Asked by: Bambos Charalambous (Labour - Southgate and Wood Green)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the financial effect on couples wishing to have a humanist wedding of the requirement to also have a civil ceremony in order for their marriage to be lawfully recognised.
Answered by Alex Chalk
Government consulted in 2014 on marriages by non-religious belief organisations. Its summary assessment of costs and benefits was published in the response, which can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/marriages-by-non-religious-belief-organisations.
Asked by: Bambos Charalambous (Labour - Southgate and Wood Green)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average duration of appeal proceedings was against first instance decisions on asylum applications for (a) Syrian, (b) Afghan and (c) Iraqi in the last 12 months for which data is available.
Answered by Chris Philp - Shadow Home Secretary
The average clearance time, from receipt to disposal, of an asylum appeal in the First-tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber, over the last 12 months for which data are available
(1 October 2018 to 30 September 2019), was:
All nationalities | 29 weeks |
Syrian nationals | 34 weeks |
Afghan nationals | 31 weeks |
Iraqi nationals | 20 weeks |
These figures are from internal management information extracted from the tribunal’s case management system. They do not form part of the published statistics.
Tribunal statistics are published on a quarterly basis and are available at: www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics
HM Courts & Tribunals Service has worked extensively to reduce the outstanding caseload and improve timeliness in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber. This has seen the live caseload in the First-tier Tribunal reduce by more than two-thirds, from 64,800 to 20,300 between July 2016 and September 2019. The average duration across all case types has also improved from 52 weeks in the period July to September 2017 to 34 weeks in the period July to September 2019.
Asked by: Bambos Charalambous (Labour - Southgate and Wood Green)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average duration of appeal proceedings on first instance decisions on asylum applications was in the last twelve months for which data is available.
Answered by Chris Philp - Shadow Home Secretary
The average clearance time, from receipt to disposal, of an asylum appeal in the First-tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber, over the last 12 months for which data are available
(1 October 2018 to 30 September 2019), was:
All nationalities | 29 weeks |
Syrian nationals | 34 weeks |
Afghan nationals | 31 weeks |
Iraqi nationals | 20 weeks |
These figures are from internal management information extracted from the tribunal’s case management system. They do not form part of the published statistics.
Tribunal statistics are published on a quarterly basis and are available at: www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics
HM Courts & Tribunals Service has worked extensively to reduce the outstanding caseload and improve timeliness in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber. This has seen the live caseload in the First-tier Tribunal reduce by more than two-thirds, from 64,800 to 20,300 between July 2016 and September 2019. The average duration across all case types has also improved from 52 weeks in the period July to September 2017 to 34 weeks in the period July to September 2019.
Asked by: Bambos Charalambous (Labour - Southgate and Wood Green)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many requests for legal assistance by asylum applicants during the first instance procedure were granted in 2019.
Answered by Wendy Morton - Shadow Minister (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
Information on the total number requests for this type of legal assistance is not held. Such assistance when provided by legal aid is funded under the ‘Legal Help’ scheme, where the decision on whether or not to grant funding is taken by the legal aid provider, and hence refusals are not reported to the Legal Aid Agency.
The data on the number of grants of this type of legal aid in 2019 is not available, as this is not broken down to the level of detail required until a claim for payment is submitted.