Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum decisions were made without substantive asylum interviews in 2020.

The Home Office is unable to state how many and what proportion of substantive asylum interviews were conducted by video conference or how many asylum decisions were made without a substantive interview as the Home Office does not publish this information

However, the Home Office does publish data on the number asylum applications awaiting an initial decision by duration. This data can be found at This data can be found at Asy_04 of the published Immigration Statistics:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-statistics-year-ending-december-2020/list-of-tables#asylum-and-resettlement