More than 175,000 asylum seekers are waiting for an initial decision on their application, a record high, newly released Home Office statistics have shown.
Data on asylum cases for the year to the end of June showed that while the number of people given a decision rose against the year before, this was more than cancelled out by a bigger increase in applications.
Almost 10,000 Afghans applied for asylum over the year, making them the second most common nationality entering the UK asylum system after Albanians.
The statistics showed there were 78,768 asylum applications to the UK in the year to June 2023, concerning 97,390 people, up from 66,384 applications in the previous 12 months.
This rise helped push the total number of people awaiting an initial decision on their claim to 175,457, 44% higher than the 122,213 total at the end of June 2022, and the highest figure since records began in 2010.
There was a 57% increase in the number of people waiting more than six months for a decision, rising to 139,961 at the end of June from 89,231 a year before.
Of the 11,790 applications by Albanian nationals, 7,557 came from arrivals on boats crossing the Channel, the data showed, although the numbers of Albanians coming on small boats dropped notably this year compared with 2022.
The number of Afghan nationals applying almost doubled over the year, from 5,154 for the year to the end of June 2022 to 9,964 12 months later.
The total number of initial decisions for the year was 23,702, notably higher than the 14,730 in the year to June 2022, with 71% giving refugee status, humanitarian protection or alternative forms of leave.
The overall rise in pending cases was “due to more cases entering the asylum system than receiving initial decisions”, the Home Office said, while noting that the increase was less than 1% in the three months to the end of June, indicating the growth in the backlog was slowing.
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“This is in part due to an increase in the number of initial decisions made, and an increase in the number of asylum decision makers employed,” the Home Office added.
Before then, the previous high was in 1990, when it stood at 82%, although the volume of applications was much lower at that time.
The total Home Office spending on asylum in the UK in 2022-23 was £3.97bn, nearly double the £2.1bn in 2021-22, government figures showed.
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