Four looming problems in the UK asylum system and how to address them
Lots of asylum decisions are now being made. But what happens to the new refugees and those who are refused?
The asylum system seems finally to have turned a corner: the asylum backlog is starting to fall.
The backlog is the single most important problem with the asylum system. Unlike arrivals, it is something the government can control. It creates huge financial costs for the taxpayer. It sucks money out of the international aid budget. It distracts ministers and officials from other issues. The thought of asylum seekers staying in hotels is politically toxic. It is also terrible for the refugees waiting interminably for a decision. Their lives are on hold, they live in destitution-level support in poor accommodation and they are prevented from working or doing anything productive. Eventually 75% will be recognised as refugees and become permanent members of our society. Making their lives so miserable and difficult rather than helping them get on their feet is not a good idea for any of us. And, as we will see, barely anyone who is refused asylum is removed from the UK anyway.
The only group to benefit from the long waiting times are those whose cases will ultimately fail; by the time that happens they will have been living here for years and it will be even harder for the government to remove than would otherwise have been the case.
Here I’m going to take a look at what is really going on with the main features of the contemporary asylum system: arrivals, the backlog, appeals and removal. The information is drawn mainly from the quarterly immigration statistics and transparency data for the year ended September 2023, the most recent available at the time of writing.
Asylum arrivals
Following a significant peak in 2002, the number of asylum applications made in the United Kingdom was fairly stable between 2005 and 2020.
The shrinking area of green for 2020 and 2021 on the chart reflects the fact that the increase in small boat arrivals in large part represented a change of route by asylum seekers. Previously, lorries had been the principal means of entry to claim asylum.
The number of small boat arrivals can be seen to have increased sharply from nowhere in 2018. The following chart shows overall numbers and also gives you an idea of arrivals by quarter. You can see that arrivals in 2023 are actually down a little compared to 2022.
The overall drop in 2023 compared to 2022 is entirely due to the rapid increase and then equally rapid decrease in arrivals by Albanians during 2022. In effect, this inflated the 2022 figures quite considerably. If Albanians are stripped out of the figures, the number of small boat arrivals is actually up in 2023 compared to 2022; in other words, there has continued to be an increase in the arrival of those of nationalities of than Albanians.
Asylum backlog
The stand out problem of the asylum system today is the time it takes for decisions to be made. This is a recent development. Unlike small boat arrivals, it lies entirely within the control of the Home Office. The good news is that the backlog has started, finally, to stabilise. It has even started to fall a little.
If we plot arrivals against backlog and decisions we can see that the growth in the backlog, which really begins in the middle of 2018, considerably pre-dates the steep increase in arrivals in 2021 and 2022.
There are now tens of thousands of refugees who have been waiting for longer than a year for an initial decision. This is really expensive because they are not allowed to work, and so have to be supported by the government. Because the backlog was allowed to grow, the Home Office ran out of ordinary asylum accommodation long ago and has had to resort to using hotels. The international aid budget has been plundered in order to fund this. Immigration fees have been ratcheted up yet again in order to plug the hole in the Home Office budget, forcing migrants who enter lawfully to pay for those who enter irregularly.
To deal with the backlog, the government decided to recruit more officials to decide asylum claims. We’d expect there to be a lag between the recruitment of new caseworkers and an increase in decision making. The number of decisions has finally started to rise rapidly, which is finally starting to reduce the backlog.
The number of decisions is likely to go up even further in the next few months as the newly recruited caseworkers establish themselves. However, it cannot be sustained at very high numbers. Many of the decisions at the moment are being made without conducting an interview. We can see from the transparency data that 12,711 decisions were taken in September 2023 but only 7,688 interviews. Once the caseworkers run out of withdrawals and cases that can be resolved with no interview, the number of decisions will start to come down again somewhat.
Whether quality can be maintained is unclear. The Home Office cleared out its experienced asylum officials and has had to recruit rookies.
Problems ahead
The number of asylum decisions soared in the third quarter of 2023 to an astonishing 29,000 proper decisions plus a further 4,600 withdrawals of asylum claims. 23,000 decisions were grants of asylum and 6,000 were refusals. This rapid increase in decisions means there are significant new problems looming ahead in the asylum system:
What happens to the person behind withdrawals of asylum claims?
What happens to the 26,000 newly recognised refugees?
What happens to the 6,000 refused asylum seekers?
What happens to failed asylum seekers at the end of the process?
Let’s consider each of these in a bit more detail.
Are asylum withdrawals really a “decision”?
Since the start of 2023 there has been a huge increase in withdrawals of asylum claims, mainly by Albanian nationals. For example, of 6,068 asylum withdrawals in the first quarter of 2023, 4,386 of them — almost three quarters — were by Albanians.
A National Audit Office report in June 2023 revealed that many of these ‘withdrawals’ were actually what lawyers call non-compliance refusals: the asylum seeker failed to return a form on time, did not turn up to an appointment or something like that. Some asylum seekers may genuinely have deliberately disappeared. But experience suggests the Home Office is bad at logging changes of address, posts things to the wrong address anyway and that a certain proportion of these decisions will turn out to be wrong.
This creates a significant long term problem. Many of those treated as ‘withdrawn’ will still be in the UK and will resurface. They may lodge a judicial review of the non-compliance refusal if they think it was a mistake by the Home Office or otherwise will renew their asylum claim or make a new one. They will become complex cases and will take additional resources to process. The Home Office may be making more work for itself in the long run by trying to hit its short-term targets. This would be entirely typical behaviour by the department.
To illustrate the point, consider the number of Albanians who arrived in 2022 and what happened to them.
We know that around 13,000 Albanians arrived in just a few months over the course of 2022, the vast majority in small boats. Just over 10,000 of them made asylum claims. Since then, there have been 8,745 withdrawn Albanian asylum claims. Only 2,716 Albanians made voluntary departures since the start of 2023, though. A further 1,918 were forcibly returned, making a total of 4,634 Albanians who made enforced or voluntary departures since the start of 2023.
We can therefore see that many of those 13,000 Albanians remain in the United Kingdom, including those that made then withdrew asylum claims. They will need to be dealt with at some point.
Their case papers may have been taken off the books and out of the backlog but the actual human beings behind those cases have not disappeared.
What happens to all the newly recognised refugees?
An amazing 23,000 grants of asylum were made between June and September 2023. All of those newly recognised refugees moved from being supported by the Home Office to either standing on their own two feet or being supported by their local authority. Or they fell through the gap and ended up homeless.
After several years of enforced idleness, it is no surprise if only a tiny percentage manage to find a job and accommodation in the matter of days the Home Office gives them between issuing their new immigration papers and evicting them from their asylum accommodation.
Sonia has written about this on Free Movement before: the Home Office has quietly reneged on a commitment to give refugees 28 days between issuing their immigration papers and evicting them from their asylum accommodation. As a result, local authorities are finding themselves having to accommodate thousands of refugees at basically no notice.
Asylum appeals incoming
In the year ended September 2023, 75% of initial asylum decisions by the Home Office were grants of protection.
However, because of the sheer number of decisions being made, there are also now a lot of asylum seekers being refused asylum: 5,934 in the last quarter. Many will lodge appeals.
Further, we can expect the percentage asylum grant rate to fall in the near future and the number of asylum refusals to increase further. The newly recruited Home Office caseworkers are working their way through the high grant rate nationalities. Soon they will start making a lot of decisions on lower grant rate nationalities. The overall success rate will fall. When that starts to happen, the number of asylum appeals being lodged will increase significantly.
The asylum application backlog is shrinking. But the appeal backlog is growing.
The average time it takes for the First-tier Tribunal to decide an asylum case was 82 weeks in the period April to June 2023. This is up from 29 weeks prior to the pandemic. It was only 48 weeks as recently as 2021, so this looks like a pretty serious problem at the tribunal. Given that it is well known that there is a huge asylum backlog and that the Home Office is increasing the number of asylum decisions made, it was inevitable that the asylum caseload at the tribunal would increase. It seems this has not been matched by increased resources for appeals.
There is a further problem which exacerbates the situation: there are no lawyers left. That’s because legal aid rates are so low that lawyers cannot afford to do the work any more. This may well be a cause for celebration for some, but it risks serious unfairness and causes significant problems to the tribunal system. Already, even before the increase in the number of appeals being lodged, around half of asylum seekers were unable to find a legal aid lawyer. That proportion is going to fall. We don’t grow on trees and even if funding were improved it would still take time to expand the pool of available legal aid lawyers.
The lack of lawyers means that many asylum seekers will go unrepresented. As well as being unfair and risking bad outcomes, including return of refugees to situations of persecution, it builds in additional delays and will make it much harder to reduce the appeal backlog. It takes a lot longer for judges to deal with appeals where there is no lawyer involved.
Refusal ≠ removal
Very few asylum seekers have been removed or voluntarily departed from the UK in recent years. This may be in part because there have been fewer failed asylum seekers to remove because of the comparatively low number of claims, the high grant rate and a lower volume of decisions. However, the long term trend looks a lot like diminished state capacity to enforce or encourage departure of failed asylum seekers.
There were just 336 enforced asylum returns in the whole of 2021 and 580 in 2022. The number has increased to 1,468 so far in 2023. The vast majority were Albanian, however: 1,100 of those removals. Albanians also made up just under half of all voluntary departures.
There are only a limited number of Albanians to depart from the United Kingdom given that they stopped arriving in significant numbers in late 2022. Once they are taken out of the figures, we can see that very few failed asylum seekers are generally removed.
In total, there have been just over 49,000 asylum refusals in the last five years.
In the same time, there have been just over 13,000 enforced and voluntary returns.
The reality is that even those who lose their asylum cases are likely to remain in the United Kingdom in the long term. No government has been willing to engage with this policy issue since 2010.
What can be done?
The United Kingdom asylum system is indeed broken. It is, to a very significant extent, Priti Patel who broke it. It was on her watch that small boat crossings soared and so did the asylum backlog. Schemes like a new 10 year route for refugees, recently abandoned, and increasing the Home Office resources funnelled into pointless age disputes made the situation worse not better.
The good news for James Cleverly — and perhaps a new Home Secretary after an upcoming election — is that the situation seems to have stabilised. The asylum backlog is finally coming down. But, as we have seen, there are still significant issues to be addressed, caused in large part by the aftermath of that backlog.
Ministers and managers need to think about prioritising resources. This has to mean doing less of some things in order to do more of others. Why not just grant recognised refugees immediate settlement, for example, rather than conducting a pointless review of their status after five years?
The asylum system is not beyond repair. It requires competent focus on the boring day job instead of being distracted by pointless or even counterproductive gimmicks.
Recent changes show that positive asylum decisions can be made much, much faster than in the past, which is great news for everyone.
The treatment of refugees in the backlog and when they receive a positive decision should be reviewed. Allowing asylum seekers to work after six months waiting for a decision would mean far fewer becoming homeless when they are granted asylum, for example. Even just giving them a bit more time between receiving their immigration papers and evicting them might reduce the number who end up homeless. A support and welcome package for newly recognised refugees should be introduced, which would save money in the long run.
More resources urgently need to be channeled into asylum appeals and legal aid. The appeal success rate remains very high, suggesting that many unnecessary appeals are being lodged. Proper, realistic reviews of pending cases might reduce the appeals backlog and save considerable time and money. Monitoring of officials who wrongly refuse applications or reject an appeal review should be introduced.
If we step back and look at the fundamental change in the asylum grant rate combined with the low number of asylum removals and departures, we can see that it is time to scrap the deterrent policies established in the 1990s and early 2000s, when far fewer asylum claims succeeded. Michael Howard, then Home Secretary, told Parliament in 1995 that only 4% of asylum succeeded as did a further 4% of appeals. The ban on the right to work, the destitution-level support offered instead, the squalid accommodation and camps and the highly bureaucratic, faceless asylum process all absorb vast Home Office resources to administer. These policies, which belong to a bygone age, deter no-one. They merely serve to punish genuine refugees who will ultimately get to stay in the United Kingdom in the long term. It is their interests and ours to help them integrate as soon as possible rather than forcing them into this demeaning purgatory first.