Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many pending tribunals involving asylum application cases there were on 1 January of each of the last five years.

The number of registered asylum appeals outstanding in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal as at 1^st January² in each of the years requested is as follows:

¹ The data are Management Information taken from the tribunal’s case management system. They do not form part of the published statistics.

² Outstanding data on 1^st January is at close of business on 31st December of the previous year.

Tribunal statistics are published on a quarterly basis and are available at: www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics

HM Courts & Tribunals Service has worked extensively to reduce the outstanding caseload and improve timeliness for all appeal types in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber. This has seen the live caseload in the First-tier Tribunal more than halve from 64,800 to 31,500 between July 2016 and September 2018. The average duration has also improved from 52 weeks in the period July to September 2017 to 39 weeks in the period July to September 2018. For asylum appeals in the same period the average time has come down from 28 weeks to 25 weeks.