Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the remarks by the Prime Minister on 13 December 2022 when he stated that "we expect to abolish the backlog of initial asylum decisions by the end of next year" (HC Deb col 887), what progress they have made in reaching that target.

We remain on track to clear the legacy backlog by the end of 2023. The asylum backlog of legacy cases fell by over 35,000 cases between the end of November 2022 and the end of August 2023 when, according to provisional data, it stood at 55,477 outstanding claims.

23,702 asylum claims were decided in the year ending June 2023, an increase of 61% on the previous year, in part due to an increase in the number of asylum decision-makers employed by the Home Office.

We met our commitment to increase the number of asylum decision-makers to 2,500, and at the end of August 2023, provisional data shows there were 2,510 in post.