Immigration tribunal appeals backlog up 80% to 90k outstanding cases

The latest tribunal quarterly statistics show that the immigration tribunal’s total appeals backlog stood at 90,389 cases as at 31 March 2025. At the same time the previous year it was 50,332 cases.

The current appeals backlog consists of:

• 50,976 outstanding asylum appeals, up from 27,133 at the same point in 2024
• 21,962 outstanding human rights appeals, up from 13,073 at the same point in 2024
• 17,192 outstanding EU citizen appeals, up from 9,841 at the same point in 2024

And there are also, relatively speaking, tiny numbers of deportation and citizenship deprivation appeals. Those numbers are actually falling slightly, in fact.

The asylum grant rate for the most recent quarter was 43%, which is slightly down on previous quarters and years.

The mean “time to clearance” at the time asylum appeals were concluded stood at 54 weeks. But that is for cases that entered the system back in 2024 when the appeals backlog was a lot lower. The time it will take cases entering the system now will be a lot longer, unless something is done.

The basic problem is that the number of appeals lodged has gone up in all categories:

• 40,667 asylum appeals lodged, up from 29,290 at the same point in 2024 (and 8,019 in 2023!)
• 20,727 human rights appeals lodged, up from 15,906 at the same point in 2024
• 17,403 EU citizen appeals lodged, up from 12,602 at the same point in 2024

The reason for the increase in the number of asylum appeals lodged is easy to discern: the current government is clearing the initial decision backlog left by the last government. The previous government basically shut down asylum claim processing while continuing to register new asylum claims, leading to a massive backlog. The current government is, rightly, clearing that backlog. And that means a lot of decisions being made in a short time period. And the vast majority of those whose claims are refused will lodge an appeal against that refusal.

Given that so many of those appeals go on to be allowed — 43% in the most recent quarter — an obvious solution would be to grant asylum more often in the first place, meaning that fewer appeals end up being lodged.

I cannot immediately think of a reason why more human rights and EU citizen appeals are being lodged. Leave a comment if you have suggestions.

Meanwhile, the number of concluded appeals (“disposals” in the tribunal’s lexicon) has barely increased at all. A total of 40,998 appeals were concluded by the tribunal in 2024/5, compared to 39,416 in 2023/4. That global figure conceals a doubling of concluded asylum appeals to 18,490 from 9,941 but a decrease in concluded human rights appeals and in EU citizen appeals.

Other tribunal users are being deprioritised in order to focus on asylum appeals.

Why is the tribunal struggling so much? Well, for the last few years the tribunal was processing fewer than 10,000 asylum appeals per year. The massive increase in caseload has not been matched by a commensurate increase in resources. Asylum appeals need judges, hearing rooms and lawyers for both sides. Some additional tribunal resources were announced in the spending review yesterday, which is a part of the equation. But it is not enough. There are so few lawyers able and willing to take on asylum appeals work these days, as a timely new report from Dr Jo Wilding shows, that many asylum appellants will end up unrepresented. This risks bad decisions, appellants simply going missing because they cannot understand the process and those appeals that are decided without lawyers will take longer to process.

The government is using the immigration legislation currently wending its way through parliament to impose on the tribunal a new statutory time limit of 28 weeks for concluding appeals. This is the sort of magical thinking indulged in by the last government. Passing a law in parliament does not make it so in real life.

If the government is serious about emptying asylum hotels then it needs to clear the asylum appeals backlog as well as the initial decision backlog. That will take management, cooperation and resources. And it requires a focus on inputs into the tribunal as well as outputs.