Asylum backlog ‘doubled in a year’
By Ian Dunt
The backlog of asylum applications where a decision has not yet been made has doubled in a year to 8,700 in the second quarter of 2008, a committee of MPs has revealed.
The figure comes in a new report on asylum by the Commons’ public accounts committee, which found asylum applications were still taking too long.
“It is in the interest of neither applicants for asylum nor the taxpayer that applications for asylum take a long time to be concluded,” said Edward Leigh, the committee’s chairman.
The MPs accepted that the New Asylum Model implemented by the government was an improvement, but stressed the process was “still too slow”.
“Giving priority to the removal of foreign national prisoners has reduced the amount of detention space available for failed asylum applicants,” Mr Leigh continued.
“The result is that few failed asylum applicants are yet being removed from the UK under the New Asylum Model. The Home Office is certainly finding it difficult to achieve the tipping point, where more failed applicants are removed than there are unfounded applications.”
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