11:00 Sir Robert Syms (in the Chair)

The growing backlog in decisions and claims is the core problem in asylum, meaning that more people are left in limbo, unable to move on and live a life. Anyone in direct contact with people in asylum accommodation knows that it is unsuitable for most, especially families and those with specific needs, on anything more than a very short-term basis. By way of context, it is of course a complicated and hard enough and dangerous world out there. Although the necessity to leave one’s home country in order to survive is beyond the lived experience of most of us in this room, we know there are myriad reasons that people are forced to make the decision to flee their home—war, famine, persecution, and increasingly the climate crisis. We are lucky to live in places where we are not faced with those kinds of decisions. Indeed, the UK receives a relatively low number of applications from the global asylum seeker population—considerably below the European average.

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