Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the staffing complement of her Department was in (a) October 2020 and (b) October 2019; and what assessment she has made of the adequacy of her Department's resources to tackle the backlog in Tier 2 visa applications.
The latest available data regarding staffing numbers for 2020 is published here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/workforce-management-information-2020.
For staffing data for October 2019, the data is published here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/workforce-management-information-2019
UKVI has diverted significant resources to work through the stock of applications which built up whilst the UK was subject to lockdown restrictions, this has seen a significant increase in the volume of applications decided. The levels of cases outstanding are reducing and output is consistently exceeding the number of new applications submitted.
As such we consider the resources available to undertake decision making in Tier 2 to be adequate.