Rishi Sunak’s rush to clear a legacy backlog in UK asylum claims has driven some applicants into the hands of criminals, pushed others towards destitution and is creating a fresh pile-up in the courts, lawyers have warned.
The prime minister, who has been under pressure to tackle record numbers of unprocessed asylum claims, claimed on January 1 that he had met his 2023 pledge to deal with more than 92,000 cases.
But within this number predating June 2022 are 35,119 people stripped from the backlog who were neither rejected nor accepted as refugees. Instead, the Home Office withdrew most of these applications for alleged non-compliance with rules or disappearance.
The withdrawal of claims has led to people being cast into limbo, evicted from supported accommodation and cut off from financial support, according to immigration lawyers and charities.
In other instances, those whose cases have been rejected or withdrawn have ended up homeless, vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking, several legal experts warned.
“There are a great many such cases going through the courts locally at present,” said Lucie Rees Sudbury practise manager at Clive Rees & Associates, a law firm in Swansea.
The firm recently represented two Albanian asylum seekers who had been arrested and charged for working on cannabis farms. Their clients had been trafficked there by gangs, it said, after failing to secure refugee status and being kicked out of Home Office accommodation.
“It’s absolute chaos,” said Euan MacKay, a partner at McGlashan MacKay Solicitors, a Glasgow law firm, of the legal complications that have arisen since the Home Office began fast-tracking claims last year.
“[The Home Office has] made a decision to clear the backlog . . . but it’s just shuffling the backlog around, loading up legal aid costs,” he said, adding that ultimately questionable decisions would end up in court.
Under current rules, an asylum case can be withdrawn “implicitly” if an applicant ceases contact with the Home Office, leaves the UK without authorisation or fails to attend a scheduled interview.
MacKay said his firm was dealing with 10 such withdrawals, including cases where Home Office correspondence had been sent to the wrong address, claimants had been informed of interview requests at the last minute or had been asked to travel huge distances.
Where asylum applications were rejected outright, the department was often failing to provide substantive reasoning, setting decisions up for legal challenge and clogging up the courts, he added.
“Before, a refusal letter would consider the claim in detail and give you proper reasons,” noted MacKay.
The government’s bid to clear the asylum backlog was spurred by the need to reduce the amount of taxpayer money being spent on accommodating applicants in hotels, estimated at more than £8mn a day. That figure has continued rising since 2022 as fresh cohorts of migrants have crossed into the UK by small boat.
Writing to MPs this month, immigration minister Tom Pursglove sought to clarify the status of 17,316 applications that were withdrawn in the 12 months up to 30 September.
Pursglove said in half of these cases, the government was “re-engaging” with the applicants. Of these 15 per cent had been granted some form of immigration status since, and 35 per cent were “being managed by various teams across the Home Office”.
A further 5,598, or 32 per cent, had vanished, he noted. “The Home Office is taking steps to urgently re-establish contact with them,” Pursglove said, adding that 3,241 asylum seekers had also left the country.
Even some of the latter cases have been problematic, however. Members of the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, a professional body of immigration law specialists, highlighted two examples where the Home Office had mistakenly deemed people to have travelled while it had been holding their passports. Both were evicted from supported accommodation and made homeless.
Nick Beales, lead campaigner for the Refugee and Migrant Forum for Essex and London (RAMFEL), said he had succeeded in reinstating two applications withdrawn recently because claimants had purportedly failed to turn up for scheduled interviews.
In one of these, a Sudanese asylum seeker said he had received an eviction notice from Home Office contractors but never received an interview request from the department.
In another, involving a Syrian man, an interview request letter had been sent to a hotel he left long ago when the Home Office had moved him to different lodgings.
Jon Featonby, chief policy analyst at the Refugee Council charity, said: “The fact that half of the withdrawn claims have now been reinstated shows that they should never have been withdrawn in the first place.”
As well as these reinstated cases, the government acknowledged earlier this month that there were about 4,500 cases from the legacy backlog that required further investigation.
An Afghan asylum seeker, who spoke to the Financial Times on condition of anonymity, said he had fled to the UK with his family shortly after the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
His case appeared straightforward, according to Asylum Aid the charity helping him — about 98 per cent of asylum applications from Afghans in 2022 were successful, according to Home Office data.
But the man has had no explanation for why he has been kept waiting. “It is like a recurring nightmare where you are screaming but no one is listening,” he said.
The UK statistics authority this month rebuked the government for misleading the public when it claimed the pre-June 2022 waiting list had been “cleared”. The Home Office continues to make the assertion.
“We have met the prime minister’s pledge to clear the legacy backlog of asylum cases . . . the overwhelming majority of which have now received a decision,” it said.
Source link
