Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of caseworkers employed at the Asylum Casework Hub in Stoke-on-Trent (a) are and (b) are not making decisions on asylum claims independently.

We are increasing the productivity of caseworkers by streamlining, digitalising, and simplifying our process. We have already doubled our decision makers over the last 2 years, and we are continuing to recruit more. This will take the headcount of our expected number of decision makers to 2,500 by September 2023.

Provisional data indicates that, as of 01 May 2023, there are 1,280 full time equivalent (FTE) Asylum Decision Makers. This information is published online in the IMB_06 tab of the Statistics relating to the Illegal Migration Bill - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). IMB_06 is not broken down in terms of how many decision makers are allocated to each Decision-Making Unit nor how many have been trained to work independently.

The latest Home Office statistics show asylum decisions are up in the year ending March 2023, with a 35% increase in asylum decisions from the previous year.