In a landmark speech on immigration last December, Rishi Sunak made a series of bold and apparently undeliverable commitments. He promised to stop the flow of small boats to the UK, increase the amount of non-hotel accommodation for asylum seekers and abolish the backlog of unprocessed asylum cases by the end of 2023.
The government’s spiralling difficulties in addressing the first and second pledges have been evident throughout the summer, with footage of new boat arrivals broadcast nightly, and complications with the opening of the Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge mounting up. The failure to address the asylum backlog was starkly exposed in Thursday’s release of the quarterly immigration statistics.
There are now more than 175,000 people waiting for a decision on whether they will be granted refugee status, the highest figure since current records began in 2010 and a rise of 44% from last year. Of these, 80% (139,961) have been waiting longer than six months for an initial decision, a 57% increase and another record high.
Home Office immigration failures are now so routine they are rarely met with shock or even surprise, but they remain puzzling. Why is the government failing on a pledge that it was so confident just a few months ago that it could deliver?
Given that the rising backlog of unprocessed claims is directly linked to the rising costs of accommodating asylum seekers (who are not allowed to work) in hotels, political pressure to reduce it remains acute.
Last December, Sunak promised to “triple the productivity of our caseworkers”. He said: “We need to process claims in days or weeks, not months or years, so we will double the number of asylum caseworkers. We are radically re-engineering the end-to-end process, with shorter guidance, fewer interviews and less paperwork.”
Sunak’s commitment to abolishing the backlog of asylum cases was later whittled back to a pledge to clear a smaller number of “legacy” backlog cases – about 92,000 – by the end of this year. Although there has been an increase in caseworker productivity, bringing the legacy backlog down to 68,000 in June, analysts point out that the rate of decisions needs to double if the commitment to clearing the backlog is to be met. Meanwhile, the overall backlog continues to rise, because 79,000 new asylum applications have been made in the past year.
There has been a determination to try new solutions. In April, the government organised a three-day hackathon, seeking out ways to use artificial intelligence to help process undecided asylum claims (the best innovations were due to be celebrated at a Downing Street prize-giving ceremony). Asylum questionnaires were introduced to try to speed up decision-making on people who had arrived from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, Syria and Yemen – who have a higher likelihood of being granted asylum – by cutting out the need for interviews. Claimants were required to fill in the forms within 20 working days or risk refusal.
It is not clear whether the impact of this change has been felt, but several refugee experts expressed concern about the unprecedented number of asylum claims withdrawn this year. The Refugee Council said 47% of Home Office decisions in the first six months of this year were withdrawals, where a claimant decided not to pursue an application or somehow fell out of the application system.
Christina Marriott, of the British Red Cross, said: “This is the highest number of withdrawals seen since records began. The reasons for this are unclear, but the government needs to urgently publish data on why vulnerable people’s claims are being withdrawn.”
Might the government’s all-consuming focus on small boats be part of the problem? Dr Peter William Walsh, of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, noted that the majority of asylum applicants in the year to June 2023 arrived by other means or made claims after overstaying visas. “Political debate has been hyper-focused on small boats, 90% of whom claim asylum. Yet in the year to June 2023, small boat arrivals made up only 41% of asylum claims,” he said.
Home Office staff are, as always, at pains to emphasise the positive, insisting that the processing of the legacy cases has sped up and claiming they are still on track to clear the backlog by the end of the year. The next quarterly figures in November will show whether that optimism is justified.
