Immigration lawyers have accused the Home Office of building delays into a scheme meant to speed up decisions on 12,000 asylum claims.
The plans announced last month to cut the asylum backlog – which now stands at a record 160,000 cases – by sending questionnaires to refugees requires claimants to reply in English within 20 working days or risk refusal.
Questionnaires are being sent to 12,000 people from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, Syria and Yemen, all countries with an asylum grant rate of more than 95%.
While lawyers and human rights organisations welcome efforts by the Home Office to speed up the processing of asylum claims, they say the scheme has run into difficulties just weeks after the announcement.
One problem has been that immigration lawyers who had already obtained witness statements from their asylum-seeker clients – explaining why they had to flee – have appended these documents to the questionnaire response as a means of answering some of the questions.
However, several immigration lawyers have complained to the Guardian that Home Office officials are rejecting the witness statements they send. A recent email exchange between one lawyer and a Home Office official reveals that the Home Office is asking for new statements to be drafted, which is difficult to accomplish within the 20-day deadline that the Home Office has imposed for completion of the questionnaire.
In the email exchange, the Home Office official states: “I understand that you have submitted the witness statement previously that may provide information about your client’s asylum claim. However, as the witness statement pre-dates the asylum claim questionnaire, we are unable to accept it as answers to the asylum claim questionnaire.
“We ask that you address the questions within the asylum claim questionnaire so your client has the best opportunity to address all aspects of their claim so that their claim could be expedited and that there will be no need for a substantive interview.”
The immigration lawyer protesting about this said: “We have been asked to provide a significant amount of information in relation to our client’s protection needs in a chronological fashion. We have already completed this task and sent it to the Home Office. We would be duplicating work if we completed another witness statement for this purpose and the form is small and would not fit in the relevant information.”
The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association coordinated a letter to the government with more than 100 signatories from legal, human rights and migrant organisations, raising concerns about the new questionnaire, calling it “fundamentally flawed” and describing it as “long, complex and poorly drafted”.
The letter calls on the Home Office to simplify the language used and not to reject cases where the questionnaire is not submitted within 20 days.
A group of immigration lawyers in Northern Ireland have added their voices to the concerns in a letter to the home secretary. “It’s absurd to reference this new process as streamlining,” their letter states, adding that the reality could turn out to be the opposite of the promised streamlining.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The streamlined asylum process seeks to more efficiently assess legacy asylum claims from nationals of Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, Syria and Yemen.
“We provide eligible claimants with the opportunity to fully explain their reasons to seek asylum in the UK through the asylum claim questionnaire. When questionnaires are only partially completed, we will return them for further details. We encourage all questionnaires to be fully completed to give us the best chance possible of making a decision without an interview, to speeds up asylum processing.”
