Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Home Department – in the House of Commons at 2:30 pm on 15 May 2006.
We have published our five-year comprehensive strategy for immigration and asylum. The issue of backlogs cannot be viewed in isolation from that overall strategy. We have developed plans to deal with immigration applications including the points-based system and the new asylum model, so that we do not simply get into the position of recreating a problem of backlogs in future. We think that we have got on top of the challenge of intake, and that has given us an opportunity to turn our attention to backlogs, which increasingly will be our focus. That has been possible only because of our redesigning of the managed migration processes and our reducing asylum intake.