Asylum seekers wrongly paid £10m in benefits

The Home Office wrongly paid asylum seekers nearly £10 million in benefits last year, it was revealed today.

A Home Office audit found officials mistakenly handed out £9.6 million in housing benefit and living allowances.

Overpayments happened when payouts continued even after asylum cases were concluded.

The real total could be even higher because officials at the UK Border Agency have not calculated the cost of errors made in previous years.

Critics condemned the "disgraceful" waste of taxpayers' cash and told ministers to "get a grip" on the problem.

The payouts were revealed in the Home Office's accounts for 2008/9. They showed two thirds of the total — nearly £7 million — were in cases where payments had been stopped but not within the required time limit.

For the rest, payouts continued after claims were rejected or approved.

Officials have been forced to write off the money because of "legal obstacles" to recovering it, the audit states. Trying to recover allowances could also leave failed asylum seekers in dire poverty.

The report blamed "shortfalls" in the system of bureaucratic controls. It says officials do not know how much was wrongly paid out in previous years.

The report states: "When a decision is made for asylum support to be ceased, procedures should have ensured the payment system stopped making payments. There were shortfalls in the controls that meant those procedures were not consistently applied.

"It is possible that cessations made in earlier years were also subject to delays and losses could have occurred — this has not been quantified."

New controls have been introduced to stop similar errors in the future, the document adds.

Tory MP David Davies, who sits on the House of Commons home affairs select committee, said: "This is yet another disgraceful waste of taxpayers' money and another huge blunder by the UK Border Agency.

"Millions of pounds are being thrown away and very little is being done to prevent it — at a time when the country is economically bankrupt."