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.<\/p>\n
With around 140,000 asylum claims and appeals <\/a>currently outstanding, MPs and refugee charities have warned thousands of people, including \u201clife and death\u201d cases could be affected by its introduction.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cit is in nobody\u2019s interests for errors to creep into the decision-making process<\/a>\u201d, and that AI, \u201ccan never be a substitute for reading all the documents.\u201d<\/p>\n He said: \u201cThere is no doubt that government can be more efficient by embracing technology.<\/p>\n \u201cAs ever, the issue is how to do this in a way that augments human processes, without compromising them.\u201d<\/p>\n Vaughan said he supports the use of AI but urged that the tool, which summarises asylum seekers\u2019 interviews, is backed up by caseworkers assessing \u201cthe entire transcript, not just the [AI] summary\u201d until the error rate is brought down.<\/p>\n Tim Naor Hilton, chief executive of Refugee Action, said: \u201cThese decisions could be a matter of life and death. While it\u2019s vital that people\u2019s asylum claims are determined without unnecessary delay, this must not be at the expense of accuracy and humanity.<\/a>\u201d <\/p>\n What is the tool and what\u2019s the problem?<\/p>\n The Government is under growing pressure to tackle the asylum backlog amid a growing number of protests outside migrant hotels<\/a> across the UK.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n ACS is intended to speed up application processing times, with the Home Office stating it extracts and summarises information from asylum interview transcripts\u201d.<\/p>\n That summary would then be used by caseworkers to help make the decision on whether a person\u2019s asylum claim would be accepted or rejected.<\/p>\n Its recent trial was hailed a success by the Government, with Dame Angela Eagle, minister for asylum and border security, telling LBC in April: \u201cWe can cut by nearly a third the amount of time it takes for cases to be summarised.\u201d<\/p>\n However, key details of its performance were buried in the official evaluation of the tool\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n The report noted: \u201cA small proportion of summaries produced (9 per cent) were deemed to be inaccurate or had missing information and were therefore removed from the pilot.\u201d<\/p>\n The report added almost a quarter (23 per cent) of case workers were \u201cnot fully confident\u201d in what the ChatGPT<\/a>-style tool produced.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cEfforts 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,\u201d said Imran Hussain, director of external affairs at Refugee Council.<\/p>\n Jake Hurfurt, head of research and investigations at civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, said: \u201cOutsourcing vital decisions to error-riddled AI tools is a worrying path for the Government to go down.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Government should stop seeking to cut costs with shiny AI tools and instead properly invest in staff.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Angela](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/GettyImages-547247066.jpg\")
Dame Angela Eagle highlighted the efficiency improvements of the AI tool, but did not point out its error rate (Photo: Getty)<\/p>\n![\"EPPING,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/SEI_260363686.jpg\")
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)<\/p>\n