I have worked with asylum seekers for 8 years. I can assure you that they do not have an easy life. A person's situation is slightly better (if you can call it that) when you first claim, because at least you're receiving weekly cash (approx £38/week for a single person) from the post office.
You do get somewhere to live - but this is normally council or (verging on) slum landlord type property that no one else wants to live in. Many people I met suffered regular abuse or violent attacks from locals who were threatened by them being there.
I worked in a drop in advice and people came in every day to ask for help with rat infestations, no heating in winter, no locks on doors, broken windows, mould on walls. Trying to get reasonable repairs done was a nightmare.
If your claim was refused but there was no safe passage of return to your home country, or if you submitted a fresh claim, your only option is to live on Section 4 support which is a £35/week voucher only which can be used in a number of shops. No cash for even a bus fare - you're expected to walk everywhere, even if you're a single parent with a baby. The standard of accommodation for Section 4 was also generally worse.
You could apply for the right to work if you hadn't had an initial decision on your first claim after a year, but a) most people were refused before then and b) trying to apply for it was a very slow and laborious process. I only knew of one client who got it successfully.
It is a very complex system and there are many more examples and rules I could cite, but the main thing to remember is that most people are fleeing torture and persecution because of their political beliefs/gender/sexuality/ethnic group/religion. Those who come with agents are sometimes abused on the trip here and most have no idea where they are headed. The agent controls everything, from the passports to the border control interview. Once they are through the agent usually dumps them at a police station with no information.
Yes, there are of course some who claim asylum who are actually here for economic reasons, but most of the people I worked with this was absolutely not the case, and their lives here were very hard. They did not want to leave their country, were hugely homesick, but feared for their lives.
Even if they were granted status, this was just the start of another set of problems, because unless they spoke good English (and it's worth pointing out that free ESOL classes for asylum seekers were mainly scrapped) most were often pushed into any manual type job that didn't require language skills by the Jobcentre.
Fair enough, it's important to work and integrate into society, and I realise that we cannot subsidise them taking the time to study, but just illustrating the point that it's not exactly a life of luxury and delight.