Rishi Sunak claims that Ministers are on track to eliminate the backlog of nearly 75,000 cases by the end of the year. New data indicates that the Home Office must process one asylum claim every four minutes until the year ends to uphold the Prime Minister’s promise of eliminating the backlog.
The Prime Minister revisited his government’s promise recently, confirming to meet the target as planned. However, critics barely think the government will be able to fulfill its goal.
There were 74,410 cases in the asylum backlog on 28 May when Rishi Sunak confirmed that ministers are tirelessly working to completely eliminate the backlog by the end of the year.
The latest briefing paper published by the Refugee Council states that the Home Office has to process 10,630 backlog cases every month until December to help Rishi Sunak fulfill his objective. This means processing 354 cases in a day and one every four minutes.
Staff at the Home Office has dropped massively even after the recruitment of additional caseworkers to deal with the backlog. The National Audit Office concluded that 1,333 decision-makers were working at the Home Office on 1 January while 1280 worked on 1 May. Moreover, only half of the existing staff is involved in the decision-making process, and only 140 caseworkers are trained to work independently.
In light of these statistics, a Home Office spokesperson disregarded this analysis, stating that the government is close to eliminating the legacy asylum backlog, which is already down by 17,000 cases.
The spokesperson further added that the decision-making is up by 35%, and the number of caseworkers is being increased to speed up the process. The government is fully focused on considering every asylum claim without any delays to ultimately reduce the burden on the taxpayers.
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