of the “Kuwaiti Bidoun”, those cases that are categorised in this way are presented as being stateless within the Home Office’s published statistics. A request by the researchers was therefore submitted to the UK Border Agency to obtain the number of cases recorded under these categories over the last ten years. “Kuwaiti Bidoun” was only introduced as a new “nationality” category in 2006. Prior to this year, therefore, zero cases were recorded. This new category could explain the sudden increase in “stateless” asylum applicants identified in Figure 6 because such cases risk having been categorised as “Kuwaiti” previously, rather than as stateless. From 2006, however, the number of cases in this category have been steadily increasing, yet the number of cases in this category from 2006 onwards nonetheless seems lower than might be expected (see Figure 11), with only 284 cases over ten years across all flavours of CID. Moreover, qualitative data from interviews with participants and review of their immigration files indicate that there appears to be an issue of Bidouns being classified by the UK Border Agency as “Kuwaiti”,82 which is a separate category available on CID. Cases classified in the “Palestinian Authority” category are much higher with a total of just over 21,000 cases identified across all flavours of CID. These cases increase substantially from just below 900 in 2001 to a peak of just over 3,000 in 2004. Case numbers then level out thereafter at an average of just above 2,300 per year (see Figure 11). Figure 11: Cases recorded as “Kuwaiti Bidoun” and “Palestinian Authority” on CID by year (2001-2010) 250 3000 Palestinian Authority cases 2000 150 1500 100 1000 Kuwaiti Bidoun cases 200 2500 50 500 0 0 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Palestinian Authority cases Kuwaiti Bidoun cases Source: Management information request CPO-11-1350 received 13 September 2011 from UKBA performance services team. In addition to these figures, the researchers also requested data that indicated the numbers of certain “nationality” categories amongst asylum claims that had been made since March 2007 but where the applicant has neither been granted leave to enter or remain in the UK, nor has left the UK. This figure is referred to as “Asylum Work in Progress” (WIP) (see Figure 12). 82 44 For this reason, the numbers of WIP cases recorded under “Kuwait” were also requested. This figure was 208. Mapping statelessness