How to solve the migrant crisis

Rishi Sunak has admitted at PMQs today that “not enough” asylum claims are being processed in Britain and pledged to fix the “broken” system.
 
He was forced to do so after Keir Starmer jibed that the bookies reckon “the Home Secretary has a better chance of becoming the next Tory leader than processing an asylum claim in a year.”
 
All Sunak could do was promise to improve the current system. He could hardly play down the staggering scale of the backlog when the data speaks for itself: only 4 per cent of asylum claims from last year have been processed, with over 120,000 applications still outstanding. 
 
While the backlog has been steadily increasing for years, the number of asylum seekers waiting over six months for a decision to be made on their case has trebled since Priti Patel took over as Home Secretary in 2019.

The backlog cannot be purely put down to a rising number of asylum claims in the past few years since it has increased disproportionately. And, while the 2022 figure of 63,089 asylum applications is 77 per cent more than in 2019, it’s still a long way off the record 84,132 asylum claims filed in 2002. 
 
Although the UK is more generous than much of Europe when it comes to the final verdict – granting 76 per cent of asylum claims in the year ending June 2022 compared to the EU average of 14 per cent – it is slower to make a decision. In Germany, for instance, the average time to process asylum claims is six-and-a-half months while the majority of cases are considered within three to four months in France. 
 
Tackling the backlog is in everyone’s interest. Delays are costly to asylum seekers who are banned from working while their claims are being processed and forced to survive on an allowance of less than £6 a day. But it also costs the taxpayer, with the government spending £6.8m each day accommodating asylum seekers in hotels until a decision is reached.
 
So how will Sunak fulfil his pledge of fixing the broken system? 
 
According to The Times, the Home Office is considering introducing an ambitious target for staff to process 80 per cent of asylum claims within six months, down from the current 480-day period it takes to process the average case. 
 
It’s thought staff could be awarded bonuses if they meet certain targets, with one proposal including a goal for each case worker to complete four asylum claims a week – over double the current rate.
 
On Monday, the beleaguered Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, insisted that the government is putting more resources and technology into speeding up the process, adding that a pilot in Leeds of the new “asylum transformation programme” has seen interview times for asylum seekers reduced by over a third. 
 
Yet the Adam Smith Institute, writing for Reaction, has suggested a more radical approach. It proposes that the best chance Sunak has for making a tangible improvement to efficiency is to break the under-resourced Home Office up into two separate Departments: Immigration and Security. 
 
Whatever method is employed, speeding up the asylum claims process is one of the best available solutions to fix the “broken” asylum system – something most people can agree on, regardless of their stance on immigration. 

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