UK asylum applications from Afghanistan rose by 53% in the second quarter of this year even before the Taliban took control, new data from the Home Office shows.

Between April and June, 394 Afghans applied for asylum in the country compared with 257 during the first quarter of 2021.

The total number of asylum applications also increased by almost half to 8,374 in this period, the highest number since the end of 2019. Although, compared to the period immediately after the invasion of Afghanistan back in 2001, applications are considerably lower.

Dr Peter William Walsh, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, says that the rise is partly down to the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions.

“It’s mostly returned to business as usual in terms of asylum applications, certainly in terms of the numbers,” he said. “The quarterly figures, they’re what we would expect in ordinary times – the hangover from last year has dissipated in large part now.”

He added that conflict in Afghanistan could lead to a further increase, but not by much.

“I would expect an uptick in asylum seekers [from Afghanistan], but it might not be as we’d expect because it’s just difficult for them to get to the UK,” he said.

It’s now easier for Afghans to seek asylum in the UK after the government pledged to accept 5,000 people over the next year as part of a new resettlement programme, with the potential to accept up to 20,000 in the long term.

The creation of this scheme means that people fleeing Afghanistan will automatically be granted refugee status and will not have to go through the asylum application process once they arrive in the UK.

How many Afghans have been successful?

The number of Afghans granted asylum in the UK rose 18.7% in the three months to June compared to the first quarter of this year. Overall asylum applications saw a much more modest 1.9% increase.

Over the last two decades, Afghans have been the group with the second-highest number of successful applications after Syrians. Since 2001, they have accounted for around one in 10 asylum or other grants.

The new data also shows a drop in the proportion of applications that get refused. Fewer than a quarter of Afghans were denied asylum status in the second quarter of this year, compared to 27.8% in the first three months of 2021.

While the most recent data shows applications picking up, the numbers are still much lower than they were in the period up to the first quarter of 2020.

This was largely due to a decline in applications made at ports, as people struggled to access travel by plane, ferry and train.

This has been partially offset by a rise in the number of small boat crossings. More than 12,400 people have crossed the English Channel in migrant boats so far this year.

How do the numbers compare globally?

Afghanistan is second only to Syria for the total number of refugees and asylum seekers dispersed across the world, but accounts for the highest number of asylum applications.

But only a tiny fraction of this number end up in the UK – less than 0.5% of the total number at the end of 2020.

In fact, three-quarters of the more than 2.8 million Afghan refugees and asylum seekers at the end of last year were registered in the neighbouring countries of Pakistan and Iran. 

What’s more, people leaving Afghanistan represent just a fraction of the total number displaced from their homes due to conflict.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimates that by the end of 2020, 3.5 million people had been forced to move within Afghanistan due to conflict. This makes it the country with the fifth-highest number of internally displaced people, after Syria, Congo, Colombia and Yemen.

The data is already beginning to reflect the current situation. According to data from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 558,000 Afghans were displaced within the country between the start of this year and 9 August.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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