First-tier Tribunal appeal receipts up 123% in a year, amid continuing concerns about Home Office decision making

In July to September this year, the number of appeals received by the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) increased by 123%, to 30,000, compared to the same period last year. Disposals (the number of concluded appeals) increased by 50% to 15,000 and the tribunal’s total open caseload increased by 92% to 121,000.

The important context for this is that the Home Office is now refusing over half the asylum claims that are made. Yesterday the National Audit Office’s report found that asylum “[d]ecision quality remains a challenge, with 42% of sampled decisions in a rolling twelve months to May 2025 having significant or fail errors” (bottom of page 35). It is unclear whether this is the same measure used in the Home Office’s internal quality checks, which show a fail rate of 48% in the most recently published figures.

The tribunal statistics show that 39% of asylum appeals were allowed in the period July to September 2025, and this must also be placed in the context of a legal aid crisis that means an increasing number of these appellants are unrepresented, which will have a downward impact on that figure. Another relevant factor is likely to be the increase in withdrawal of asylum appeals, this is up from 15% for July to September last year to 37% this year.

No breakdown or reason is given for the withdrawal, but a large proportion of these are likely to be where the Home Office has withdrawn the decision under appeal, accepting that it was incorrect. This is a good thing for the Home Office to do (it would of course be better if the decisions were made properly the first time around), and it can also have a downward effect on success rates.

You can see receipts vs disposals for the tribunal as a whole in the below chart, with a bit of a breakdown.

I have set out below a breakdown of the different types of appeals and the main data we are given, along with the percentage change from the same period last year. You can see that the percentage of appeals that are being allowed has dropped almost entirely across the board, with deprivation of citizenship appeals the only area which has seen an increase in the success rate of appeals.

This chart gives a better picture of the state of the asylum appeals backlog in particular, looking at receipts and the total open caseload.

Also relevant to the open caseload figures is the amount of time the tribunal takes to decide a case. The mean time taken across all appeals was 52 weeks for the period July to September 2025, up eight weeks from the same period last year. Asylum appeals now take well over a year to conclude, at 60 weeks, with human rights appeals just behind that at 58 weeks with EEA appeals at 36 weeks.

The focus today will no doubt be on the tribunal’s ability to cope with this huge increase in its caseload. I will, as ever, remind you that this is a problem that is largely caused by the Home Office and could (and should) be helped by them putting some serious work into reviewing and withdrawing poor refusals (I am in particular thinking of Afghan cases here).

In the year ending September 2025 the Home Office refused 7,041 Afghan nationals’ protection claims which, assuming they all appealed, would have been over 12% of the asylum appeals received by the tribunal over the same period. There is nowhere to send these people and some of these refusals are being withdrawn by the Home Office at appeals stage, as it is accepted that they are unsustainable.

The Home Office has given every indication that they also have Syrian cases in their sights. Again, if they do start refusing these cases in large numbers then that will be another large number of cases moved to the tribunal, presumably in a relatively short period of time. There have been over 9,000 asylum claims made by Syrians in the past two years, with there being a pause on decision making for around a year of that.

The final point I will make is that the lack of capacity in the legal aid sector is obviously also affecting the ability of the tribunal to manage its caseload, it is considerably more difficult for the tribunal to work with an appellant who is unrepresented and may not speak English than it is to deal with an appropriately qualified and experienced lawyer. The extremely belated increase in legal aid rates is unlikely to be enough to turn the sector around to the extent needed to help bring the tribunal’s caseload down.