New reports examine the Home Office's asylum team in Cardiff, the asylum support system and the non-suspensive appeals process for ‘clearly unfounded’ claims
The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration yesterday released three reports on various aspects of the Home Office’s handing of asylum applications.
The 40-page report An Unannounced Inspection of the Cardiff Asylum Team is available here.
Cardiff is one of ten non-detained asylum casework units across the UK and receives approximately 8% of the UK’s annual non-detained asylum applications.
In the report, the Chief Inspector says he found a poorly managed change programme for asylum casework at the Home Office had resulted in the rapid loss of experienced staff, which led to a backlog of over 13,000 cases by the end of 2013.
See the press release here for more information on the report.
The second report, An Inspection of Asylum Support, can be found here.
According to a press release, the Chief Inspector found in the report that the Home Office was deciding applications for asylum support fairly, but a poorly managed organisational change had led to deterioration in service, and an increase in the number of recipients of asylum support.
The Chief Inspector also found that there was no effective strategy in place to identify and tackle asylum support fraud.
The third report, An Inspection of the Non-Suspensive Appeals process for ‘clearly unfounded’ asylum and human rights claims, is available here.
A press release accompanying the report says the Chief Inspector found that while removals of applicants whose asylum claims were certified as ‘clearly unfounded’ were happening quicker than others, the Home Office was not using these powers to their full extent.