The government’s own statistics make clear that Rishi Sunak’s legacy asylum backlog claim just isn’t true
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What’s more, we know that at least 17,000 cases were “withdrawn” by the Home Office last year.
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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.
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Asylum seekers homelessness crisis
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.
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Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
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A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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