the last decade are unnecessarily high, and this serves nobody well,” said Jacqueline Broadhead, director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity.

“Better planning and organisation could have reduced this sum substantially … and helped the country to invest in a longer-term and more acceptable model.”

She argued that there is now an opportunity to improve the locations where migrants are hosted that “supports wider community cohesion and consent for migration”.

“Sensible investment in welcoming has a genuine and positive impact for new arrivals,” she added.

There was a positive note that the Labour government had “taken several steps which address some of the issues highlighted in the report”, said the authors.