Month: December 2025

10 December 2025: BBC: UK Asylum System Hit by Inefficiencies and Wasted Funds

The UK’s asylum system is affected by inefficiencies, “wasted public funds” and a succession of “short-term, reactive” government policies that have moved problems elsewhere, the National Audit Office (NAO) has said.

As part of its analysis, the spending watchdog looked at a sample of 5,000 asylum claims lodged almost three years ago, in January 2023. Since then, 35% (1,619) of those asylum seekers had been given some sort of protection such as refugee status, and 9% (452) had been removed from the country. But 56% (2,812) still did not have a final outcome in their case.

The Home Office welcomed the analysis, which it said supported “the case for fundamental reform of the asylum system”.

Most of the cases in the remaining group (2,021 out of the 2,812) remained in a sort of “limbo”, with no appeal lodged.

Read more: BBC news, Daniel Sandford, https://shorturl.at/3h1Zl

3 December 2025: Joint Public Issues Team – JPTI: Supporting churches to respond to the co-option of Christmas by the Far Right

Local churches across the UK will already have well-developed plans for celebrating Christmas – both in our church buildings and with our wider communities. Each of us will have had a lifetime of sharing the message at the heart of Christmas, ‘good news of great joy… for all’.

But this year, we have seen a ‘turning up of the volume’ of Far Right politics and the co-option of Christian language and symbols – including Christmas – for a nationalist agenda, overtly hostile to asylum-seekers and Muslims, and more covertly threatening to many more of us in our churches and neighbourhoods. 

This includes an event planned for central London on 13^th December, led by ‘Tommy Robinson’ and ‘Unite the Kingdom’, with the explicit aim of ‘putting Christ back into Christmas’, but associated closely with aggressive patriotism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. We’ll be all too aware that within our church communities, and our wider neighbourhoods, there will be some people who find these events threatening or scary, some who will want to fiercely reject them, others who will be drawn to them for a variety of reasons, and still many others who will feel confused and bewildered by the mixed messages that they find themselves having to make sense of.

We offer here a ‘rapid response’ resource for local churches wanting to navigate these complexities and discern faithful ways forward: to celebrate Christmas with a clear message of love for all our neighbours and (in small but significant ways) resisting agendas of division and hostility, while recognising that even within our own church communities there will very likely be a wide diversity of experiences, hopes and fears, and political views.

Continue reading “Good news of great joy… for all”