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Release diary

Log what changed and which parts of the site should move with it.

Release discipline matters because national asylum numbers, local authority tables, hotel scrutiny documents, and local public evidence do not all update together.

Release timeline

The diary should tell users what moved, when it moved, and what evidence layer drove the change.

2026-10-07
2026-10-07Latest

Correction: December 2022 figures for 29 places, and broken place links

The quarterly trend on 29 place pages showed wrong figures for 31 December 2022. The largest errors were Kingston upon Hull, shown as 4,777 where the Home Office gives 942; Aberdeen City, 486 against 107; and York, 40 against 357. The other 26 were in the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The series is built from the North West Regional Strategic Migration Partnership's workbooks, which republish the Home Office table, and these figures came from an earlier edition; we have not established whether the error was in that edition or in how this site read it. Every one of the 12,408 points in the series now matches the Home Office's own table (Asy_D11, year ending June 2026), and every refresh now checks the latest quarter against the Home Office table for each authority before it goes live. A failing check had also held the site on its 28 September build until 7 October; it now carries the figures to 30 June 2026. Separately, the eight "Top areas" cards on /places/ and some place links on supplier pages pointed at addresses that did not exist, and are fixed. The table behind every place page can now be downloaded as a CSV from /places/.

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2026-09-27
2026-09-27

Questions answered: eight explainers that update themselves, and three new articles

A new /explained/ section answers the questions people search for about the asylum system, each in a short paragraph with the latest official figure, its date and its source: how many asylum seekers are in the UK, how many are waiting for a decision, how many asylum hotels there are and what they cost per night, how much asylum seekers get a week, how many small boats have crossed this year, the grant rate, and how long an appeal takes. The answers are built from the data at each refresh rather than written by hand. Three new articles cover the one in, one out returns to France (1,087 against 27,920 small boat arrivals), the military sites (1,162 people, about 1% of those on support), and the proposed flat charge of around £10,000 for asylum support, on which the Home Office has put no figure for what it would raise. The research page now leads with the latest pieces and the questions, then the flagship investigations, then everything else by topic.

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2026-09-27
2026-09-27

Correction: the homepage grant rate

The homepage card headed "Initial grant rate" showed 31.5% for the year to June 2026. The Home Office's own figure for that year is 38%. The card divided grants by every initial decision, including withdrawals and administrative outcomes, and counted dependants; the Home Office measure counts main applicants only and divides grants by grants plus refusals. The site now computes the rate on the Home Office's basis from the same Asy_D02 table, which reproduces both its published 38% for the year ending June 2026 and 48% for the year before, and a test holds it to those figures. The card and the new grant rate explainer read one shared calculation.

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2026-09-27
2026-09-27

Tribunal figures to June 2026, small boats to 24 September, and July's Home Office payments

The Ministry of Justice tribunal statistics for April to June 2026 are in. The First-tier Tribunal immigration and asylum chamber took in 21,762 appeals, 21% fewer than a year earlier, and cleared 16,786, up 30%. It still took in more than it cleared, and 155,798 cases were open at the end of June, 48% more than a year before. The mean time to clear an appeal rose to 65 weeks from 52. MOJ revised January to March 2026 in this edition, and those figures are updated too. The small boats series now runs to 24 September: 18,609 arrivals so far in 2026, against 32,188 by the same date in 2025. The Home Office's July 2026 payments over £25,000 add £15.7m of asylum spending, taking the ledger to £4.33bn across 17,103 payments to 369 suppliers since 2010.

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2026-09-07
2026-09-07

Corrections: the privacy policy on analytics, the Birmingham finding on fertility, and a corrections page

The privacy policy said this site uses no analytics and loads no third-party scripts. Both statements were false: every page has carried the Cloudflare Web Analytics beacon, a cookieless script that reports aggregate page views. The policy now says so, names the postcode lookup that sends a typed postcode to postcodes.io, and adds the retention statement it lacked. The footer no longer says no personal data is collected, since the hosts process IP addresses to serve pages; it now says no cookies and no advertising or behavioural tracking. The footer's claim that every number on the site links to its source was wider than the implementation, where sourcing sits at section level and on the sources page, so it now says every headline figure is traceable to its source and methodology. The accessibility statement now names WCAG 2.2 AA as the target and lists the target-size and reflow checks still to do. The Birmingham finding credited its projection to a fertility-rate gap the model does not use, since it runs on Census child-woman ratios, and said the truth sits between two models that had in fact shared a bias; both sentences are corrected on the page. There is now a corrections page, /corrections/, generated from every dated correction in the findings and the diary, so the record is in one place and cannot drift from the pieces that carry it. Ten duplicate redirect entries that Astro warned would become a hard error are reduced to one per path. Raised by the same external audit as the entry below, which missed the analytics beacon; found while checking its privacy findings.

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2026-09-07
2026-09-07

Corrections from an external audit: the 2051 count and chart, the audited share, the crossing years, and a birth count read as a rate

An external audit of the live site found three defects and all three are fixed here. /national/ published 93 local authorities below a 50% White British share by 2051 where the homepage and the finding said 86: that page kept its own inline filter from April and was missed by the commit that carried the v8.0 recalibration through every other surface, so it counted Sheffield under both its retired and its current code and counted the six London boroughs whose projection the plausibility guard withholds. It now reads the shared helper, and the test that checks the count on each page now checks every page that prints it rather than three of them. The true cost article described the audited portion of the £7,973M central estimate as "about 60%"; its own table puts £4,363M on an audited basis, which is 55%, and audited plus attributed is 63%. Both figures are now stated, derived from the cost categories and asserted against them. Threshold years for the Lancashire towns shipped as bare years and now carry a sensitivity band from the model's measured out-of-sample error: Blackburn 2026 to 2028, Pendle 2033 to 2035, Preston 2035 to 2039, Burnley 2048 to 2053. The homepage hotel headline now names the year it covers, because a 2024/25 average sat undated above figures from the latest quarter. Two further defects were found while fixing those. The national ethnic trajectory chart on /national/ aggregated the projection file itself rather than reading the shared helper, so it counted Sheffield and Barnsley under both their retired and current codes and plotted 74.5% for 2021 against the 74.4% published elsewhere; it now derives every series from one place, and that page no longer imports the projection file at all. Separately, the deprivation fertility finding was headlined "Women in the most deprived areas have 66% more births" and gave 1.66x as a fertility ratio. It is a ratio of birth counts: ONS Table 8 publishes births by IMD decile and no count of women aged 15-44 to divide by, and deprived deciles have younger age structures, so an unknown part of the gradient is age composition rather than fertility. The same rule this site applies to asylum support, that a count is not a rate without the population at risk underneath it, was not applied to its own demographic data. The causal headline is withdrawn and the confounding argument, which the data does support, is kept.

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2026-09-04
2026-09-04

Home Office spending ledger, and the tribunal, route, small boats and hotel refresh behind it

All 402 Home Office "spending over £25,000" transparency files from 2010 to 2026 are now ingested, and /what-the-home-office-publishes/ sets what the department publishes as transactions against what it reports as audited outturn. Asylum is tagged in two fields rather than one: filtering on Expense Area alone gives £2.85bn and misses £1.47bn, because the directorate label vanishes between 2017 and 2020 while the expense type codes do not. Every figure carries a basis, and two bases may be compared side by side with both named but never summed into one total. Tribunal appeal outcomes, route data, the weekly small boats series and the hotel and money ledgers were refreshed on 31 August and 4 September.

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2026-08-23
2026-08-23

Model v8.0: recalibrated on an out-of-sample test, and the counts that follow from it

The projection model was re-fitted and tested by fitting cohort change ratios on Census 2001 to 2011, forecasting 2021, and scoring against the actual Census 2021, so the fitting window never touches the target. On the White British share it scores mean absolute error 1.56pp with a bias of +0.05pp across 285 areas. The settings it replaces scored 2.82pp with a bias of -2.13pp on the same test, meaning the previous model projected change too fast rather than too slow. Shrinkage toward the national ratio is K=25 and the growth ceiling is 1.65 per decade, both chosen on that test. Counts move with it: 86 local authorities are projected below a 50% White British share by 2051 rather than 109, 59 of them currently majority, and Birmingham's 2051 share is 14.9% rather than 10.7%. The backcast comparison with NEWETHPOP is withdrawn; the defensible comparison is out-of-sample against out-of-sample, this model at 1.56pp across 285 areas against NEWETHPOP at 3.95pp across 296. Only a one-decade horizon has been tested.

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2026-08-23
2026-08-23

Estate design system, five claim corrections, and a data refresh that had been failing since July

The site moved onto the shared visual system used across the network. Five published claims were corrected: the 190,809 safe-and-legal humanitarian grants for year ending March 2026 are 77 per cent in-country extensions rather than arrivals, and out-of-country grants fell from 58,459 to 43,620; the 107,003 people in supported accommodation was the 31 December 2025 quarter end, not the current 97,519 at 31 March 2026, and it had been understating every area's share by about 9 per cent; and the claim that 70 nationalities see grant rates rise after appeal was never right, the figure being 101 of 105. Separately, the scheduled data refresh had failed on every run since at least 13 July, across five distinct faults, and now runs Monday and Thursday and deploys what it commits.

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2026-08-21
2026-08-21

Small boats weekly series refreshed to 20 August 2026

The Home Office weekly time series was 17 days past its own publication cadence and had been left behind by a refresh job that never included it. Now current to 20 August 2026.

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2026-06-11
2026-06-11

Tribunal appeal outcomes updated to January to March 2026

MOJ tribunal statistics for Q4 2025/26, covering January to March 2026 in the First-tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber. These are financial-year quarters and are not interchangeable with the calendar quarters used for Home Office claims, decisions and support elsewhere on this site. Next edition 10 September 2026, covering April to June 2026.

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2026-05-21
2026-05-21

Immigration system statistics, year ending March 2026

The Home Office quarterly release. Routes, claims, decisions, backlog, support and returns updated to the year ending March 2026, with the accommodation snapshot at 31 March 2026.

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2026-04-14
2026-04-14

Model v7.0: Census 2011 DC2101EW, per-LA migration, 25 findings

Major model upgrade. Census 2011 DC2101EW (18 groups, observed) replaces NEWETHPOP proportional splitting. MAE improved 2.45 to 1.71pp. Per-LA ethnic migration rates from Census 2021. Scenario selector on every place page. Cost calculator. Backlog clock. Postcode resolver. Grant rate appeal toggle. 25 findings live. Withdrawn 13 August 2026: the 1.71pp was a backcast that fitted its ratios on the same two Censuses it was then scored against, so it measured the model's guardrails rather than its accuracy, and its bias ran the opposite way to the truth. The figures above are recorded as reported at the time and should not be quoted. Superseded by v8.0 on 23 August 2026.

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2026-04-14
2026-04-14

Asy_D04 outcome analysis: true grant rates after appeals

Home Office outcome analysis (Dec 2025) integrated. 103 nationalities with initial + appeal-adjusted grant rates. Average uplift +14.1pp. Iran 67% initial to 85% after appeals. Sri Lanka 27% to 59%.

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2026-04-14
2026-04-14

ONS Births 2024 fertility data integrated

Empirical TFRs from ONS Linked Births 2024. White British TFR 1.31, Pakistani 2.52. National ASFRs by age band. IMD deprivation fertility gradient 1.66x. 567,460 births analysed.

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2026-02-26
2026-02-26

National asylum statistics updated

Year ending December 2025 figures published, including 107,200 people on support and 31,000 in hotels.

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2026-01-23
2026-01-23

Committee report confirms 197 hotels in use

Home Affairs Committee report captures the official count of hotels in use as of 5 January 2026.

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2025-11-27
2025-11-27

Local authority asylum and resettlement tables updated

Latest public local release remained the year ending September 2025, with Glasgow still highest by count.

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2025-06-12
2025-06-12

Home Office publishes hotel cost factsheet

Average daily hotel cost for 2024/25 published at GBP 5.77 million.

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