The Home Office has lost contact with almost 6,000 people whose asylum claims were “withdrawn” in the year ending Sept. 2023, immigration ministers told MPs.
The ministers said 5,598 of those whose asylum applications were treated as “withdrawn” in the year ending Sept. 2023, or 32 percent of them, are still in the UK, “and the Home Office is taking steps to urgently reestablish contact with them.”
“When we withdraw a claim, and if someone has no other permission to stay in the UK; funding and support stops and someone becomes liable for law enforcement activity to be removed from the UK. If these individuals were to make further submissions, caseworkers may consider whether their previous actions are damaging to their credibility,” the letter says.
The ministers also said the Home Office has “a dedicated tracing capability that works with the police, other government agencies, and commercial companies to trace absconders.”
They also said that 3,144, or 18 percent are no longer in the UK; 2,643, or 15 percent have re-engaged with the Home Office and been granted some form of lawful immigration status; and 5,931, or 35 percent, have re-engaged with the Home Office and their cases are being dealt with by Home Office teams including immigration enforcement, appeals and litigation teams and further submissions.
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the revelation is “staggering,” and accused ministers of spending their time on gimmicks rather than getting a grip.”
“This is a staggering admission that the Home Office has lost almost 6,000 asylum seekers and has no idea where they are,” she said in a statement to the PA news agency.
“The fact that thousands of people have been allowed to effectively disappear into the underground economy or left vulnerable to exploitation by criminal gangs is yet more evidence of the shocking mismanagement and chaos in the Tory asylum system.”
Asylum claims can be treated as withdrawn for a number of reasons, including when applicants are known to have left the UK, have been given a different form of permission to stay, or have disengaged with the process.
However, the number of withdrawn cases soared last year partly because of the removal of Albanian nationals.
In the year ending Sept. 2023, the number of withdrawn cases (17,316) was more than four times the number in the previous year (4,260). Almost three-quarters (73 percent) of Albanian cases were treated as withdrawn.
The Home Office previously said that more than 5,500 Albanians have been returned in 2023.
In their letter to Dame Diana last week, Mr. Pursglove and Mr. Tomlinson said 1,628 of them were small boat arrivals, including 367 offenders and 1,261 non-offenders.
The ministers also said 222 non-Albanian small boat arrivals were removed last year, including six offenders and 216 non-offenders.
A rule change last year, which means those who fail to return a questionnaire within 30 days may have their cases treated as “withdrawn,” is also a likely cause of the hike in withdrawn cases.
The rule change was brought in in a bid to speed up processing as part of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s pledge to “abolish” the asylum applications backlog.
The Home Office declared earlier this month the it had delivered the promise, but critics accused the government of making misleading claims as 4,537 “complex cases” remain undecided and tens of thousands of cases with non-substantive decisions, including those that were withdrawn.
The chair of the UK Statistics Authority Sir Robert Chote said on Thursday that the episode “may affect public trust” and criticised the government because the supplementary dataset, which were published on Jan. 2 along with a press release, was not released on the previous day when the government sent out an embargoed version of the press release.
