Rishi Sunak and his immigration minister have been scolded by the UK statistics watchdog for using inaccurate figures to back up spurious claims about asylum seekers.
In a statement to the House of Commons in December, the prime minister claimed that the asylum backlog – 132,000 cases at the time – was half the size of the backlog left by the departing Labour government in 2010. This implied the backlog in 2010 would have been about 260,000.
In the same month, the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, and the safeguarding minister, Sarah Dines, told MPs that 450,000 and 500,000 legacy cases had been left by the Labour government.
However, the UK Statistics Authority found the statements “do not reflect the position shown by the Home Office’s statistics”.
Sir Robert Chote, the UKSA chairman, said the asylum backlog in 2010 was 19,000, meaning the number of outstanding claims had in fact risen almost ninefold to 166,000.
Chote was responding to concerns raised by the shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, who has called on Sunak, Jenrick and Dines to correct the record.
Jenrick and Dines appeared to be referring to figures from the then chief inspector of borders and immigration and UK Border Agency, which included a large number of duplications, errors or applications moved to a “controlled archive”, and contained applicants who were untraceable, dead or had become an EU citizen through another channel.
Chote said: “Given the data quality issues at that time, it would not be reasonable to suggest that this management information from the UK Border Agency accurately represented half a million genuine undecided asylum applications then in the backlog.”
Chote said he had “engaged” with Sunak, Jenrick and Dines to bring this to their attention and “share the UK Statistics Authority’s expectations for the use of official statistics and data in public debate”.
In a letter to Sunak published online, Kinnock, the Labour MP for Aberavon, said a failure to correct the record could amount to a breach of the ministerial code.
I've asked the Prime Minister to correct the record - in line with the Ministerial Code - after the statistics regulator ruled that the asylum backlog had increased by 147,000 since 2010 (not 'halved' as PM claimed!)
— Stephen Kinnock (@SKinnock) April 4, 2023
Under the Tories it is 8x higher than under Labour, at 166,000 pic.twitter.com/Q5ak3Xn8hW
“I strongly urge you to lead by example and correct the erroneous use of figures in that statement at your earliest opportunity and to call on the minister of immigration and the minister for safeguarding to do the same.”
In a statement to the Times, which first reported the development, the Home Office said: “We are taking immediate action to bring the asylum backlog down. We’ve set out new plans to clear the initial asylum decision backlog of legacy cases by the end of next year. We have also doubled the number of asylum caseworkers to more than 1,000 and we will double it again while rolling out a successful pilot scheme nationwide to boost the number of claims processed.”
