Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment he has made of the level of the backlog in Home Office asylum cases in (a) England, (b) North West region and (c) Runcorn and Helsby constituency.

The information requested is not currently available from published statistics, and the relevant data could only be collated and verified for the purpose of answering this question at disproportionate cost.

The Home Office publishes data on asylum in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on asylum seekers awaiting an initial decision is published in table Asy_D03 of the ‘Asylum applications, initial decisions and resettlement detailed datasets’. This table is not broken down by constituency.

Data on asylum seekers on support by local authority is published in table Asy_D11 of the ‘Asylum applications, initial decisions and resettlement detailed datasets’. Please note that not all asylum seekers awaiting a decision will be on support.

Information on how to use the datasets can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbooks.