Even Fraser Nelson, editor of the right-wing Tory magazine, The Spectator, joined the criticism, likening Sunak’s X post to that of a ‘snakeoil salesman.’
The UK Statistics Authority, the nation’s largest producer of official statistics, has criticised Rishi Sunak over his assertions that the asylum backlog in Britain has been ‘cleared.’
Sir Robert Chote, chair of the watchdog, warned that the claim could further erode trust in the government and voters may feel they have been ‘misled.’
Some 100,000 migrants are still stuck in the backlog waiting for a decision on their asylum status. Yet the government claims it has met Sunak’s pledge to clear ‘legacy’ asylum claims, those submitted before June 2022. However, official statistics confirmed that around 4,500 of these cases remain uncleared.
Shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, accused the prime minister of pushing out a ‘barefaced lie’ which was ‘an insult to the public’s intelligence.’
The Refugee Council accused the Home Office of ‘losing track’ of the asylum system, as some 17,000 asylum claims were withdrawn of removed.
The prime minister also attracted criticism after he posted on X that the government had fulfilled its promise to clear the backlog of asylum decisions by the end of 2023. ‘That’s exactly what we’ve done,’ wrote Sunak.
Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael raised concerns about the PM’s claims with the statistics watchdog.
In a letter responding to the MP’s concerns, Chote wrote: “The average member of the public is likely to interpret a claim to have ‘cleared a backlog’ – especially when presented without context on social media – as meaning that it has been eliminated entirely, so it is not surprising that the government’s claim has been greeted with scepticism and that some people may feel misled when these ‘hard cases’ remain in the official estimates of the legacy backlog.”
The statistics watchdog chair warned that the episode may “affect public trust when the government sets targets and announces whether they have been met in other policy domains.”
“It highlights the need for ministers and advisers to think carefully about how a reasonable person would interpret a quantitative claim of the sort and to consult the statistical professionals in their department,” he said.
In response to Chote’s letter, Carmichael said: “Not only is the Conservative government celebrating something that is no achievement, they are twisting the facts – as proven by the UK Statistics Authority just today.
“Thousands of vulnerable people are still living in limbo as they wait for their claims to be processed. The British public deserves better than this.”
The PM’s ‘misleading’ claims did not go down well among X users either.
“That unelected prime minister is blatantly lying,” was one comment.
“More Tory lies. The people have had enough,” was another.
Even Fraser Nelson, editor of the right-wing Tory magazine, The Spectator, joined the criticism, likening Sunak’s X post to that of a ‘snakeoil salesman.’
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward
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