Recommendation 11

When we asked officials how lessons from earlier reforms had been embedded, the Home Office said it had “learned a lot of lessons” from its work to clear the initial backlog of legacy claims in 2023.18 It highlighted improvements it made following that exercise, including changes to caseworking processes, increases in productivity, and improved training for asylum caseworkers.19 Since 2019, the Home Office has added quality review stages to test how well-founded its decisions are before going to appeal. However, increases in the speed of processing asylum claims have, at times, come at the expense of decision quality.20 Officials told us that these changes have contributed to backlogs shifting to the appeals system. The MoJ explained there were “around 70,000” people waiting for an appeal decision, compared with 27,000 in April 2024, and that appeals were currently taking “near 60 weeks” to be heard.21