Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the average wait time is for the processing of an extension to Health and Care Worker visas for those working in the NHS in each of the last 5 years; and if she will make a statement.

The Home Office does not routinely publish details of average processing times and they do not form part of any current transparency data. However, information on our immigration routes with service standards and whether they have been processed against these standards is available as part of our transparency data, at: Migration transparency data - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Health and Care visa extensions already benefit from a 15 working day service standard from the point of biometric submission, instead of the standard 8 weeks.