When a Home Office letter told him his request for asylum in the UK had been rejected, Obada was surprised and disappointed. On January 18 this year, he submitted an appeal.
A message on the Home Office website reassured Obada — not his real name — that someone from the immigration appeals tribunal, part of the courts service, should be in touch by June 3. Yet, asked five months later what he had heard since, Obada said: “Nothing.”
Obada’s long wait for a court hearing reflects a growing crisis in a critical part of the immigration system and the threat it poses to ministers’ efforts to empty hotels housing asylum seekers. The hotels have generated sometimes violent protests — most notably at the Bell Hotel in Epping, which will continue to host asylum seekers after the local council failed in a High Court bid on Tuesday to have them removed.
The appeals backlog is one of the gravest problems facing the system as ministers embark on a new drive to take the initiative over asylum issues.
Obada is one of tens of thousands of people stuck waiting for asylum cases to be heard in immigration appeals tribunals, the specialist courts that rule on cases brought by people who reject Home Office decisions about their status.
The courts have been overwhelmed, according to people familiar with them, partly by the sheer numbers. A record 111,084 people claimed asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, arriving both in small boats or, like Obada, on tourist or other visas.
Yet the system is also, according to people involved, grappling with a shortage of judges trained to hear the cases and solicitors to prepare them. There are too few barristers to argue cases, while cuts to the legal aid system of support for legal costs mean many applicants lack lawyers to manage appeals efficiently.
According to the government, there were at least 51,000 asylum appeals waiting to be heard in August, up from 27,000 as recently as March 2024 and 8,000 a year before that. Many of the people waiting for those hearings — including Obada — are living in expensive-to-provide hotels. The average wait for a court date stood at 53 weeks in August.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood on Monday is expected to announce further measures to reduce the number of asylum seekers reaching the UK, by reducing the right to permanent residence for those winning refugee status.
While ministers have vowed to end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the next general election in 2029, the number in hotels at the end of June was up 8 per cent on a year before, at 32,100.
As the backlog of people waiting for a decision on their appeal grows, the number waiting for an initial Home Office decision is actually falling. There were 70,532 initial decisions pending on June 30 — down 18 per cent on a year earlier because the Home Office had accelerated its processes.
“We’ve moved from a situation where the main problem in the asylum system was the large initial decision backlog to one where . . . an increasingly more pressing one is the growing appeals backlog,” said Mihnea Cuibus, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
Ministers have expressed frustration at the scale of the delays and in August announced plans to replace the tribunals with a new, faster independent adjudication process.
However, details of the new process have not yet been published and for now the appeals system remains a vital check on errors in the initial decision-making by Home Office officials.
In the year to March 2025, the first-tier immigration tribunal approved 45 per cent of the 12,139 applications for asylum claims rejected by the Home Office that it considered. The appeals process is not expected to feature in Monday’s announcement by Mahmood.
Cuibus warned that it would prove hard to solve the tribunals’ problems.
“Adding capacity to tribunals and finding the necessary legal aid is significantly more difficult than hiring and training more civil servants in the Home Office,” he said.
The process’s frustrations were clear talking to Ali, originally from Egypt, who fled to the UK with his wife and two children in August last year. Ali — not his real name — said the Egyptian authorities detained him for pro-democracy activism after a military coup in July 2013. After release, he fled to a new job in Qatar. He then fled again to the UK after Qatar last year withdrew his work visa under what Ali said was pressure from Egypt.
Ali said the Home Office official who interviewed him had just two hours to compile all the family’s information and hear his complicated story. The rejection letter that he received last November seemed composed of “copy and paste” selections from a preset list of reasons to reject claims, he added. He immediately submitted an appeal but heard this month that the case would not be heard until May 1 next year.
The family is currently in a house provided by Serco, the outsourcing contractor. “The case worker . . . looked like she was handling a lot of cases, so I’m not sure she was paying attention to my case particularly,” Ali said.
One leading immigration lawyer, speaking anonymously because of the issue’s sensitivity, said many people lodged appeals because Home Office decisions were “poorly decided and poorly reasoned”.
Obada, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee family in Jordan, said the official interviewing him asked little about the harassment from people associated with Jordan’s government that made him flee to the UK. The questioning was so minimal he assumed the official was sparing his feelings.
“I got really agitated talking about it,” Obada said. “I thought maybe that the person realised I was upset so decided not to ask me too much more about it.”
In a statement, the Home Office said the present government had inherited an asylum system “under immense pressure” with decision-making taking “far too long”.
But it said that, even before its new plans were enacted, it was taking action.
“We are restoring order to this system . . . with a rapid increase in decision-making and extra funding to maximise the number of appeals that can be heard in tribunals,” it said.
Yet the anonymous lawyer expressed scepticism the extra funding would tackle the shortage of lawyers and judges or make the Home Office’s initial decisions less fallible. Without that, the person added, long delays would continue.
That could mean further frustration for those awaiting appeal dates. Obada said he was grateful to be safe in the UK and feared harm if he returned to Jordan. But, having previously worked as a salesman, he said he longed to resolve his case, be recognised as a refugee and resume his career.
“I don’t like staying in a hotel,” he said. “I’m able to work and I don’t want to sit in a hotel while the government spends money on me.”
Additional reporting by Malaika Tapper