UK Edition
Asylum backlog almost doubles in two years after Covid saw resettlement ‘grind to halt’
Home Office data show that a record 70,905 asylum seekers were waiting for a decision at the end of June this year
The backlog of asylum applicants has nearly doubled in two years as refugee resettlement effectively "ground to a halt" during the Covid pandemic, official figures show.
Home Office data show that a record 70,905 asylum seekers were waiting for a decision at the end of June this year – up 73 per cent over the past two years despite a decline in the number of applicants. This included 3,064 Afghans who reached the UK before the Taliban takeover of their country.
The total was more than nine times higher than it had been in June 2011.
The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford said the data showed refugee resettlement to the UK in effect "ground to a halt during the pandemic".
Only 308 refugees were resettled in the second quarter of this year, compared with a quarterly average of 1,400 between 2016 and 2019. This included just nine of the Afghan asylum seekers.
Dr Peter William Walsh, researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said: "The scale of the asylum backlog does not reflect numbers of people applying, because asylum applications have slightly decreased.
"Some of the recent increases in the backlog took place during the pandemic, but actually this is a much longer-term trend. A key driver is that the share of people receiving a decision within six months has fallen dramatically over the past decade."
The UK received asylum applications from 37,325 people in the year ending June 2021 – a nine per cent fall from the previous year.
These figures include migrants arriving across the Channel. The Migration Observatory said boat arrivals had been increasing but made up a minority of asylum claims in the most recent data, which is from 2020.
Afghans made up 4.5 per cent of asylum seekers granted protection and have had a higher than average success rate in asylum cases, at 70 per cent for the 2018 cohort of applicants as of May 2020, excluding those who had not yet received a final decision.