Clearing the asylum backlog is a national emergency

Right now, 90,000 men, women and children are stuck in the UK’s asylum backlog. Most have been waiting over six months just for the Home Office to make an initial decision on their asylum application. 28,000 have been waiting more than a year.

People who came to the UK seeking safety – fleeing war, persecution and unimaginable trauma – now find themselves trapped in a cruel Home Office limbo, banned from working or renting a home, living in unsuitable accommodation, unable to move on with their lives.

Now, with protests outside asylum hotels over the summer reaching new heights, many are also living in fear of violence and intimidation. 

The former Conservative government deliberately created this humanitarian crisis by telling the Home Office to stop processing claims, causing the backlog to grow and grow. They claimed it would act as a deterrent to stop people coming here – but of course it didn’t.

Labour has so far failed to get a grip of the crisis. At the current rate of people claiming asylum and the Home Office deciding cases, it would take five years to clear this backlog. 

The Liberal Democrats are not willing to stand by and let this continue. We urgently need to deal with this backlog, so people are not trapped in limbo and refugees can get on with their lives in the UK.

That’s why we are calling on the government to declare the asylum backlog a national emergency and set up Nightingale processing centres – like the Nightingale hospitals we saw during the pandemic – to clear the asylum backlog within six months.

These centres should be independent from the Home Office – part of a dedicated new unit to take over processing asylum claims. The Home Office has shown, time and again, that it is not fit for this job. Decisions are wrong the first time far too often, leading to appeals and causing costly delays.

By creating a new unit and staffing it with double the number of caseworkers, we can clear the backlog in six months and restore some humanity to the system.

Until the Government treats this crisis with the urgency and seriousness it demands, nothing will change and the vulnerable people caught in the system will continue to suffer.

Image: Steve Cadman, CC BY-SA 2.0