Lord Pannick
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Asylum Seekers: MoD Housing
Lord Pannick Excerpts(1 day, 19 hours ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord and hope he enjoyed his time at both barracks and found it convivial, as far as possible given the service it presumably had at that time. We are trying to ensure that this is a temporary measure. Ultimately, the purpose of all this is to ensure that we process people very quickly, eventually with off-site decision-making, and that we then disperse or remove those individuals when asylum decisions are taken. I will look into the £1.3 million that the noble Lord mentioned and give him a formal response by letter. Please rest assured that the purpose of this is to provide temporary accommodation to reduce hotel numbers, and ultimately to help us on the path to reduce them to zero.
Lord Pannick (CB)
The Minister just acknowledged that speedy determination of asylum claims is essential to addressing this problem. You obviously need less accommodation if people can be moved on when they have no asylum claim, and moved to other countries speedily. That will have a greater deterrent effect on those who want to come here. What is the current backlog of asylum claims? What are the Government doing to ensure more speedy determination of those claims?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful that the noble Lord has put his finger on a point that the Government have also put their finger on. The current initial claim for decision-making on outstanding asylum decisions is around 91,000. In the last three months alone, the number of people awaiting that initial decision has fallen by 19,000, or 17%. That is because we have taken decisions to put extra staff into that area to speed up asylum applications, and we are looking at using that newfangled thing, AI, to try to improve speedy applications and understanding of those applications. It is absolutely right that we get those application numbers down. The number of people awaiting a decision is down by 24% over the period of the previous Government.