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The Home Office’s unsuccessful scramble to meet Rishi Sunak’s pledge to clear an asylum backlog is leading to a new “crisis” with a rapidly expanding mountain of appeals threatening to clog up the tribunal system, i has learnt.
Specialist lawyers have said there will not be enough of them to handle the extra cases – many caused by government mistakes, so claimants will be forced to represent themselves even if they are unable to speak English.
Taxpayers also face having to pick up the bill, as the Home Office houses and financially supports the thousands of extra asylum seekers who are waiting for appeals.
An insider at the department told i that the appeals were being fuelled by the Home Office making more “unsafe” asylum decisions as it rushed to fulfil the PM’s promise.
The caseworker pointed to changes made to procedures in an effort to clear a backlog of more than 90,000 old asylum cases by the end of last year. They included shorter interviews and “concise” refusal letters, introduced to speed up processing.
“Changes were implemented from July onwards so we could clear the backlog, but the legal risk was high,” the Home Office insider told i. “Quite literally, the backlog has been moved from asylum decisions to appeals.”
The latest available figures on asylum appeals show they had already more than doubled by September, with a 111 per cent rise compared to the previous year.
They show that there were 3,866 new asylum appeals between July and September and that they made up 38 per cent of all immigration appeals compared to just 19 per cent a year earlier.
Those working in the system say the situation has got much worse since then. Figures covering all the asylum and immigration tribunal cases show the number received jumped from 4,500 in October to more 6,000 in November.
But the numbers of cases being dealt with has stayed steady so the current backlog of 35,400 unresolved tribunal cases looks set to increase exponentially.
Euan MacKay, a partner at McGlashan MacKay solicitors specialising in asylum law, said the number of appeals handled by his firm “really kicked off” in December and continued at high levels through January.
“The Home Office are just rushing things out and where they’re doing refusals they’re really, really poorly reasoned,” he said. “They’re just going to add to the backlog.”
There has been political discussion over the need to increase tribunal capacity if the government attempts to send people to Rwanda, but no announcement of plans to deal with the current explosion in demand.
Immigration solicitor Sonia Lenegan has warned that there were not enough specialist lawyers to take on the extra work, and she has predicted that many claimants would have to represent themselves – even if they do not speak English.
“It’s hugely concerning,“ she said. “The volume of cases will mean delays, and the lack of lawyers will mean appeals are not able to be determined fairly.
“People will be waiting longer and longer and they are still entitled to asylum support because an asylum claim is not considered finished until an appeal is done.”
Around half of asylum appeals are currently successful, meaning that if the trend continues the Home Office will have to reverse thousands of asylum refusals and withdrawals.
Asylum seekers, many of whom wait years for an initial decision on their claim, currently wait an average of 11 months for a tribunal ruling on appeal and the figure is expected to quickly pass a year.
Thomas Munns, a solicitor at Duncan Lewis, said that in one recent case the Home Office decided to refuse an asylum application so quickly after an interview that the claimant had no chance to send in supporting evidence and documents.
He added: “It seems as though the Home Office have prioritised clearing the backlog over the quality of decision-making or ensuring that applicants have been given the opportunity to substantiate their claim through further evidence in line with their own policy and guidance.”
The Government’s claim that it was successful in clearing the asylum backlog by the end of last year has been disputed by its own statistics watchdog and glossed over the fact that more than 4,000 cases were left waiting a final decision.
Another source with close knowledge of the system, who did not want to be identified, said the quality of decisions during the rush to clear the backlog “was poorer” and causing a “massive uptick in appeals”.
“It’s complete chaos out there and everyone is extremely stressed having to respond to this latest crisis, and that’s just the professionals,” they added. “The toll on people claiming asylum is infinitely worse.”
Asylum seekers who have their claim withdrawn or refused lose their right to government accommodation, and the right to remain in the UK, leaving many at risk of homelessness and criminal exploitation.
The Refugee Action charity said it had been challenging an increasing number of Home Office decisions to stop people’s support, and was seeing many reversed because of abuses of process where people “haven’t actually been properly served their decision, provided with correct documents, or timescales not properly followed”.
The Care4Calais charity said it had also monitored an uptick in appeals and a “high success rate”. But it warned that limits on legal representation meant that many asylum seekers would not be able to access the process.
Chief executive Steve Smith said there were also “concerns that rushed decisions are resulting in poorer decisions being made”, adding: “It is the perfect storm that will leave individuals facing an uncertain future, outside the asylum system and more vulnerable to exploitation.”
The Home Office said that asylum seekers and caseworkers could request extensions to two-hour interviews, and submit more evidence in writing.
The department said a new template introduced in July for letters telling people their asylum claim had been refused had not changed the decision-making process, but made the documents more “concise”.
But a caseworker said the format was driving appeals because the “rejection of material facts is not properly explained or argued” in the way it was previously.
Stephen Kinnock, Labour’s shadow immigration minister, said: “We already knew that the Home Secretary was cooking the books on asylum ‘decisions’, because more than 30,000 claims had been withdrawn rather than properly processed and dealt with.
“Now we find that many have been rushed through and will be subject to appeal – a hidden backlog that the government don’t dare talk about. This is yet more smoke and mirrors from Conservative ministers who have broken our asylum system.”
HM Courts and Tribunal Service has already moved to speed up tribunal hearings with virtual cases and online services, and can expedite appeals if requested. A recruitment drive for more immigration and asylum tribunal judges is continuing.
A government spokesperson said: “We have met the Prime Minister’s pledge to clear the legacy backlog of asylum cases made before 28 June 2022 and all of these cases have been reviewed.
“Our processes are underpinned by a robust framework of safeguards and quality checks, ensuring that asylum claims are carefully considered, decisions are sound, and that protection is granted to those who genuinely need it.”
