According to Treasury guidance, departments must ensure their estimates are "consistent with their best forecasts of requirements", which the IFS report says "certainly does not appear to be the case" for the Home Office.
There is a strong case that the current budgeting process is failing for asylum spending," he said. He added that the Home Office had got into a "bad habit of submitting initial budgets to parliament that it knows to be insufficient".
When there is a one-off unexpected spike in costs or demand, spending more than was budgeted is entirely understandable. But when it is happening year after year, something is going wrong with the budgeting process.
We have been clear the prior approach was to fund the majority of asylum system costs through the Supplementary Estimate. As part of the ongoing Spending Review, in future we are seeking to include these costs in the Main Estimate.
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