Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department has made (a) a comparative assessment of the speed of processing asylum claims for (i) her Department's existing method and (ii) alternative methods and (b) an assessment of the efficiency of alternative methods taken by other nations.

We have taken immediate action to speed up asylum processing whilst maintaining the integrity of the system. This includes simplifying guidance and streamlining processes. We have also introduced shorter, focussed interviews, making the interview process more efficient.

The asylum backlog of legacy cases had fallen by over 35,000 cases, between the end of November 2022 and the end of August 2023, and has continued to fall since the last publication of statistics.

Information on the legacy backlog is published online in the IMB_02 Tab of the data table regarding Statistics relating to the Illegal Migration Act - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk(opens in a new tab)). This data is provisional and has not been cleansed to remove duplicates.

In the year ending June 2023, there were 23,702 initial decisions made on asylum applications, 61% more than in the previous year. This is in part due to an increase in the number of asylum decision makers employed by the Home Office.

We are confident that with increased capacity and improved efficiency this will help deliver further significant output over the coming months.