Hundreds of asylum seekers have claimed to have slept with the daughter of the Kurdish Prime Minister to justify why they can’t go home, a whistle-blower is reported to have said as he reveals very nearly all asylum claims in Britain are fraudulent, but that there is a culture and incentive structure of accepting them anyway.

Only one-in-100 asylum claims made to the British government are genuine, but huge numbers of them are approved anyway, an anonymous whistle-blower cited by the national newspaper of record, The Times is reported to have claimed. Identified only as “J”, the whistle-blower is said to be a Home Office asylum ‘decision maker’ with years of experience and thousands of claims assessed, who says the fraud is so transparent the improbable and constantly recycled back-stories given by migrants — who he believes are coached on their claims to give the ‘right’ answers to get approved — are obvious, yet are so often approved anyway.

In recent years as many as three-quarters of asylum applications to the British government were approved. Although this has come down and is now comparatively low at about a third, if the one-per-cent figure of those being genuinely in need of asylum is even close to being true, the claims suggest Britain is continuing to absorb a huge quantity of costly dependents through fraud.

Per the claims, there is a culture within the Home Office that biases assessors towards accepting migrant’s stories, and that staff are told to treat the asylum seekers as “customers” as “you’re providing a service to them, not a service to the country”. That accepting an application is quick and involved little paperwork, while denying one takes time and is difficult creates an incentive structure to rubber-stamp applications, it was said.

“J” is reported to have said: “At best 1 per cent of asylum seekers are genuine. There’s almost no aspect of the asylum system that isn’t either a massive fraud or just really dysfunctional. Nothing works as it should”.

Perhaps the most extraordinary revelations in the whistle-blower’s account is of the incredibly low-effort lies allegedly told by asylum seekers, which nevertheless appear to work often enough to make them worth constantly recycling. The system gives applicants months to hone their stories and to be coached to give the right answers by rote, it is claimed, with the same grounds for admission heard by assessors “hundreds” of times.

It is stated that so many migrants claim to be former lovers of the daughter of the Prime Minister of Kurdistan this “script” told by asylum seekers making “package claims” it has become a “running joke” among Home Office officials. Allegedly, “hundreds” have made this exact claim.

Again, further “hundreds” of arrivals from Pakistan say they were forced to flee their homeland because they are gay, all claiming to have had the same boyfriend back home. The whistle-blower said this single mega-boyfriend  has “provided hundreds upon hundreds of very obviously fake letters of support”.

Another common tale, this time for migrants from Bangladesh, is for “large numbers” of arrivals claiming to be a senior member of the former governing party, which was ousted in a 2024 coup. Despite the alleged high position in the now-outlawed party, it was found applicants couldn’t even answer basic questions about the organisation.

The Times says the government refused to comment on specifics given “We do not comment on anonymous briefings”, but it nevertheless confirmed a central claim of the report, that the Home Office doesn’t check the claims of arrivals with their home countries because to do so would break confidentiality.