The government will spend an extra �600m on tackling asylum applications in an effort to clear the backlog of cases.

The Home Office plans to use the cash boost to radically speed up the decision-making process and decide 150,000 asylum cases in the next eight months.

The extra cash comes on top of �400m per year for three years to tackle asylum problems, announced in Chancellor Gordon Brown's comprehensive spending review last week.

A large-scale campaign to recruit more than 4,500 staff needed to deal with the extra workload is already under way.

'Clear the backlog'

Some of the new Treasury money - which will more than double the budget of the immigration and nationality directorate this year - will provide extra detention places for those awaiting final decisions.

A Home Office spokeswoman confirmed: "The immigration and nationality department are getting a substantial increase, not only to clear the backlog, but also to increase the number of detention places."

And The Guardian newspaper reported a Home Office source as saying: "This year's budget is more than doubling. It was �590m and now it is going to be �1.2bn.

"By March 2001 we want to clear the backlog.

"We want to make between 130,000 and 150,000 decisions in this financial year. That covers the backlog of 90,000 cases and the number of new asylum applications we expect to get."

By next January, the government wants to ensure that 70% of all new asylum claims have an initial decision within two months.

New detention centres

The longer-term goal aims for three-quarters of all asylum decisions to be taken within two months, with a further four months allowed for appeals.

Asylum cases currently take 13 months on average to be resolved.

Ministers expect the numbers of failed asylum seekers being removed from the country to grow as the speed of processing cases increases.

Around �100m of the new cash will go towards building three new detention centres to ensure those facing deportation do not disappear before they are removed from the country.