Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many asylum seekers have spent at least six months awaiting a decision on their asylum claim in the UK.

The Home Office publishes information on asylum applications and resettlement in the Immigration statistics quarterly release. Data on the number of asylum applications that are currently awaiting an initial decision are published in table Asy_D03 of the asylum and resettlement detailed datasets (which is attached), which includes whether cases have been waiting less or more than 6 months.

The number of people awaiting an initial decision is a subset of the total number of people in the asylum system (‘asylum work in progress’), which also includes those awaiting appeal outcomes and failed asylum seekers that are subject to removal from the UK. The total number of cases in the asylum system is published in the ‘Immigration and Protection’ data of the Migration Transparency Data collection.