Latest statistics show that only two Syrian people have been granted refugee status this year

The latest quarterly immigration and asylum statistics have been published, covering the period January to March 2025. The asylum backlog is down, but that is fairly meaningless given how atrocious decision making is at the moment, those cases are now the First-tier Tribunal’s problem. Syrians seeking asylum in the UK remain in limbo, almost six months since the Home Office paused decision making on their claims.

Fee waiver refusals are up, despite fees also going up, which does not seem like good news. Similarly, the increase to the minimum income requirement appears to have triggered a huge increase in complex human rights casework for the Home Office. I believe they refer to this sort of thing as “unintended consequences”, but are they really unintended if everyone tells you from the outset that changes are going to cause a problem?

Asylum

In the year ending March 2025 the grant rate for Syrian nationals seeking asylum in the UK was 98%. On 9 December 2024 the Home Office paused consideration of all Syrian asylum claims and withdrew the country policy and information notes. In the period October to December 2024 there were 2,026 asylum claims from Syrian nationals (representing 2,280 people) and for January to March 2025 this was down considerably to 391 claims (443 people).

In the first three months of this year two Syrian people have been granted refugee status. In the previous three month period the number was 1,565, plus 31 grants of humanitarian protection. There have been no significant changes in the number of Syrian claims refused, withdrawn or with other outcomes.

I can’t see that a quarterly breakdown of settlement grants by nationality has been published, so it is not possible to see how many people waiting for an outcome to their settlement protection applications have been impacted by the pause on decision making there.

The number of Syrians claims awaiting a decision is 6,029, and most of those (61%) have now been waiting for six months of more. If they are refused, most of those cases will move to the tribunal.

The future of Syrians in the UK remains uncertain, in April this year it was reported that a Syrian national was refused schedule 10 support on the basis that he could return to Syria, but it is unclear whether this was just poor decision making unconnected to a wider policy position.

Looking at the system as a whole, the number of asylum applications waiting for an initial decision has dropped from 90,686 at the end of 2024 to 78,745 at the end of March. The number of main applicants waiting for a decision for six months or less fell from 40,633 at December 2024 to 33,406 at March 2025. Those waiting six months or longer also fell from 50,053 to 45,339.

The Home Office reports that the grant rate for asylum claims for the year ending March 2025 was 49%. The Home Office calculates the grant rate by excluding withdrawals, which makes it seem higher than it actually is when you consider the number of applications actually made. This is particularly the case now that withdrawals make up 21% of case “outcomes” for the period 2022 to March 2025 (the average was 12% for the decade before this).

I will take a closer look at what is going on with the grant rate when I update our briefing on the asylum statistics, however it does look like the drop in grant rate is because of a particularly high proportion of refused cases in the period April to June 2024 (66%, grants at 34%). So this may mean we see an increase in the annual grant rate in the next statistics release.

The Home Office indicates that the drop is because of changes made by the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 to the standard of proof, but does not seem to have any evidence to confirm this as they are only able to state that it “may” have led to fewer cases meeting the new raised standard. In the meantime, practitioners have been raising concerns for months about the increasingly poor quality of asylum decisions, and you don’t have to take our word for it as the tribunal statistics show that almost half of asylum appeals are allowed, and this is with many people going unrepresented.

Family applications

The data on family applications shows a 26% drop in the number of entry clearance applications as a partner under Appendix FM. In 2023 the number of applications was around 13,500 to 14,000 each quarter, whereas for July to September 2024 the figure was 9,031, in October to December 2024 it was 10,713 and 10,962 for the first three months of 2025. This drop is because of the increase to the minimum income requirement in April last year.

Those who cannot meet the minimum income requirement must instead try to establish “exceptional circumstances” in order to make a successful application. The Home Office deems these application “complex” and so I think it is probably the reason we have seen a huge increase in the number of these applications received by the Home Office.

Rather than revert to the previous income threshold, the government is now threatening to make it even more difficult for families by changing what they will accept as “exceptional circumstances”.

Fee waivers

The data on in-country fee waivers for immigration applications shows a worrying downward trend in fee waivers. I cannot think of a rational explanation for this as the fees have increased dramatically during this time. The increases in applications at the beginning of 2024 seem likely to have resulted from the increase to the immigration health surcharge which took effect in February 2024, however if anything I would have expected the grant rate to increase again that.

Some of the refusals can be attributed to people making inappropriate fee waivers and the effect of this on grant rates was noted by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration in their recent inspection on fee waivers. However this is a fairly recent phenomenon and does not explain the earlier drop.

Work routes and sponsors

Looking at quarterly changes rather than year on year, the reduction in people issued health and care visas as the main applicant has fallen 459 to 4,496 for the period January to March 2025, so the decline in numbers may be slowing down. But when you do look at the year on year figures the impact of the changes restricting some people in this route (care workers) from bringing family members early last year is stark.

In the period before these changes came into effect (October to December 2024) the number of main applicants granted entry clearance in this route was 28,372. In January to March 2023 this was 36,910. So the fall in numbers over the past couple of years has been extreme.

The post-Brexit increase in the number of sponsors of skilled workers has continued to increase and reached 114,249 at the end of March 2025.

There has been less movement in the number of sponsors of temporary workers, and we can see that the number of temporary workers has fallen slightly this year. Youth mobility visas are down 11% year on year and seasonal workers down 5%.

EU Settlement Scheme

We are now quite far past the June 2021 deadline to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme, however a considerable number of late applications are still being made, 22,487 in the first three months of the year. Many such applications are still being granted, as for the year ending March 2025 8% of settled status grants were made to late applicants.

It is good to see that the Home Office process for automatically upgrading some people with pre-settled status to settled status seems to be working, with 6,287 such grants in January to March 2025.

Returns

Enforced and voluntary returns have both been steadily increasing since Covid lows in early 2021. Most enforced returns are still Albanian nationals, however there has been an 11% drop in the enforced removal of this group for the year ending March 2025. Nationalities that have seen increases are Romanians with enforced returns up 39%, Brazilians up 30% and Indians up 94% over the same period.

In August 2024 the Home Office changed the way it recorded use of force incidents so that when restraints were “applied passively and with the compliance of the resident”, this is now recorded as a use of force. In the first three months of this year, restraints were used in 8% of removals.

It is also concerning to note that eight pregnant women were detained in the first three months of this year (table PWD_01), up from three the previous quarter.

Conclusion

The Office for National Statistics has also published its data on net migration today. For some analysis of those figures, I will direct you to this post by Jonathan Portes and this from Migration Observatory.