An emergency effort to cut the UK backlog of more than 100,000 undecided asylum cases is to largely scrap the need for applicants from five war-torn and oppressive countries to undergo official interviews.
Under the programme, to be launched on Thursday but made public via a leaked letter published online on Wednesday evening, people who fled the five listed countries and awaiting asylum decisions will be sent questionnaires and not called to face-to-face meetings.
The “streamlined” programme will apply to nationals of Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, Syria and Yemen, all countries either suffering civil wars or regarded as having oppressive governments. Between January and September last year, more than 90 per cent of asylum applications from citizens of these countries received some form of refugee protection.
The scheme is intended to tackle a backlog of claims that has become a growing political problem as increasing numbers of hotel rooms have had to be requisitioned to house the large numbers of people awaiting decisions on claims.
People are awarded refugee status — or asylum — if they can show they have fled a genuine threat of persecution or severe danger.
However, the plan was already attracting criticism on Wednesday evening.
One Conservative MP for a northern English seat, who has repeatedly demanded tougher action to address the rise in small-boat migration across the English Channel, described the new policy as “crazy”.
“They say it isn’t an amnesty, but that’s how it will sound to some people,” he said.
Advocates for asylum seekers’ rights, meanwhile, were angry at plans within the programme to cancel the claims of anyone who failed to return the Home Office questionnaire within 20 working days.
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said measures to reduce the backlog of cases were welcome but the answer was not “yet more bureaucratic hurdles and threats of applications being withdrawn”.
“After living in worry and uncertainty for months and even years without hearing anything about their claims, it cannot then be fair or reasonable to expect people to complete a lengthy form only in English in a matter of weeks especially for those who don’t have access to legal advice and don’t speak English,” Solomon said.
The leaked letter, from Daniel Hobbs, director of the Home Office’s Asylum, Protection and Enforcement Directorate, and Fiona Jones, his deputy, presented the policy as an effort to cut a significant backlog of asylum claims. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, has promised that by the end of this year all cases lodged before June 2022 will have been decided.
There were 117,400 cases awaiting an initial decision in the UK asylum system on September 30 last year. Including the family members of some applicants, the cases represented involve a total of 143,000 individuals. New figures on Thursday are expected to show a substantial further increase. On September 30 2010, there were 6,485 outstanding cases.
The backlog has become a growing political problem as Conservative MPs have complained about the requisitioning of hotels in their constituencies to house people awaiting decisions. Protesters tried to attack one such hotel, in the Knowsley area of Merseyside, earlier this month.
The organisers of that demonstration have organised similar protests at hotels elsewhere.
The Home Office did not immediately comment on the leaked letter but did not dispute that it was genuine.
In the first nine months of 2022, 96.8 per cent of applications from Eritreans were approved, the highest success rate of the five nations in the programme, while the lowest was from Libyans, 91.6 per cent of whom were granted protection.
