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Letters informing asylum seekers of crucial immigration meetings and interviews with government officials are being sent to the wrong addresses, causing serious delay to the claims process, Housing Today has learned.

Immigration experts have called on the National Asylum Support Service – the government agency that processes claims – to prevent the confusion by giving local housing providers greater say over where asylum seekers are housed.

Keith Best, chief executive of the Immigration Advisory Service – a charity that offers legal advice to asylum seekers – said: "It has to be left to the local housing provider to allocate housing." NASS insists on having a central register and allocating from that rather than leaving it up to housing providers.

Under the central allocation system, each asylum seeker is allocated an address by NASS's head office in Croydon. But housing providers sometimes need to change the allocation when accommodation is not available or properly prepared.

Correspondence from the Home Office and lawyers is sent to the official – but wrong – address, resulting in many letters going astray.

Best said: "We write to [asylum seekers] at a specific address and ask them to come to an interview and they never turn up. It's not their fault but it has enormous knock-on effects."

He added that, because the deadline for an appeal hearing is sometimes as little as a month, the delay caused by missed meetings leaves lawyers unable to prepare a case.

He was unable to provide figures showing the scale of the problem but said it happened "frequently" and "across the country".

Jim Steinke, chief executive of the Northern Refugee Centre, said: "It is something we have come across and it causes, for some people, major problems. It is one of those bureaucratic things it would be good if we could resolve."

Steinke said the problem would be solved by giving housing providers the power to allocate addresses, although it would require stringent inspection of standards by the Home Office.

Laurence Chester, director of services at NASS contractor Roselodge, has also come across the problem. He said: "Everyone would like to see decentralisation."

A NASS spokesman said staff checked addresses with the housing provider before dispersing asylum seekers.

He said: "In the past, accommodation providers have moved asylum seekers and not told us." However, he maintained: "It is clearly easier to allocate centrally."