March 18, 2025 - 10:00am
The ever-expanding backlog of asylum appeals cases, which is costing the taxpayer vast sums, is the result of a generation of politicians trying to look busy without tackling any of the fundamental causes of the problem. And sadly, if not unexpectedly, the government’s response is more of the same.
New figures show that there are no fewer than 41,987 individuals awaiting a decision, each of which needs to be fed and housed at public expense. At the start of 2022, the figure was just 7,173 — an extraordinary increase of around 500%.
Increasing legal aid fees may help bring more lawyers in to work on the cases, in fairness. But the flagship announcement — that “ministers are planning to change the law to introduce a mandatory 24-week legal deadline for all asylum appeals” — is probably meaningless.
It’s easy to be bewitched by the promise of hard legal deadlines, which is one of the reasons politicians have grown so fond of them. But law on its own isn’t anything special. What really matters is not simply that “Parliament has duly enacted that X has to happen”, but the consequences which follow if X doesn’t happen.
For Labour’s proposal to have any teeth, there would need to be actual consequences for missing the deadline, at least for institutions but ideally for specific individuals within those institutions whose duty it is to ensure the new law is complied with.
Crucially, however, those institutions or individuals must also have it within their power to comply with the law, both to maximise the chances of driving the change required and as a matter of basic justice. You cannot fairly hold someone responsible for breaking a legal obligation they had no chance of upholding.
There’s no mention of any sanctions in the reporting on Labour’s announcement, and almost impossible to envision what they could be. Who could they possibly fine or fire for missing the deadline on an asylum appeal? Nobody has the power to commandeer spaces for additional courtrooms, conscript judges to sit in them, or throw out appeals unheard after 24 weeks.
Except, of course, the Government. It alone can hurl the resources at the system needed to increase throughput, to the extent resources are the problem, while only Parliament could change the law to restrict grounds for, or time allowed for, appeals.
Keir Starmer may yet start dabbling in that territory as this unhappy parliament drags on. Despite his career as a human rights lawyer, there has always been something of a Nixon-to-China dynamic on this stuff where Labour is more willing to actually change the law than the Conservatives. It was none other than Tony Blair, after all, who introduced the UK’s first and only derogation from the ECHR, on prisoner votes.
Changing the law is the only way to fundamentally shift the centre of gravity on this, just as building a proper asylum estate is the only way to get asylum seekers out of hotels and public housing until we do. Any government serious about tackling this issue once and for all would need concrete proposals on one or both of these fronts.
Until then, there is no reason to expect this new deadline to be any more effective than similar ones in other areas, such as the legal-but-otherwise-theoretical 13-week limit on planning permission decisions. And we may yet see at least one push to “clear the backlog” by rubber-stamping appeals or a granting an amnesty.
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SubscribeWhy should Britain have a proper asylum estate?
It makes no sense to house asylum seekers in an overcrowded country where everything is expensive.
We should have secure, short term holding areas where we keep applicants (and those found entering illegally) until we can move them off shore.
Make Britain an unattractive destination for migrants, and they’ll soon stop coming.
…and move them rapidly! Withdraw from or suspend any international treaty or agreement that prevents immediate deportation. Give illegal immigrants a choice: live in a large camp on South Georgia with subsistence rations or return to your country of origin. Meanwhile, genuine asylum seekers can apply from refugee camps near their former homes.
…And be heard, accepted and received in numbers according to the resources available. And I mean resources funded through positive cashflow – not through further deficit spending.
Even genuine asylum seekers don’t belong in the UK, except where they’re useful intelligence assets.
Whatever money we’re willing to spend to support them would go further in countries closer to their place of origin.
Ideally, yes. That is best fit.
The last paragraph outlines the danger of seeking to ‘time-limit’ or ‘fast-track’ asylum appeals. It seems as if the only way the backlog could be cleared within the resources available would be to water down the requirements for asylum.
Who, among the press or the general public, would know this is happening unless a whistleblower from within the system stepped forward? We’d simply see the number of claims being processed increasing, no doubt amid claims of increased efficiency.
Of course, an alternative would be make it more straightforward to reject applications for asylum. That should – at the very least – include those whose entry into the UK was via illegal means. I somehow doubt that will happen, although anyone genuinely escaping their country of origin for fear of their life would find themselves safe in the majority of other European countries through which they’ve travelled to reach the UK.
The problem is that it is easy to assert a claim that one needs asylum and a lot more difficult to establish that what is being claimed is a tissue of lies. It is also a lot harder to reexport an unwilling asylum seeker to a country that doesn’t want them back. The easy solution is always going to be to accept the ever-shifting asylum claim and pass the problem on to the taxpayer.
At the very least the boats should be treated like any invasion and pushed back from whence they came as soon as they are spotted in the channel.
Make it a hard and fast law that you can only request asylum from outside the country, except in cases of national security importance.
True, but the answer is not to race through the backlog.
It’s easy to eliminate a backlog by simply approving applications. The system is already biased in that direction.
It’s nice to read articles like this that clearly spell out the circumstances around some specific political issue, sadly, it isn’t really telling us anything new. Kier Starmer’s government won’t do anything to address the problem, you say? Imagine my surprise. When there are clear, obvious and workable solutions on offer and the government doesn’t apply them, what are we supposed to think?
Indeed. It’s all a tragic farce.
Political commentators write earnestly and logically about problems and solutions, but our ruling class don’t recognise the same problems as us, so they have no interest in the solutions.
For Starmer, as for Boris, Sunak, Cameron and Blair, dilution of Britishness is a feature, not a bug.
They want a disunited mass of desperate Anywhere People, kept in check by a surveillance state beyond the Stasi’s wildest dreams.
As Gordon Ramsay says… “Nah, nah, you numpty! Shut it down. Shut. It. Down….”