Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 28 April 2023 to Question 181937 on Asylum, how many legacy asylum claims submitted before 28 June 2022 have not yet received a decision.

The Home Office publishes provisional data on the asylum backlog in the ‘Statistics relating to the Illegal Migration Act’ release. Provisional data on asylum applications awaiting an initial decision, including a breakdown by legacy and flow cases, as at 31 March 2011 to 30 July 2023, can be found in table IMB_02 of the ‘Statistics relating to the Illegal Migration Act: data tables to July 2023’.

The Home Office also publishes finalised data on asylum in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on applications awaiting an initial decision under Section 12 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, including a breakdown by legacy and flow cases, is published in table Asy_10a of the ‘asylum and resettlement summary tables’. Data on the number of people awaiting a decision is published in table Asy_10b. The latest data relates to as at 30 June 2023. Data as at 30 September 2023 will be published on 23 November 2023.

Please note the provisional data in the ‘Statistics relating to the Illegal Migration Act’ release is higher than the figures in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’ as the provisional data includes duplicates which have not been cleansed from the data; the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’ has been subject to additional quality assurance as cleansing.

Information on future Home Office statistical release dates can be found in the ‘Research and statistics calendar’.