Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what progress her Department has made in reducing the number of asylum cases dating to before 2007.

At the end of 2012, there were approximately 41,000 ‘legacy’ asylum and migration cases where the original application was submitted before March 2007. The Home Office committed to review and communicate decisions on all of these by the end of 2014. The work to review and communicate decisions was completed by the end of December 2014 aside from a small number of cases where an external impediment, such as an outstanding criminal investigation or ongoing litigation, prevented us completing our review

There are cases where the Home Office has completed a review and decided that it is not appropriate to grant leave but not yet removed the applicant. It is for this reason that we committed to review and communicate decisions on the pre March 2007 cases but did not guarantee that all will be concluded by the end of 2014. Such individuals will remain live whilst removal is progressed.


Link to the related published data:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/407276/asylum_transparency_data-q4_2014.ods