Will Sunak manage to remove illegal migrants ‘within weeks’?

Let the trumpeters trumpet and church bells across this land peal away in celebration: the Home Office has an administrative achievement to its name. According to ministers, a ‘legacy’ backlog of almost 92,000 asylum claims made before the end of June 2022 has been cleared, just as Rishi Sunak pledged that it would be.

It is hardly the equivalent of the Union flag flying again over South Georgia early in the Falklands War. But nonetheless let us just rejoice for a moment at that news given how seldom it is that the Home Office hits any target whatsoever. Yet after our rejoicing is done we must, alas, kick our brains into gear and unpack what this really means.

It certainly doesn’t mean there is now no backlog of asylum cases. Around 100,000 applications made since June 2022 are yet to be determined. Nor does it mean the British state has proved it is no soft touch for asylum claims, as Home Secretary James Cleverly has acknowledged there was an overall grant rate of 67 per cent last year. (This, remember, is for people who overwhelmingly arrived in our country illegally but managed to enter before Rishi Sunak’s pledge that nobody in such circumstances will be permitted to stay kicked in).

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Nor does it mean that the roughly one in three people whose applications were turned down have been removed – most will be in an appeals process by now. Nor does it mean that all of the 92,000 cases in the backlog have received an initial decision: some 4,500 have been placed in a different in-tray as ‘complex’ cases, often involving disputed claims about the age of younger applicants. In addition, another 17,000 or so historic asylum claims have been discontinued by the Home Office because, remarkably, it has simply lost track of the applicants.

These quibbles are the main thing to latch onto if you think, as Labour does, that the chief deficiency in the UK asylum system is the slow processing of claims. Because otherwise Cleverly’s contention that there has been a ten-fold increase in processing capacity rather shoots your fox. You can certainly ask questions about just how thoroughly the 20,481 cases receiving initial decisions between November 20 and December 17 were probed given that this was more than the entire number of cases processed in 2021. That rather reeks of a pre-Christmas rubber-stamping frenzy.

But if Cleverly is right and armies of new Home Office desk officers are now whizzing through the paperwork, looking grave and shaking your head as you mutter the word ‘backlog’ – which has long been shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper’s favoured tactic – is running out of road.

But none of this is going to satisfy those who are focused on the fundamental lunacy of sustaining a system which fails to deport more than 90 per cent of illegal arrivals into our country. While asylum claims are now running at above 80,000 a year, forced returns are below 6,000. For us, a quicker processing system that delivers a high grant rate arguably even amounts to yet another pull factor for economic migrants gaming the asylum system: you have a two-thirds chance of getting refugee status (and can still appeal if you are turned down) and will be kept in limbo for less time than previously. From the point of view of an asylum shopper, what’s not to like?

For us, the key test of Sunak is whether he is ever going to fulfil his pledge, made in the House of Commons last March, that anybody arriving in the UK illegally will be removed ‘within weeks’. Given all that has happened since, I’m guessing that the answer to this is no.