£883 million went to councils for asylum. £1.6 million of it is findable

The National Audit Office puts it at £883 million in 2024-25: £247m in grants to councils for dispersal accommodation, and £636m in grants and incentive payments for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

Searching every supplier name in the Home Office’s published spending file for that year returns £1.6 million. The largest single council payment is Liverpool City Council at £438,960. That is roughly £1 published for every £550 paid.

Why the money is invisible from both ends. Transparency regimes publish what a body spends, never what it receives. A grant leaving the Home Office is not itemised in its file; the same grant arriving at a council is income, and appears in no council spend file either. Neither side is concealing anything — the reporting simply has no place to put it.

One trap worth naming. A search for “council” in the supplier field returns £3.59m, not £1.6m, because it catches Refugee Council — a charity, not a local authority, paid £2.0m that year. Counting it more than doubles the answer and is wrong.

Spending figures cited from An analysis of the asylum system, National Audit Office, December 2025. Payment data: Home Office spending over £25,000, Open Government Licence v3.0.