Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she has taken to ensure the timely distribution of Biometric Residence Permit cards during the covid-19 outbreak.

UVKI does not hold figures relating to the number of customers who have waited longer than 10 working days to receive their Biometric Resident Permit (BRP) after a positive decision. However, it does have service level agreements with its production provider the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency (DVLA) and its secure delivery provider FedEx.

Customers who applied for leave to enter from abroad will usually be expected to collect their BRP from a Post Office or from an Alternative Collection Location (ACL) such as a University International Student Team office. Considering the global pandemic, The Post Office agreed to hold BRPs for up to 90 days from receipt before returning them to UKVI if uncollected to enable delayed travellers to collect their BRP. Usually the Post Office would hold BRPs for 60 days before returning any uncollected BRPs to UKVI.

The DVLA has a target of producing 90% of BRPs within 24 hours of receiving the production request and 100% within 48 hours. For the financial year to date DVLA has achieved 72.4% within 24 hours, 97.4% within 48 hours and 2.6% over 48 hours.

FedEx has a target to attempt first delivery for 99% of BRPs within 48 working hours of collection of the BRP from DVLA. For financial year 2020 to end December 2020 FedEx were achieving 94.4%. UKVI is working closely with FedEx to improve this performance and an improvement plan is in place to achieve this.

Further steps UKVI have taken to improve the timely delivery of BRPs includes introducing an ‘Post Arrival Process’ for closed university ACLs. This was introduced to enable BRPs for overseas students to be delivered directly to their UK residential address instead of to their ACL for collection. Twenty-one ACLs signed up to the scheme enabling 10,348 BRPs to be produced and delivered.

UKVI has continued to improve the pre-delivery notification messaging we send to customers including the timing of when it is sent. It now includes the BRP reference number, in addition to the FedEx delivery consignment number, delivery post code and clearer instructions relating to help customers organise re-delivery if first delivery fails.