Rishi Sunak’s claim to have cleared the asylum backlog labelled ‘misleading’ by factchecker

Statistics watchdog, the Office for Statistics Regulation, are also probing the PM’s claims

Rishi Sunak’s claim that the government has cleared the asylum backlog has been called “misleading” by a fact checking organisation.

Full Fact, a charity that combats misinformation, reviewed the claim after a row broke out about the backog, with Labour accusing Mr Sunak of a “barefaced lie”.

It comes after the statistics watchdog, the Office for Statistics Regulation, launched an investigation into Mr Sunak’s announcement.

The prime minister had said that the pledge to clear all so-called legacy asylum claims - counted as those submitted before June 2022 - had been met. Official statistics released on Tuesday showed that 4,500 of these cases had still to be processed.

Mr Sunak then went on to suggest that he had cleared the entire backlog, despite data showing that 98,599 claims were still waiting on a decision.

He wrote on X, formely Twitter: “I said that this government would clear the backlog of asylum decisions by the end of 2023. That’s exactly what we’ve done.”

The Home Office said Rishi Sunak’s commitment to clear the legacy asylum backlog ‘has been delivered’ (PA Wire)

Now Full Fact have decided that this statement was misleading. In their review, published on their website on Wednesday, they wrote: “This is misleading. The PM’s claim relates to a subsection of outstanding asylum cases called the ‘legacy backlog’, rather than the overall backlog of cases which still stands at almost 100,000.

“Most ‘legacy backlog’ cases have been resolved but around 4,500 are still marked as awaiting an initial decision.”

Reacting to Mr Sunak’s comments, Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said they were “just not true”, and shadow immigration minister Steven Kinnock accused him of a “barefaced lie” that was “an insult to the public’s intelligence”.

Home secretary James Cleverly had also said that “every single” legacy asylum case had been processed, despite thousands remaining unresolved.

He said that the government had “committed to processing all those applications” not completing them. He said it was “impossible” to know when they would be given decisions and said the cases were “complex”.

Mr Kinnock wrote to the statistics watchdog on Wednesday to set out his concerns about the Tories’s claims. In a letter to the chair of the UK Statistics Authority Sir Robert Chote, he wrote: “I am concerned that these statements by ministers - if left uncorrected - risk creating a highly misleading picture of the actual state of affairs with respect to the asylum backlog, an issue of significant interest to the public.”