Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her department has taken to reduce the waiting time for people awaiting (a) a substantive interview and (b) an initial decision on their asylum claim.

To further accelerate decision making we are driving productivity improvements by streamlining interviews, simplifying processes, and dealing with cases more swiftly where they are certified as clearly unfounded.

We have already doubled our decision makers over the last 2 years, and we are continuing to recruit more. This will take our expected number of decision makers to 1,800 by summer and 2,500 by September 2023.