The government’s own statistics make clear that Rishi Sunak’s legacy asylum backlog claim just isn’t true

Published

6 months ago

January 2, 2024

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The Home Office has started the New Year proudly trumpeting its progress in dealing with the huge number of outstanding asylum cases.

It claimed in a press release issued last night to have “cleared” the legacy backlog as promised by the prime minister in December 2022.

The whole premise of the “legacy backlog” is a rather arbitrary term invented by the Home Office by which they mean claims made before June 2022.

It was only set out after Rishi Sunak made a much broader-sounding promise to MPs to “abolish the backlog of initial asylum decisions by the end of next year”.

This focused the target on a fixed number of 92,601 outstanding older cases, rather than all the additional claims made since that date.

But last night’s bold headline that the government has cleared that so-called legacy backlog was itself immediately attacked by Labour as “false” and by the Refugee Council as “misleading”.

The government’s own statistics published this morning make it clear this boast just isn’t true. The legacy backlog hasn’t been cleared – there are still 4,537 cases remaining on it.

The Home Office says these are “complex cases” which require “additional checks or investigations” before a final decision can be made – due to the applicants presenting as children but needing age verification for example, or suffering serious medical issues.

But while the cases have been “reviewed” – they’re not yet resolved.

What’s more, we know that at least 17,000 cases were “withdrawn” by the Home Office last year.

This morning the home secretary, James Cleverly, was forced to admit to Sky’s Kay Burley that many of these individuals had “slipped out” of the system and might be working illegally, although he argued others would have chosen to go home and that enforcement activity against dodgy employers is on the increase too.

All of this obfuscation means that the headlines this morning have focused on the misleading nature of the legacy backlog claim – rather than the underlying fact the Home Office has successfully sped up its decision-making process by hiring an extra 1,200 staff, setting targets and changing its systems.

Last year, 112,000 claims were dealt with – including nearly 87,000 of those legacy cases, as well as some of the more recent applications. This is the highest number in 20 years.

The overall backlog now stands at 98,000, down a third from this time last year – and it suggests that if the rate of asylum claims stays the same, or even reduces, the Home Office would finally be on track to get on top of incoming cases.

Of course the government’s trying to discourage people from coming to the UK to claim asylum at all, by banning people from doing so if they’ve arrived by illegal routes and packing them off back home, to Rwanda or a safe third country.

Getting the emergency legislation needed to override the Supreme Court’s objections through parliament to finally deliver the controversial policy is going to be the PM’s biggest challenge for the new year.

But it feels like the government has rather shot itself in the foot in its efforts to highlight progress in reducing the asylum backlog by misleadingly focusing on a specific promise made by the PM which hasn’t quite been met – rather than the bigger picture.

Politics

SEC shoots down Ripple’s argument for a lower penalty

Published

2 hours ago

June 17, 2024

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SEC shoots down Ripple’s argument for a lower penalty

The SEC argued Ripple’s proposed lower civil penalty wouldn’t be enough, and there’s no comparison to its settlement with Terraform Labs.

Politics

Nigel Farage to launch ‘contract with the people’ in Wales following poll boosts

Published

4 hours ago

June 17, 2024

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Nigel Farage to launch 'contract with the people' in Wales following poll boosts

Nigel Farage will kick off Reform UK’s policies in South Wales on Monday, where he is poised to put pressure on the Tories over immigration and tax.

The Reform leader will launch his party’s “contract with the people” – which they will not call a manifesto – in Merthyr Tydfil to highlight “what happens to a country when Labour is in charge”.

The Senedd in Cardiff is the devolved legislature of Wales and is currently run by a Labour-administration.

The launch will follow a productive few days for Reform that saw his party overtake the Conservatives for the first time – prompting Mr Farage to declare his party the “opposition” to Labour.

Election latest: Pub registered as political party; Farage to launch Reform manifesto in Wales

His fortunes increased further after another poll by Survation for The Sunday Times showed the Tories could be reduced to just 72 seats in the next parliament, while a separate survey by Savanta for The Sunday Telegraph showed Reform up another three points.

Reform has consistently pushed the Conservatives to adopt a more hardline stance on immigration and tax cuts.

In a flavour of the policies that will be unveiled tomorrow, the party said earlier this month that it would like to see a tax on businesses who employ overseas workers.

This would see firms pay a higher 20% rate of national insurance for foreign workers, up from the current 13.8%.

Reform is also opposed to Labour’s plans to end private school tax exemptions, and wants the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, overseen by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, in order to use offshore processing centres for illegal immigrants and prevent them from claiming asylum.

Some Tory candidates and former MPs on the right of the party have been agitating for Mr Sunak to advocate for an exit from the ECHR – something he has been reluctant to do but has left the door open to.

Other Reform policies include offering vouchers to go private if you can’t see a GP in three days, scrapping interest on student loans, increasing police numbers, keeping “woke ideologies out of the classroom”, abolishing the TV licence fee, reforming the Lords and reducing “wasteful spending”.

Mr Farage used an article in The Sunday Telegraph to criticise Lord Cameron, the foreign secretary, for an interview he gave to The Times on Friday in which he urged voters to reject the Reform leader’s “inflammatory language” and “dog whistle” politics.

In response, Mr Farage wrote: “If Lord Cameron is worried about damaging divisions, he should look a bit closer to home.

“The terminally divided Tory party has proved itself incapable of effective government over the past 14 years – and is set to be even more hopelessly split in opposition, after it gets hammered on 4 July.”

The Reform leader will also turn his fire on Labour, saying he had chosen Wales to launch his “contract with the people” “because it shows everyone exactly what happens to a country when Labour is in charge”.

“Schools are worse than in England, NHS waiting lists are longer than in England, COVID restrictions were even tighter than in England and now Welsh motorists are being soaked by literally hundreds of speed cameras to enforce the deeply unpopular new 20mph blanket speed limit in towns and villages,” he said.

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“Meanwhile, the Tories have been the official opposition almost solidly since 2016 and have achieved zilch, which probably explains why we are neck-and-neck with them in the polls in Wales.

“So, if you want a picture of what the whole country will be like with a Starmer government and a feeble Conservative opposition, come to Wales and then hear us unveil a better future for all of Britain”.

Rishi Sunak has repeatedly said a vote for Mr Farage’s party amounted to handing a “blank cheque” to Labour, whom the polls predict will form the next government from 4 July.

The full list of candidates standing in Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare are:

Workers Party of Britain – Anthony Cole
Communist Party of Britain – Bob Davenport
Independent – Lorenzo de Gregori
Green Party – David Griffin
Conservative Party – Amanda Jenner
Labour Party – Gerald Jones
Liberal Democrats – Jade Smith
Reform UK – Gareth Thomas
Plaid Cymru – Francis Whitefoot

Politics

Two-child cap to hit extra 670,000 children in next five years, thinktank warns

Published

5 hours ago

June 16, 2024

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Two-child cap to hit extra 670,000 children in next five years, thinktank warns

An extra 250,000 children will be hit by the two-child benefit cap next year, rising to an extra half a million by 2029, a leading thinktank has warned.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the number of children who will fall under the cap – which limits child benefits for the first two children in most households – will reach 670,000 by the end of the next parliament if the policy is not reformed.

The two-child benefit cap, which restricts Child Tax Credit and Universal Credit to the first two children, was brought in by the Conservative government in 2017.

Campaigners have long called for it to be abolished on the grounds it would lift thousands of children out of poverty.

It comes as a separate study from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found 40% of people who work in primary schools and GP surgeries have considered quitting their job because of a “shameful” level of hardship among the population.

Election latest: Minister says election ‘not about the past’ as poll suggests Tory wipeout on 4 July

The JRF found the service providers were “staggering under the weight of hardship” by having to provide extra support to the nearly four million people struggling to pay for essentials including food, heating and clothing.

The IFS said the two-child cap has helped drive up the share of children in large families who are in relative poverty from 35% in 2014-15 to 46% in 2022 – a period when poverty for families with one or two children fell.

The Labour Party has faced pressure to drop the cap – including from former prime minister Gordon Brown – but has so far refused to commit to ending it, citing the current state of the country’s finances.

The pressure intensified further after figures on the right, including former home secretary Suella Braverman and Reform leader Nigel Farage, both called for the cap to be scrapped.

Abolishing the cap does not appear in either the Tory or Labour manifestos, with only the Green Party and Liberal Democrats making the commitment in their offers to the public.

The IFS said removing the cost of the limit would cost the government about £3.4bn a year, equivalent to freezing fuel duties for the next parliament.

The limit currently affects two million children and more children are added each year because it applies to those born after 5 April 2017.

The IFS said when fully rolled out, the cap will affect one in five children, rising to 38% of those in the poorest fifth of households.

It said 43% of children in households with at least one person of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origin will be affected, while those who fall under it on average will lose £4,300 per year – representing 10% of their income.

IFS research economist Eduin Latimer said: “The two-child limit is one of the most significant welfare cuts since 2010 and, unlike many of those cuts, it becomes more important each year as it is rolled out to more families.”

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Mubin Haq, chief executive of the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust, which funded the research, said: “The limit has been a significant contributor to child poverty amongst large families during a period when poverty for families with one or two children fell.

“If the next government is serious about tackling child poverty, it will need to review the two-child limit.”

Alison Garnham, the chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, said the “biggest driver” of child poverty in the UK was the two-child limit.

“Any government serious about making things better for the next generation will have to scrap the two-child limit, and do so quickly.”

A Labour spokesperson said: “We are under no illusions about the scale of the task ahead if we win the election.

“Labour has already set out how we would make a start, with free breakfast clubs in every primary school, cutting fuel poverty and bringing down energy bills, banning exploitative zero hours contracts, making work pay, ending no-fault evictions and creating more good jobs right across the country.”