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The UK statistics watchdog is investigating the government’s claim to have “cleared” the so-called legacy backlog of asylum cases.
Rishi Sunak said on Monday that he had met his pledge to process by the end of last year all 92,000 asylum cases that were outstanding up to June 2022, which he had defined as the “legacy” backlog.
“By clearing the legacy asylum backlog, deciding more than 112,000 cases, we are saving the taxpayer millions of pounds in expensive hotel costs, reducing strain on public services and ensuring the most vulnerable receive the right support,” the prime minister said.
The claim to have cleared the backlog was repeated by home secretary James Cleverly in a broadcast-media round on Tuesday.
Labour insisted it was a false claim, arguing that more than 4,000 of those cases remained unresolved and highlighting that 17,000 asylum seekers had simply been withdrawn from the list.
A spokesperson for the Office for Statistics Regulation, an arm of the UK Statistics Authority, confirmed to the Financial Times on Wednesday that it had received a complaint and was looking into the matter.
The row comes after Sunak was rebuked by the chair of the UK Statistics Authority last month for wrongly claiming that “debt is falling”, in a bid to suggest he was meeting one of his five priority pledges for 2023.
The OSR will examine the presentation and communication of all the migration data in the government’s statistical and press releases on Monday, as well as remarks made by ministers — including Cleverly — in subsequent media appearances.
Such investigations have no set conclusion deadline, and they can be triggered autonomously by the OSR or by external complaints. However, this probe is expected to take weeks, rather than months, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The OSR does not disclose the substance of complaints, or the identity of those who have made them, when it opens investigations.
It also has the power to identify its own concerns when it launches probes on the basis of a complaint. The OSR has already investigated concerns about the Home Office’s statistics regarding about 17,000 withdrawn asylum applications, which concluded in December.
The government was contacted for comment. In its press release on Monday that stated the legacy backlog had been cleared, the Home Office acknowledged that 4,500 “complex” cases within this backlog required “additional checks or investigation for a final decision to be made”.
It said these cases typically related to asylum seekers “presenting as children”, where age verification was needed; to those with serious medical issues; and to those suspected of past convictions, which would bar them from asylum under UK law.
Cleverly defended the claim that the backlog had been cleared, despite these cases remaining unresolved. He told the BBC on Tuesday that the government had “committed to processing all those applications” rather than completing them.
He said: “Our commitment was to process them and we’ve done that.”
Critics also argued that the pledge to clear the “legacy” cases was an arbitrary target in the first place. Sunak defined the “legacy” backlog as asylum cases that had been outstanding up to late June 2022, when new asylum laws were introduced in the UK, but 98,000 applications lodged since then are yet to be processed.