Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the report by the ONE Campaign entitled Getting a grip: How the Home Office should improve refugee and asylum seeker welfare and protect UK aid, published on 29 September 2023, what assessment she has made of the implications for her policies of the recommendations of that report.

The Home Office is tackling the asylum legacy caseload so that people can receive a decision and exit the system, either by returning to their home country, or granting them asylum so they can begin to make a contribution to the UK. We have already met our commitment to increase the number of decision makers to 2,500. We will continue to increase the number of caseworkers to help clear the asylum backlog by the end of 2023. We are on track to clear the legacy backlog by the end of the year.

We are also improving the productivity, volumes, and speed of decision making so that people spend less time in asylum accommodation. We are streamlining and modernising the end-to-end process, with improved guidance, more focused and fewer interviews, enhancing use of digital technology, and we are introducing a more efficient approach to how claims are handled by decision makers. The aim is to clear initial asylum decisions relating to claims made before 28 June 2022, when the Nationality and Borders Act measures came into force, by the end of 2023.

The Home Office is committed to making every effort to reduce hotel use and limit the burden on the taxpayer. This is why we are delivering a range of alternative accommodation sites, maximising hotel space, operationalising the Illegal Migration Act and continuing our hard work to clear the asylum backlog by the end of the year.

In line with our response to the ICAI review, FCDO published the updated UK In-Donor Refugee Costs methodology report alongside our latest Statistics on International Development.

The full methodology report can be found here. Section 3 sets our the fit for purpose assessment and current data limitations.