Home Office haunted by 25-year-old asylum system

The effectiveness of new IT systems designed to speed up asylum claim processing in the UK continues to be held back by the Home Office's failure to decommission its 25-year-old case management database, five years after it promised to retire it. In January, the UK's major projects watchdog said the "full benefit" of Atlas, the Home Office's new case management system for asylum claims, would not be realized until the legacy Casework Information Database (CID) is decommissioned. Officials said most operations have changed over to Atlas, but CID is still being used for some processing.

They also said CID is due to be decommissioned "soon." The processing of asylum claims has become a hot political issue in the UK as people in the system who are destitute and not allowed to work can receive accommodation and subsistence cash support while they wait for a claim to be decided. There were 224,742 cases in the asylum system at the end of June 2024, of which less than 40 percent were cases awaiting an initial decision.



Last summer, the issue sparked rioting among the far-right centered on so-called asylum hotels. In June 2019, the Home Office responded to a Parliamentary report on the separate Windrush scandal by agreeing to migrate off CID by March 2020. A report from the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), a joint body of HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office, said in January 2025 that the tech migration has not taken place, according to data from March 2024.

It said the Immigration Platform Technologies (IPT) program, which includes the Atlas immigration casework system, had previously been underestimated, and the Home Office prioritized implementation of the Illegal Migration Act, introduced under Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak. The IPA report said the Home Office's revised plan would result in the IPT program's closure at the end of July 2024. It gave the project a red rating for the year 2023/24, meaning "successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable.

" "IPT has delivered elements of its scope and has begun realizing benefits. However, full benefit realization will not occur until the decommissioning of the legacy system CID," data accompanying the report said. The Home Office has declined to comment.

CID was first introduced in 2000 . It was maintained by Atos and used Oracle Forms, Visual Basic 6, Oracle DB, MS Office Automation, FaceVACS, VB.Net, and COM+.

In September 2023, The Register revealed that the Home Office failed to meet its own earlier deadline for the retirement of CID as the backlog of asylum claims reached historic highs. It had told the public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, that it would end use of the system by that month. In March 2024, media reports revealed that technical issues with Atlas were causing claims delays and frustration for staff.

In response, a Home Office spokesperson did not deny there were problems with the system. ®.