Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many staff were allocated to processing asylum claims in (a) 2014, (b) 2018, (c) 2020 and (d) 2021.

The Home Office are unable to state how many asylum applications were decided within the 26-week period in 2014, 2018, 2020 and 2021 to date but can state the number of applications decided within the 24-week period (6months) from Q2 2014 to Q2 2020.

This information can be found at Asy_01 of the published Migration Transparency data:

Immigration & Protection data: February 2021 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The number of staff who were allocated to processing asylum claims in 2021 is not recorded and held in a reportable format. To obtain this information would require detailed reporting against multiple cost centres and could only be obtained at disproportionate costs.

However, the Home Office can provide the number of asylum case working staff from 2014 to 2020. This data can be found in ASY_04 of the published Transparency data:

Immigration & Protection data: February 2021 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)