Home Office says only half of UK asylum decisions meet its quality standards

10 comments

1. *Rishi Sunak’s push to clear backlog of claims is driving huge increase in legal appeals, costs and harm to applicants*

   Only half of the Home Office’s recent asylum decisions have met its own internal quality checks, significantly fewer than before Rishi Sunak’s push to clear a backlog of old claims.

   Civil servants and lawyers say errors and omissions are also driving a huge increase in costly legal challenges, with more than 9,300 appeals lodged between this April and June.

   Only 52% of asylum decisions sampled in the Home Office’s internal quality assurance process were satisfactory in 2023/24, new figures show, down from 72% the previous year.

   In the same period, the number of appeals against asylum decisions lodged at the First-Tier Tribunal rose from 8,000 to 29,000. Almost half of challenges are currently successful.

   An asylum official who spoke to the Observer on condition of anonymity said changes implemented after former prime minister Sunak’s pledge to process more than 90,000 old asylum claims by the end of 2023 had made decisions less safe.

   “They significantly shortened the training period for asylum decision-makers,” they added. “They raised the targets to clear the backlog, focusing on quantity rather than quality. Decision-makers were expected to crank out seven ‘events’ a week, come hell or high water, and that adversely impacted on the quality of their decisions.”

   The Home Office also introduced a two-hour limit for most asylum interviews, which the official said “made it very difficult to gather enough information to write a sustainable decision that could withstand legal scrutiny”, and “concise” templates for explaining refusals.

   The quality assurance process was also downgraded during the push to clear the legacy backlog, with an internal Home Office report from June 2023 warning of “insufficient activity to identify risks” and a “risk of incorrect or unsustainable decisions”.

   The asylum processing changes have been maintained since the general election, the Observer understands, despite Sunak declaring the legacy backlog “cleared” in January.

   The Freedom from Torture charity called the quality assurance figures “alarming”. Head of asylum advocacy Sile Reynolds said: “If quality is sacrificed in the pursuit of efficiency, then we risk sending refugees back to torture and persecution.

   “If this government doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the previous government, then it needs to urgently prioritise quality alongside speed.”

   Lily Parrott, a solicitor at Duncan Lewis who specialises in asylum claims, said she and her colleagues had “noticed a drop in decision-­making quality”.

   She added: “We’ve been seeing a lot more unexpected refusals, and we’re very conscious that will probably just move the backlog from the Home Office to the tribunal. As the quality of decisions goes down, that’s leading to more refusals and more appeals.”

   Parrott said errors in asylum refusals included decision letters with the wrong name, the wrong nationality, the wrong gender, and where “they’ve been clearly copying and pasting sections of other people’s decisions”.

   The Observer has also been told of cases where the Home Office booked interpreters for asylum interviews who spoke the wrong dialect, generating inaccurate records of applicants’ testimony as a result.

   The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association said members were seeing “factual mistakes”, failures to consider evidence and “poor-­quality interviews”. It added: “The Home Office is refusing cases on the basis that it does not believe individuals are at risk, because there is insufficient detail about the risk of persecution, while simultaneously appearing not to seek that detail or information.”

   The Care4Calais charity said mistakes had a “profound” impact on vulnerable asylum seekers, who face “further needless anxiety, uncertainty and months in limbo for appeals to be processed”.

   Hannah Marwood, the charity’s head of legal access, said: “These poor-quality decisions will wreck people’s lives by denying them the right to safety and protection.”

   A Home Office spokesperson said: “The government is determined to restore order to the asylum system so that it operates swiftly, firmly and fairly. We are getting the asylum system moving again by processing cases and increasing returns of people who have no right to be here.”

2. Just refuse them all, then start deporting. No endless appeals, no free hotels.

3. >They significantly shortened the training period for asylum decision-makers,” they added. “They raised the targets to clear the backlog, focusing on quantity rather than quality. Decision-makers were expected to crank out seven ‘events’ a week, come hell or high water, and that adversely impacted on the quality of their decisions.”

   >The Home Office also introduced a two-hour limit for most asylum interviews, which the official said “made it very difficult to gather enough information to write a sustainable decision that could withstand legal scrutiny”, and “concise” templates for explaining refusals.

   Wow it’s almost as if underfunding government departments leads to less efficiency… Who have thought it….

   Same story in the courts, policing, HMRC, the NHS, councils etc…

   Austerity budgets have consequences, and we’ve been feeling it quite severely in almost every public service since 2010.

4. Just stop taking everybody in we can’t fix everyone else problems

5. I am sorry I’ve no patience for this any more. If you arrived here illegally immediately deport them or detain them abroad if no country of origin can be found.

6. Our immigration system is being overwhelmed because it was never designed to cope with these numbers.

   We adopted the Australian points based system for legal migration. Maybe we should also adopt their policy for dealing with illegal migrants too.

   In 2012 they started their offshoring policy by sending some people who came to the country by sea for asylum processing.

   Then in 2013 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd expanded the scheme to everyone reaching the country by unofficial boat and declared that no-one who arrived by this route would ever be allowed to resettle in Australia.

   The Australian military began escorting small boats to the edge of its territorial waters.

   Not only did the number of boats landing drop, the number of attempts dropped significantly too to almost zero since then.

   There is a proven solution to this problem but it would rely on the government being brave enough to implement it.

7. The Guardian should be happy. The incessant need for numbers over quality means we issue for more than deserve to be. Which is in part why our grant rate is triple the rest of Europes and what ours used to be only a decade or two ago.

8. Just close the department, save money. You let them all stay anyway.

9. Edit: sorry I misread applications instead of decisions. But the core of the rest of my answer is valid. There is THE book and you can read it for yourself.

   There no excuse for that at all. The rules are all on line. You can read the actual book the Home Office staff work to.

   I successfully applied for settlement visas for two children, relatives of my wife, to come and live with us in the UK. I read the rules and arrived with paperwork covering all the points they asked for. I was shocked at the number of people applying for visas, often with a professional adviser with them, who didn’t have all the information or were unsure of their answers.

   It’s not rocket science especially when the rules for any particular type of application are clear and you can print them off to work to.

10. Labour are good at pointing out the mistakes of the past 14 years of government. Now they just have to prove themselves better. They have the added complication that they will never be able to satisfy either the right wing, or their own left.

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