Exclusive
AI deployed to reduce asylum backlog - saving 44 years of working time
29 April 2025, 12:40
LBC has been given exclusive access to new AI technology designed to cut the amount of time it takes to process asylum claims in England.
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The Chat-GPT-style software will cut the amount of time caseworkers spend working on each individual claim by up to an hour, and with a backlog of more than 90,000 cases, that equates to nearly 44 years of working time.
Dame Angela Eagle is the Minister for Asylum and Border Security, and told LBC: "We can cut nearly half the amount of time it takes for people to search the policy information notes, and we can cut by nearly a third, the amount of time it takes for cases to be summarised, and that means there are significant increases in productivity here."
The software saves caseworkers from trawling through multiple documents, each hundreds of pages long, every time they need to reference or search for relevant information relating to an individual’s case, but the minister is eager to make clear this does not mean a computer is making the decision as to whether someone stays.
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She added: "Condensing it very speedily and accurately signposts caseworkers directly to the place where the information is so they can go and look at it themselves. It doesn’t and wouldn’t, and couldn’t, make decisions.
"Anything that makes those kind of caseworker decisions faster and fairer and more efficient is best for the country because we have to keep people and look after them while we’re making a decision on their asylum claim.
"If we can shorten that amount of time then that saves the public purse lots of money."
George Shirley is the Director of Asylum and Humans Rights Operations at the Home Office and told LBC: "It’s a complicated process involving the assessment of lots of pieces of information from policy, individual evidence from the claimant, all of which takes a considerable amount of time.
"It’s a long task through many pages and transcripts, so we’ve used AI to try and reduce that fact-finding time.
"At the end of December there were 90,686 cases waiting initial decision. This will save about an hour collectively, the case summarisation saves 23 minutes and the policy search tools saves about 37 minutes, so that gives you a sense of how long this process takes."
