It will surprise no one that a general election year has begun with a row over immigration – a crucial issue for voters in key parliamentary seats, which will determine the UK’s next government.
But the intensity of the row – with Rishi Sunak accused by Labour of indulging in “a barefaced lie” – is an indication of the way in which future debates will focus on promises made by the government and the use of Home Office statistics.
On Tuesday Sunak claimed to have “cleared” the legacy backlog of nearly 93,000 applications dating back 18 months.
“I said that this government would clear the backlog of asylum decisions by the end of 2023. That’s exactly what we’ve done,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
Stephen Kinnock, the shadow immigration minister, hit back: “The PM’s barefaced lie that he has cleared the asylum backlog would be laughable if it wasn’t such an insult to the public’s intelligence.”
The row dates back to a promise made by the prime minister in December 2022, when he told MPs: “We expect to abolish the backlog of initial asylum decisions by the end of next year.”
Later that day, Downing Street downgraded the target, telling journalists that Sunak had committed to clearing the backlog of 92,601 initial claims made before June 2022 when the Nationality and Borders Act came into force.
Since then, the government has poured resources into doubling the number of asylum caseworkers and agency staff who have been offered bonuses and overtime to help clear the backlog.
On 1 January 2024, the Home Office made its first claim to have hit Sunak’s target. “The prime minister’s commitment of clearing the legacy asylum backlog has been delivered,” it said.
But it also released statistics on 2 January that classified 4,537 cases as still “awaiting an initial decision” in a column marked “legacy backlog”.
The home secretary, James Cleverly, was asked on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 why the government said the backlog had been cleared. He replied: “Because it has.”
The Home Office defines an initial decision as being either granting or refusing asylum or another form of protection.
There are other outstanding questions about the asylum backlog statistics that have not yet been answered.
There were 35,119 “non-substantive decisions” among the legacy backlog – including cases where the Home Office has withdrawn an asylum seeker’s claim. The Home Office has not said how many withdrawn cases have been resubmitted as “secondary asylum casework” – in effect shifting the cases from the legacy list on to another.
Questions have also been raised by figures such as Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader pondering a return to frontline politics, who has accused the government of “rushing through” the cases of 51,469 people who were granted asylum in 2023.
The issue of asylum backlogs is seen as crucial because of public concern about the costs of housing asylum seekers in hotels, which the government says is about £8m a day.
Home Office sources say they have addressed a problem that was neglected by Boris Johnson – more than 112,138 initial asylum decisions were made in 2023, up from 31,766 made in 2022.
But the debate will switch to the so-called “flow backlog” of cases since June 2022. The latest figures show that this stood at 94,062 applications awaiting an initial decision – higher than the legacy backlog when the prime minister made his pledge.
