LONDON — U.K. government efforts to eradicate a vast backlog in asylum cases this year by fast-tracking thousands of cases are headed for failure, a senior lawmaker has warned.
Diana Johnson, a Labour MP who chairs the cross-party Commons home affairs committee, told POLITICO there was “a big issue” over whether Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s proposals are “doable” given Whitehall’s dismal record at dealing with asylum cases at speed.
The number of asylum seekers in Britain still waiting for decisions on their cases has now soared to a record 166,000 people, according to Home Office figures published Thursday.
U.K. officials said they will now fast-track around 12,000 cases from countries where the vast majority of applications are successful — including Syria and Afghanistan — if the individuals pass criminal and security checks.
Sunak has pledged to eliminate most of the backlog and pass new laws to stop small boats of migrants from reaching the U.K. by the end of 2023.
But Johnson said her committee is “concerned … because in the past the Home Office have said they will do things like recruit many more caseworkers, and it’s taken them much longer than they promised.”
She added there was also a “real problem” with retention of staff. “It’s not a very well-paid job,” she noted. “In the past, there have been huge problems with people leaving quickly. It takes time to train people and then the work is actually quite difficult and hard.”
Sunak, however, has pledged to triple productivity among asylum caseworkers, which he insists is possible on the basis of “sophisticated modelling.”
“What worries me is you can have all sorts of algorithms,” Johnson said, “but the reality is, this is about people making decisions on complicated cases.”
Sunak’s plans to fast-track asylum cases have been greeted with criticism from within his own party, too.
Tory backbench MP Bill Wiggin told Times Radio: “It doesn’t sound quite like the sort of ‘taking back control of our borders’ that we said we would do when we fought the last election.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Our priority is to stop the boats and ensure that people who come here illegally are detained and swiftly removed.”
They added the department was “working to speed up asylum processing so that people do not wait months or years in the backlog, at vast expense to the taxpayer, and to remove everyone who doesn’t have a legitimate reason to be here.”
