Immigration stats front and centre as politics returns

4 January 2024

It may be a new year, but 2024 kicked off with a topic that dominated politics in 2023: immigration. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), the Prime Minister claimed that the government had successfully cleared the “asylum backlog”.

As we explain in our new fact check, this is misleading.

Mr Sunak’s claim actually relates to the “legacy backlog”, a specific subsection of the total number of outstanding asylum cases which the government pledged to clear by the end of 2023.

The government says all of these cases have now been processed and most—though not all—have been resolved. As of 28 December 2023, around 4,500 “legacy backlog” applications were still awaiting an initial decision, down from around 92,000 last year when the Prime Minister first set out the government’s plan to clear the backlog.

The overall asylum backlog, however, still stands at almost 100,000 cases.

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