Jim Shannon – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jim Shannon on 2015-12-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the reasons in the discrepancy between the proportion of granted asylum claims which are made to people from Pakistan and the proportion of applicants under the detained fast-track procedure who are from that country.

James Brokenshire

The basis of an individual’s asylum claim is not recorded on Home Office systems. It is not therefore possible to differentiate Pakistani applicants claiming for reasons of religious persecution and discrimination from Pakistani applicants claiming for one or more other reasons in the Detained Fast Track (DFT) or the non-detained process.

Certification under section 94 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 is not requested by an applicant. It is applied by the Secretary of State in circumstances where the applicant’s claim is refused and considered to be so lacking in merit as to be clearly unfounded.

The number of initial certified refusals for Pakistan main asylum applicants, from year ending September 2013 to year ending September 2015, was 604. The Home Office publishes data on asylum applications and decisions on a quarterly and annual basis. The information supplied on certified refusals is based on initial decisions which do not necessarily relate to applications made in the same period.

No assessment has been made of any difference that might exist between grant rates in respect of Pakistani applicants in the DFT process when it operated, and cases entering the non-detained process at the same time. However, as the DFT process avoided claims involving particular complexity and/or vulnerability, and prioritised cases which appeared to be late or opportunistic, it is to be expected that the DFT would have fewer grants than the non-detained process.