Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of trends in the number of visa applications classified as complex over the last five years.

The complexity of an application can vary from case to case due to a range of factors which may include the various checks which must be carried out in the course of assessment.

The Home Office routinely conducts checks with other government departments and external agencies. This may mean we hold an application for longer than normal, but in some cases it is essential we do so.

If an application is deemed complex and expected to take longer than the standard processing timescale, UKVI will write to the customer within the standard processing time and explain what will happen next.

Data on our performance against published Service Level Agreement (SLA), which also includes visa renewals, can be found within our transparency data: Migration transparency data - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)