UK unlikely to clear asylum backlog this year, warns watchdog

Record delays in the processing of asylum applications have led to spiralling costs, according to the UK public spending watchdog, which has cast doubt on the government’s capacity to meet its promise of clearing the backlog in 2023.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and home secretary Suella Braverman have made resolving the pile-up of cases, which now run to 75,000, to the end of June last year central to resetting the asylum system. They are motivated in part by the need to slash the £6mn a day that the government says it is spending on housing asylum seekers in hotels.

Braverman has also proposed new legislation that, if it becomes law, will bar anyone reaching the UK without prior permission from claiming asylum altogether.

But in a report released on Friday, the National Audit Office said the Home Office spent £3.6bn on asylum support costs in 2022-23, almost double the amount in 2021-22 and £2.2bn more than budgeted for the department’s asylum and protection group. The additional funding required was draining the UK’s overseas aid budget, it said.

“One factor behind the mounting costs is delays in asylum decision-making,” the NAO said, noting a steady increase in the time taken to process claims. Despite almost doubling the number of case workers since last year, the programme is still lagging.

At the end of March 2023, 129,000 people — or 75 per cent of the total — who had claimed asylum had waited more than six months for an initial decision, the NAO said. This compared with 43 per cent at the end of March 2017 and 61 per cent at the end of March 2020.

“Despite recent progress, the asylum and protection transformation programme is a long way from meeting government’s ambitions,” NAO head Gareth Davies said.

“The Home Office has nearly doubled the number of decisions made each week, although it is unclear whether it will be enough to remove the backlog of older asylum decisions by the end of 2023. To date, the programme is not on track to achieve the expected benefits,” he added.

The NAO said that prioritising legacy claims would also probably lead to a fresh backlog in more recent claims, “rising from almost 61,000 in April 2023 to around 84,000 by December 2023”.

It would require an average of 2,200 decisions a week from May 2023 to meet Sunak’s pledge to clear the legacy backlog by the year’s end, the NAO estimated. The rate as of April stood at 1,310.

Questioned by the House of Commons home affairs select committee on Wednesday, Braverman acknowledged that the government would not meet its targets at the current pace. But she said that her department was continuing to boost the number of case workers and the number of asylum decisions would rise towards the end of the year.

“We are moving in the right direction,” she said, stressing that it would never be possible to clear the numbers altogether because “the boats keep coming”.

Responding to the report, the Home Office said: “The government is working nonstop to reduce the asylum backlog and deliver cheaper, more orderly alternatives to hotel accommodation.”

“As the NAO acknowledges, we have already doubled the number of caseworkers and cut the legacy backlog by 20 per cent, but we know more must be done to bring the asylum system back into balance.”