Home Office reprimanded by watchdog after Rishi Sunak accused of lying about clearing asylum backlog

The Home Office has been reprimanded by the UK Statistics Authority after Rishi Sunak claimed that the government had cleared the asylum backlog despite cases remaining.

The UK Statistics Authority chairman Sir Robert Chote has criticised the Home Office after the PM made the claims that backlogs had been cleared. Opponents criticised the claims, with the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the watchdog's regulatory arm, previously announcing that it was looking into the claims despite 4,500 "legacy" cases still awaiting a decision.

Sir Robert said: “The average member of the public is likely to interpret a claim to have ‘cleared a backlog’ – especially when presented without context on social media – as meaning that it has been eliminated entirely, so it is not surprising that the Government’s claim has been greeted with scepticism and that some people may feel misled when these ‘hard cases’ remain in the official estimates of the legacy backlog.

“That said, there may be a perfectly good case for excluding cases of this type from any commitment to eliminate the backlog over the timeframe the Government chose, but this argument was not made at the time the target was announced or when it was clarified in the letter to the Home Affairs Committee.”

Sunak had made clearing the asylum backlog a major policy point of his leadership, with 92,000 people still awaiting decisions before July 2023. He claimed on X (formerly Twitter): “I said that this government would clear the backlog of asylum decisions by the end of 2023. That’s exactly what we’ve done.”

His claims were echoed by the Home Office which said that the “commitment of clearing the legacy asylum backlog has been delivered”.

Sir Robert added: “This episode may affect public trust when the Government sets targets and announces whether they have been met in the other policy domains.”