An AI tool used to help decide asylum cases faster will be rolled out despite accuracy issues, with critics warning ‘life or death’ cases could be affected
An AI tool is being rolled out by the Home Office to tackle the backlog in asylum claims, despite making “serious errors” during a trial, The i Paper can reveal.
Around a tenth (9 per cent) of claims reviewed by the AI tool were so flawed they had to be removed from a trial last year, according to government documents.
With around 140,000 asylum claims and appeals currently outstanding, MPs and refugee charities have warned thousands of people, including “life and death” cases could be affected by its introduction.
Tony Vaughan KC, Labour MP and chair of a cross-party group on refugee issues, called on the government to further develop the tool and said that until the inaccuracies are fixed for caseworkers to manually check the AI-generated summary, saying “it is in nobody’s interests for errors to creep into the decision-making process”, and that AI, “can never be a substitute for reading all the documents.”
He said: “There is no doubt that government can be more efficient by embracing technology.
“As ever, the issue is how to do this in a way that augments human processes, without compromising them.”
Vaughan said he supports the use of AI but urged that the tool, which summarises asylum seekers’ interviews, is backed up by caseworkers assessing “the entire transcript, not just the [AI] summary” until the error rate is brought down.
Tim Naor Hilton, chief executive of Refugee Action, said: “These decisions could be a matter of life and death. While it’s vital that people’s asylum claims are determined without unnecessary delay, this must not be at the expense of accuracy and humanity.”
What is the tool and what’s the problem?
The Government is under growing pressure to tackle the asylum backlog amid a growing number of protests outside migrant hotels across the UK.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is expected to announce plans in the autumn to introduce a new fast-track scheme so asylum decisions can be made in weeks instead of months or years.
Alongside this, the Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS) tool is expected to be rolled out by January 2026, according to government papers obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) laws by fair tech campaigners Foxglove, and shared exclusively with The i Paper.
ACS is intended to speed up application processing times, with the Home Office stating it extracts and summarises information from asylum interview transcripts”.
That summary would then be used by caseworkers to help make the decision on whether a person’s asylum claim would be accepted or rejected.
Its recent trial was hailed a success by the Government, with Dame Angela Eagle, minister for asylum and border security, telling LBC in April: “We can cut by nearly a third the amount of time it takes for cases to be summarised.”
Dame Angela Eagle highlighted the efficiency improvements of the AI tool, but did not point out its error rate (Photo: Getty)
However, key details of its performance were buried in the official evaluation of the tool’s performance.
The report noted: “A small proportion of summaries produced (9 per cent) were deemed to be inaccurate or had missing information and were therefore removed from the pilot.”
The report added almost a quarter (23 per cent) of case workers were “not fully confident” in what the ChatGPT-style tool produced.
The report does not provide any detail on what the errors were. The Home Office refused to provide the information when asked by The i Paper.
“Efforts by this Government to tackle the asylum backlog are welcome, but relying on under-tested AI tools to make life and death decisions risks grave consequences,” said Imran Hussain, director of external affairs at Refugee Council.
Jake Hurfurt, head of research and investigations at civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, said: “Outsourcing vital decisions to error-riddled AI tools is a worrying path for the Government to go down.
“The Government should stop seeking to cut costs with shiny AI tools and instead properly invest in staff.”
The housing of asylum seekers while their applications are processed has sparked far-right protests across the UK, including in Epping last month (Photo: Guy Smallman/Getty Images)
The need to ease the backlog of asylum claims comes as a record-breaking 25,000 migrants have crossed the Channel to the UK in small boats this year already.
Asylum seekers refused sanctuary in Britain are seeing their appeals take an average of 54 weeks. There were 51,000 outstanding appeals as of March, which does not include the 79,000 asylum claims awaiting an initial decision.
Ben Maguire, Liberal Democrat MP for North Cornwall and the party’s shadow attorney general, said: “It’s essential we speed up the assessment of asylum cases after the Conservatives left the system in a total mess with backlogs spiralling.
“However, the Government must be transparent about the errors and fix them before any wider rollout because these are life-changing decisions that need to be handled quickly but diligently.”
Another Government AI headache
The Home Office has already faced controversy over its efforts to use AI to tackle the asylum backlog.
Earlier this year, it was announced AI would be used to assess disputed ages of asylum seekers who say they are children, with a borders watchdog report stating it was “inevitable” that some of the AI’s decisions will be wrong.
And in 2020, the Home Office scrapped a decision-making algorithm for UK visa applicants, after it was found to create a “fast lane” that favoured white people from certain countries.
The i Paper asked the Home Office if any improvements or changes were planned to its AI tools, in line with the recommendations of the report, but a spokesperson did not respond to the specific questions.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “This new AI technology is helping to speed up asylum processing, as we continue to implement our Plan for Change to restore order to the asylum system, clear the backlog and end the use of hotels by the end of this Parliament.
“The new tech will support caseworkers to make accurate, evidence-based decisions whilst reducing the time taken to do resource-intensive administrative tasks in support of that process.”
What is the ACS tool – and how does it work?
Freedom of Information requests submitted by fair tech campaigners Foxglove and shared exclusively with The i Paper revealed that the Government is pressing ahead with the roll out of the Asylum Case Summarisation tool by January 2026.
A Home Office civil servant states in the papers that the tool is being rolled out “over several months” but the date it will start being used is not clear.
The documents also reveal the tool was built internally and uses OpenAI’s GPT4 model. It was trained using existing Large Language Models.
ChatGPT-style AI models have been repeatedly plagued by accuracy issues. This includes a phenomenon called “halluncinations” which is where the AI will generate fictional information and present it as real.
Foxglove’s FoI also requested for the tool’s Equality Impact Assessment, a report carried out to ensure new practices do not unintentionally discriminate against groups of people. The Home Office refused to provide this.
Tim Squirrell, Foxglove’s head of strategy, said: “Asylum decisions can be a matter of life or death. You probably wouldn’t want to trust your life to a chatbot making such serious errors that its work has to be thrown out nearly 10 per cent of the time.
“We’re calling for the rollout of this dodgy bot to be put on hold until the Government fesses up about how it intends to deal with this.”
A second AI tool, Asylum Policy Search, is being worked on alongside the ACS tool. It is an AI search assistant for “relevant country policy information”.
Around half of the caseworkers in the trial (46 per cent) told the report they would not continue to use this second tool. Some staff stated they “did not see the benefit” compared with existing, non-AI tools.