Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the answer of 7 July 2023 to Question 191605 on Asylum: staff, what progress she has made on recruiting asylum decision makers to take their number to 2500 by September 2023.

There is currently work underway to redesign the training of Asylum decision makers. The current plan will see the initial training reduced from 9 to 2-3 weeks with further training given as the decision maker progresses.

As of 01 May 2023, there are 1,280 full time equivalent (FTE) Asylum Decision Makers. This information is published online: Statistics relating to the Illegal Migration Bill on GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). Please note that this data is provisional and includes the number of asylum decision makers employed from the beginning of each month from August 2019 to May 2023.

The latest Home Office statistics show asylum decisions are up in the year ending March 2023, with a 35% increase in asylum decisions from the previous year which may be in part due to the increase in the number of asylum decision makers employed by the Home Office.

We are on track to clear the legacy asylum backlog by the end of 2023.