Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the average time for scheduling of an asylum substantive interview was over the past five years.

The Home Office does not currently report on the average time that is taken between the date of an asylum claim to the date of a substantive asylum interview taking place. However, the Home Office does publish data on the number asylum applications awaiting an initial decision by duration, for main applicants only. This data can be found at Asy_04 of the published Immigration Statistics: List of tables - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

The Home Office currently have several specialist decision-making units, including a unit progressing older asylum claims. We are also working to increase the number of decision makers, shorten and improve asylum casework training and consolidation. This investment in our people will speed up processing times and increase the throughput of asylum decisions.

The decision-making route remains the same for all asylum applications however we have created additional hubs to provide a greater ownership, improved consistency, and management of the cohorts to ensure quick decisions can be made.

The Asylum Transformation programme is working to transform the asylum system and continue to streamline and simplify processes to speed up decision making to increase efficiency and output. The development and delivery of changes to the asylum process across the end-to-end asylum system include the increased use of technology, improved screening and accelerated decision-making procedures to drive delivery efficiency.